Wife says that T’Pau’s lines in the first Star Trek movie weren’t really in Vulcan but REALLY were in Welsh. She doesn’t speak it but heard it and Cornish from old relatives as a kid.
Post the text and I will translate it for you. It would be better if you had the exact text rather than doing it by ear though.
HUGS!
Sqrl
IIRC, the woman playing her had a thick Russian-Jewish accent (so it’s Welsh as delivered by Jackie Mason’s mom!), so transcribing it is, well, not likely to happen. Just wondering if anybody had heard about it.
Cornish, um, died out in 1777. T’pau must be pretty friggin old.
Not T’Pau–Wife’s relatives were speaking what she thought was Cornish.
“They were Cornish, REALLY old, and incomprehensible. Could have been speaking Vulcan for all I know.”
T’Pau was (according to Wife, a notedly unreliable source) speaking Welsh, which is still spoken. And T’Pau WAS friggin’ old–Vulcans live a long time. Word is that the Vulcan woman on the new series was originally going to be her in her younger days.
Actually, I’ve been to Cornwall and it did sort of sound like Vulcan. People go around speaking Klingon, so why not?
Small nitpick: T’Pau was not in the first Star Trek movie. That character only appeared in the original series episode Amok Time. T’Pau was a leader of some sort, perhaps the Vulcan equivalent of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The Vulcan masters in the movie were teachers of advanced logic and mind control.
The actress who portrayed T’Pau was indeed Celia Lovsky, who did have a heavy Slavic accent. In the movie, the masters were played by Edna Glover, Norman Stuart and Paul Weber. I don’t know if any of them have an accent, but the names don’t make you think of Eastern Europe.
I have no idea where the writers got the Vulcan language, but I’d guess that the stuff from the original series was made up without reference to any other language. The stuff that appeared later, such as in the movies, could well have been from some Earthling tongue.
Maybe, but then, maybe not. Klingon was based on Hungarian. If they were going to base Vulcan on some Earthling tongue, Welsh would probably be a good choice, since it (and the languages most related to it) is rather obscure, and not known to many Trekkies.
Well, the sound guy from Star Wars says that, in the bar scene, Gliddo is speaking a heavily processed and BACKWARDS Quechua, but it sounds forwards to me.
I’m not absolutely sure, but I don’t think there was any Klingon language in the original series. I think the first time they spoke in their own tongue was when V’Ger destroyed their ships in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. (Which was also the first time they showed up with the sagittal crest on their skulls. Boy, that sure shocked the Trekkies.)
Sorry. I realize that this didn’t help figure out where Vulcan came from. I’ll try to stop being such an knee-jerk Trek-info freak.
NO!! I don’t want to be all alone on this board!
A quick cross reference from those who know at http://www.trekbbs.com, I can’t seem to get the vB code working so I’ll quote from ELLID;
“No, it wasn’t Welsh. It didn’t even sound like Welsh. The only fantasy language I can think of off-hand that’s based on Welsh is one of JRR Tolkien’s Elvish languages (I think it’s Sindarin; Quenya was based on Finnish).”
Based on Hungarian it might well be or could it be… Argentinean Welsh:
"In particular, there has arisen among the Argentinian Welsh a
practice of introducing back-formations from Spanish into their
understanding of English, or more precisely their understanding of the
ways in which the Welsh in Wales appropriate English words into Welsh
pronunciation and syntax when it is necessary to invoke a concept for
which Welsh doesn’t have a word. "
You try singing ‘Land of our Fathers’ backwards in Spanish, boyo.
Fun and pointless trivia - Celia Lovsky was the first wife of Peter Lorre.
That’s all.
It was Greedo.
Solly.