Watching a Star Trek clip recently, it struck me that humanity currently has ~7100 distinct languages.
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Watching a Star Trek clip recently, it struck me that humanity currently has ~7100 distinct languages. Yet on Star Trek, they speak "Klingon" or "Romulan" or "Vulcan", etc as if a planet only ever had one language. That'd be like saying you speak Human.
That's now going to bug me indefinitely.
:disgruntled:
@gumnos Wasn't that planetary unity the goal? You can't go on space adventures if you are divided even on your tiny, insignificant planet.
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Watching a Star Trek clip recently, it struck me that humanity currently has ~7100 distinct languages. Yet on Star Trek, they speak "Klingon" or "Romulan" or "Vulcan", etc as if a planet only ever had one language. That'd be like saying you speak Human.
That's now going to bug me indefinitely.
:disgruntled:
@gumnos Star Trek is just bog-standard fantasy in space. Every episode has a dungeon dive ("planet"), and the race equivalents are orcs, trolls, gnomes, &c. One language each.
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@gumnos Wasn't that planetary unity the goal? You can't go on space adventures if you are divided even on your tiny, insignificant planet.
@mms though that's almost worse—language and culture are intimately intertwined, so this suggests the obliteration of thousands of cultures in pursuit of the unity

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Watching a Star Trek clip recently, it struck me that humanity currently has ~7100 distinct languages. Yet on Star Trek, they speak "Klingon" or "Romulan" or "Vulcan", etc as if a planet only ever had one language. That'd be like saying you speak Human.
That's now going to bug me indefinitely.
:disgruntled:
The "racial language" is what's spoken by the one group that escapes to space before those back home drown in industrial waste.
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@kabel42 @mms @gumnos Happened in Star Trek 6 and they had to use a Klingon phrase book. https://youtu.be/avH2K1iR8Oo
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@kabel42 @mms @gumnos Happened in Star Trek 6 and they had to use a Klingon phrase book. https://youtu.be/avH2K1iR8Oo
"My shuttlecraft is full of eels. Do you want to come back to my place, bouncy-bouncy?"
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Watching a Star Trek clip recently, it struck me that humanity currently has ~7100 distinct languages. Yet on Star Trek, they speak "Klingon" or "Romulan" or "Vulcan", etc as if a planet only ever had one language. That'd be like saying you speak Human.
That's now going to bug me indefinitely.
:disgruntled:
I just assumed that everyone was speaking their own language and the Universal Translator took care of if. Presumably, "Klingon" is shorthand for "one of the many thousands of distinct Klingon languages and dialects". In much the same way, most of the Enterprise crew isn't speaking English most of the time.
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Watching a Star Trek clip recently, it struck me that humanity currently has ~7100 distinct languages. Yet on Star Trek, they speak "Klingon" or "Romulan" or "Vulcan", etc as if a planet only ever had one language. That'd be like saying you speak Human.
That's now going to bug me indefinitely.
:disgruntled:
@gumnos Even when they acknowledge this, they fall short.
The Minbarri from Babylon 5 for example, the entire planet/species has THREE languages.
Three!
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I just assumed that everyone was speaking their own language and the Universal Translator took care of if. Presumably, "Klingon" is shorthand for "one of the many thousands of distinct Klingon languages and dialects". In much the same way, most of the Enterprise crew isn't speaking English most of the time.
@gumnos @suetanvil exactly, if we saw things from the point of view of a non human crew they probably also pile up all the earth languages as "Human"
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@gumnos Even when they acknowledge this, they fall short.
The Minbarri from Babylon 5 for example, the entire planet/species has THREE languages.
Three!
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