To add even more confusion to Picard’s history, in the stupid Generations movie, his Nexus fantasy life was living in an English Christmas Card (I can’t tell my Victorian from my Edwardian). So apparently, Picard is a self-hating Frenchman.
I laughed so hard at this I think it’s a sign I need to take a break.
I’m now imagining Captain Picard played by Peter Sellers in the manner of Inspector Clouseau. What is AI for, if not this???
I mean, there are tea drinkers in America, too… but if I’m anywhere but at my home or the home of someone I know well, I won’t assume that there will be any decent-quality tea available. Sure, most places do have tea, but it’s usually something like Lipton’s at best. By contrast, when I’ve visited Ireland (and likewise if I should ever visit England), you can walk into pretty much any random establishment and expect that the tea will be at least decent.
Of course, that might well change, sometime in the next few centuries.
I mean, the Replicator makes it so you can always get the best tea ever recorded in human history.
Average per capita tea consumption in France is a fraction of what it is in England and Ireland. On the other hand, the guy in Du côté de chez Swann was not dipping his madeleine into an espresso, and it is hard to get more French than that.
It is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
They had the Eugenics War and WWIII in their timeline; France being in densely populated Europe was probably hit hard. And given that French is a minority language on one planet in a large multiworld polity, it makes sense it’d be “obscure” even without that.
English likely predominates among human languages just because it was in the right position to do so when humanity went interstellar. If somehow that had happened a few centuries earlier quite possibly the Federation would speak French and English would be the obscure language.
“Mr. La Forge, follow that ship!”
[La Forge ejects]
Agreed, I even posted about that in the older thread I’d linked to.
Nit noew, Data.
You all may be thinking Clouseau, but I’m picturing Pepe le Pew.
“ah Mademoiselle Borg, why do you run away.? Ah, my little darling, it is love at first sight, is it not, no?”
“I am ze captain, and you are ze first mate. Promotions will follow quickly!”
The question then isn’t “why doesn’t Picard have ze Fraanch akzent”, but “Why do Scotty and Chekhov have accents?”
I think they are affectations. You wake them up in the middle of the night and they’ll talk just like normal people.
Sure, but it’s already not hard to get high-quality tea. But most American places don’t, anyway.
It might be that Picard’s habitual specification of “Earl Grey” isn’t because he likes bergamot; it’s because the specificity is what ensures that the replicator will go for the high-quality pattern. If you just order “tea”, without any qualifiers, you get Lipton. But Lipton doesn’t make an Earl Grey, so if you order that, you get Twinings or the like.
My theory is that they come from insular communities. We see them in Star Trek often. Some provincial place where people keep to themselves for the most part. I’m sure there would be lots of places like that in their version of Earth.
Heck, you have people who live in different parts of the same city with different accents in the US.
Which reminded me of the members of the Bringloidi colony in the TNG episode “Up the Long Ladder.” They were human colonists who’d left Earth a couple of hundred years earlier, and had decided to eschew technology and live an agrarian lifestyle. They had Irish accents.
Ah, well - perhaps Scotty and Chekhov came from more remote communities where local dialects/languages were still strong despite Chekhov being required to learn English in school? Perhaps Picard grew up in a less remote/more urban or urban-adjacent area where the mainstream language dialect was much more dominant?
Actually Lipton does make Earl Grey.
When I was in France the British teas like Twinings were what was usually available. Lipton, too, but it’s not like “American tea” is viewed as particularly exceptional or needed. I don’t recall seeing Lipton outside of the Parisian region but my visit was more than 40 years ago so my recollections aren’t that sharp in regards to such a detail.
Also, some place that managed to avoid getting smashed during WWIII or the Eugenics War, and so maintained more of its original culture. Or even someplace that deliberately resurrected pre-War culture and behavior as much as it could; Chekov would fit as somebody coming from a place like that. He’s basically the Worf of the original series; just exchange “Klingon this” and “Klingon that” for “Russian this” and “Russian that”.
That’d be a good explanation, but it’s contradicted by canon.
Picard’s character biography indicates that he was born and raised in the rural community of La Barre, in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region of France, and lived and worked in his family’s vineyard (seen in the epsiode Family) until he left to join Starfleet. And, Picard’s father was noted to have been a traditionalist.
His brother, Robert Picard, appears in Family, and he, too, was played by an English actor, Jeremy Kemp.
Is “rural” the same as “isolated”?
We already live in a world where farmers have college degrees and use advanced technology to farm. We live in a world where subsistence farmers/herders off the grid own smart phones and recharge them with solar panels. In the ST future I would only expect more of this, alongside that transporter technology that enables near-instantaneous travel from one point to another. Rural schoolchildren might regularly teleport to school and taking a day-trip to anywhere on the planet might be easily done provided your home/community is part of the global culture.
Oh, but then why would there be isolated communities with divergent accents? I dunno - why are Amish so attached to horse-and-buggy transportation?
In ST in some ways we actually know more about planets other than Earth than about Earth itself.
This is because they, like so many of the secondary regular characters in TOS, were conceived as one-dimensional stereotypes, to illustrate the wide variety of humans embraced in Star Fleet (some of them eventually were allowed to develop small other facets to their characters). Compare with the crew from Forbidden Planet, all white men, all (one excepted) with bland US accents.
Fortunately, that sort of stereotyping by national origin was toned down a fair bit in TNG.
Whereas Sulu was more like Picard - the fact that he was Japanese rarely if ever came into play, albeit probably for different reasons.