I haven’t seen it, but I knew there was trouble on teh horizon when I heard the first rumours taht this’d be a prequel. I mean really, that’s moving into some DANGEROUS writing territory that no show has been able to pull off without being tempted to ignore past laws in order to pathetically gain a bunch of new viewers.
I also have no doubt that they would try to many things too fast, as they did with DS9 and Voyager. The first episode of Voyager personally turned me off the episode for it’s duration. They tried SO HARD for the viewer to love the characters right from the getgo that it seemed desperate. They did this in DS9, but I also had doubts that they couldn’t do much from a space station (I was glad to be proved wrong). But the efforts the writers made for us to fall in love with the characters just became cheesy.
Nobody has mentioned it here yet, so I’m presuming that the writers figured out the secret of character development: let them grow on their own, we’ll grow to love them as time goes on. Don’t force it on us. If that’s the case (and it seems that they still had to throw in an execption with the “fear of space flying” character-dumb dumb dumb), then I’m glad for the most part.
The question I have is this:
What does the computer sound like?
If it’s any better than:
“Computer?”
“WORKING”
“Can you calculate the distance of the earest thing we can blow up? We’re kinda antsy over here…”
clikiticlikititiclikikclik
“THE NEAREST ITEM SUITABLE FOR TARGET PRATICE IS-”
Because sure as heck, that would still be better than what we have today, but not as good as what’s “to come” TOS.
Ah, but one can learn curse words without knowing their meaning. A five year old can say “Fuck You” without having the slightest inkling of what it means. Also, just because it wasn’t part of the Enterprise’s (NCC-1701) database doesn’t mean that no human had knowledge of it. It could be one of those things that is known about, but such knowledge isn’t widespread. I would think that Spock’s mother, for one, would know about it.
You can certainly name them, but they cannot be counted, just as languages cannot be counted, because they have no defined boundaries. The only precisely countable lects that exist are the number of idiolects (equal to the number of humans that there are) and the number of universal grammars (one).
Let me give you an example. A particular language is usually thought of as a collection of lects that are mutually comprehensible and not comprehensible to speakers of other lects. Now, if I remember this specific example from my sociolx class, German is a language and Dutch is a language. An Amsterdam resident who speaks Dutch will not fluently understand a Berliner speaking German. A German speaker living on the Dutch border will understand the German of Berlin. However, she will also understand the Dutch spoken by her Dutch neighbour five klicks down the pike. (We are talking here of the popular language, not as taught in schools.) The “Rhenish fan” between Dutch and German is not a set of dialects, but a range or gradient of various dialectical features, and a speaker at a particular point in the middle of that gradient will understand speakers near her on the “fan” regardless of whether they identify as German or Dutch speakers.
There are definite phonological, lexical, etc. differences between the English as spoken in individual towns in Britain. There’s argument over whether Scots English should be considered a dialect or its own language, from a linguistic perspective.
Most Quebec speakers would identify a Quebecois dialect, but the distinctions are so definite that it’s very easy for me to understand most Montreal accents but very difficult to get through a Saguenay accent.
So: Dialects cannot be counted because they can’t be precisely defined, and neither can languages or just about any other kind of lect bigger than a person and smaller than the human race.
Three problems, Matt. First, you’re assuming that Klingon linguistics work by the same rules as Terran. This might not be the case.
Second, I don’t quite follow your logic. My fiancee speaks three languages (Cebuano, Tagalog, English). I have counted the languages she speaks. People in the US, Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland, the Philippines, India, and Australia all speak different dialects of English. Hmm, I count 8 dialects. I don’t claim that there aren’t more, but I was able to count those 8.
Third, if you can name it, you can count it. Identify the characteristics of a dialect, name it, and count the names. Or at least, by this method, you can count the identified dialects.
As I understand it, the problem is defining what a dialect/language is. Perhaps the linguists circa 2150 have a definition they agree on. Perhaps the computer in the universal translator has divided the Klingon languages into 80 distinct groups for purposes of transation, and that’s what was being referred to. Perhaps they’re relaying information from the Vulcans using somewhat imprecise terminology. Perhaps the Klingons themselves have 80 identified dialects to their language, using whatever definition they might have.
The point of the “80 dialects” comment was that Klingon isn’t one language, it’s a whole bunch of somewhat loosely related languages, and translating them is a more complex task than, say French to English.
Asked in the friendliest tone, could you give me an example?
[QUOTE]
*
Are you referring to DS9 or Voyager?
In Voyager’s first few episodes, Janeway kept droning about trying to make sure that the crew would all get along with one another, it seemed to be her first priority which is somewhat understandable, but certainly not a priority for a starship Captain who has other things to worry about.
DS9, IMHO, tried to get viewers to accept the characters by first throwing in O’Brian to tie over from TNG, then bringing in Q (which is a character I LOVE, BTW) very quickly as well. These seemed to me to be trying to hard to sweep the viewers into the new mold of ST and saying “You’ll love these guys, too! Really! Okay, we don’t have Data, but we have this shape-changing alien who finds humans ‘intereseting’ just like Spock and Data! Couldn’t you just CUDDLE HIM? The Captain’s bald! Huh? Huh? REMIND YOU OF ANYONE YOU KNOW (he asked them knowingly)?”
When they brought in Worf (I’m glad Dorn’s getting the work, really), then that just clinched it. I wasn’t enthralled in the least.
I can’t pin it down more than that, it was many years ago, and I’m just stating my opinion. If you let me watch the first episode of DS9 again, I could be more concrete, but those were my impressions of the series. They just tried to hard by moving too fast.
Granted, but it seems likely that Terran structural linguists would at least try to use terms the same way on Klingon as they do on a Terran language. And I’m having difficulty imagining how a language would be broken up into a number of finite, integral dialects.
That’s not what I mean; I mean you can’t count the number of dialects that there are. In the first case, you’re not counting the number of dialects that there are, you’re counting the number of lects that your fiancee can use. In the second case, you’re making a list and counting the number of items on that list, all of which are dialects. Look at Canada. In what you’ve called a Canadian dialect, we could identify Newfoundland dialects, Maritime dialects, Prairie dialect, BC dialect, Ontarian dialect, Toronto dialect, Montreal dialect, Eastern Township dialect; I could subdivide each of those further, I’m sure; and the boundaries between Canadian and, say, mid-Atlantic US dialects are unclear.
Sure. And you can also claim that some Sulibans are more advanced than others. It has a vague practical meaning, but no scientific one. Dialects have no boundaries, just gradients. You can name points on that gradient, just as you can name points on a line, but you can’t count them. Natura non fecit saltam.
Perhaps, or perhaps TPTB simply have got no idea what they’re talking about and are simply yoinking terms out of O’Grady and Dobrovolsky at random. I know how I would bet.
That’s rather the point - he asked - it’s taken for granted that it’s possible, or even likely he ignored or forgot it.
And, of course, having rewatched the episode last night, there was no flailing in 0G.
He pushed off from the 1G ‘Down’ area, floated up relatively gracefully through the low-to-zero area, then fell (upwards) when he came to the area where the gravity started going ‘Up’.
Matt, thanks for the clarification. I have no doubt that the writers are not linguistic experts, so it makes sense that they wouldn’t use the word dialect in the way a linguist would. The show isn’t aimed at technical experts, but at space opera fans. I wasn’t aware that the usage wasn’t technically correct, but I did understand the meaning quite well.
None taken, because I can assure you that that’s not the case with me. I LOVED seeing Rachel Garret Captaining the Enterprise in TNG, and I had no problems with a female Cap in Voyager. But I blame the writers for assuming that a Captain would feel that it’s her duty to make sure everyone gets along.
Then there were the multiple time-travel episodes, letting the ship get damaged more often than not, Traveös back to Earth via special portals and whatnots, far too much use of the Borg, making them more of a staple than a threat… and on and on…
…Then I heard about how they handled the last episode.
No, i hated Voyager because most of the characters i wanted to impale on a stake outside my house. Harry Kim was the worst character in the history of the show, and that includes Wesley Crusher. Tom Paris was supposed to be some hotshot guy, but just ended up as some guy who was an excellent pilot. Chakotay and Tuvok were spoiled potential, they could have been soooo cool. Neelix should have been thrown out the airlock, and Janeway needed to make up her mind if she was going to be Kirk or Picard, and not flip back and forth between them each week. The only cool characters were the doctor, seven (despite the obvious reason she was put on the show), and at times, chakotay and tuvok. Now, as for what Voyager did to the borg…bleh. I’ve never seen bad guys wimpified so easily. And the borg kids never happened, its like that baseball episode of DS9, it doesn’t exist, the reality is too harsh…
(there may have been more than 2)
I already mentioned “Pon Farr <you>”, another good one was
“you should really install seat belts”
(echoing what fans have been saying for decades…)
Brian
Another point occurred to me about the supposed speed of Enterprise. A lot have noted that their transit time would put the Klingon homeworld way too close to Earth. But it’s even worse than that.
Since Klang apparently accidentally crashed on Earth on his way from Rigel X to Quo’nos, these places should be on opposite sides of Earth. So, to have travelled from Earth to Rigel to Quo’nos would be a much longer trip than just from Earth to Quo’nos (their original 4-day flight plan). And yet there was very little indicating that this stuff took weeks of transit time.
Still, I’m going to give them a chance. They could make this into a great show.
Maybe not. Perhaps he was trying to elude them.
The location of the celestial bodies involved isn’t a problem for me, it’s the travel time to the Klngon homeworld that I cannot spell. I’m willing to let them have a poetic license for the map, although it seems that it would have been easy enough to change it.
