# Why wasn't Picard a Brit? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [April 16, 2013, 6:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-wasnt-picard-a-brit/655857 "2013-04-16T18:24:02Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Biffy\_the\_Elephant\_Shrew](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e47c2d/32.png) [@Biffy\_the\_Elephant\_Shrew](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Biffy_the_Elephant_Shrew)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2013, 1:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-wasnt-picard-a-brit/655857/81 "2013-04-18T01:27:43Z")
> [@terentii](#): > > Back in 1967, the only thing he knew about Russian accents was that his grandfather (I think), who was from Russia, had trouble pronouncing the letter “v.” Chekov reminds me of the Smothers Brothers’ “Volga Boatman” routine about drinking wodka, and when you’ve drunk enough wodka you womit. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2013, 1:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-wasnt-picard-a-brit/655857/82 "2013-04-18T01:33:44Z")
> [@terentii](#): > > I’ve also read that Ziva on _ **NCIS** _ (who is Colombian in real life, and not Israeli) consistently mispronounces her Hebrew lines. Nitpick, but Cote de Pablo is from Chile not Columbia. ---
**Author:** ![dropzone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dropzone/32/7515_2.png) [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2013, 1:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-wasnt-picard-a-brit/655857/83 "2013-04-18T01:38:53Z")
> [@digs](#): > > It was obvious to my young brain that they’d written the part as a frenchman, but then cast Stewart, an archetypal Englishman… and were too lazy to rename him. Wasn’t Roddenberry inspired to name him in a misspelled homage to the Piccard family and was at a loss for a new name because Great Britain lacks French-speaking Switzerland’s glorious history of exploration? > [@terentii](#): > > Going by what James Blish implied in one of his _ **Trek** _ books, everyone in the Federation (or in contact with it) knew at least some “Basic,” the dumbed-down version of English proposed for international use after WWII. I am sick and tired of these accusations of BASIC being “dumbed down.” It is an endlessly expandable language and even old, line-numbered GW-BASIC runs lightning quick on modern computers. :mad: > [@Voyager](#): > > “Playing Shakespeare?” We watched the whole series on Netlfix recently. Most interesting was Stewart and David Suchet (from Poirot) both doing Shylocks speeches. (And passing a yamulke to show who was Shylock and who was doing the other characters.) That’s the one! But no Brian Blessed. ☹ > [@Great\_Antibob](#): > > …Crusher…Marina Sirtis…Fans got to wank hard… I’m not saying anything, except that I preferred Diana Muldaur. Smart like my wife, looks like my wife–the whole package except she’s not as funny as my wife, but few people are. ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2013, 1:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-wasnt-picard-a-brit/655857/84 "2013-04-18T01:43:28Z")
> [@Biffy\_the\_Elephant\_Shrew](#): > > Chekov reminds me of the Smothers Brothers’ “Volga Boatman” routine about drinking wodka, and when you’ve drunk enough wodka you womit. 😃 Oddly enough, I’ve lived mostly in Russia for the last 20+ years, and not once have I heard anyone confuse “w” for “v,” though the opposite is often true (“Vashington” instead of “Washington”). Much more common is substituting “h” for “g,” as they do in the south of the country (something Gorbachev was notorious for) and vice versa (“Gitler” instead of “Hitler”). Nowadays when they borrow an English word like “weekend,” they tend to use a combination of “у” and “и,” so it comes out as “oo-EEK-end.” ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2013, 1:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-wasnt-picard-a-brit/655857/85 "2013-04-18T01:46:27Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Nitpick, but Cote de Pablo is from Chile not Columbia. I stand corrected. Mea culpa. ☹ ---
**Author:** ![The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/the_other_waldo_pepper/32/12370_2.png) [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Other_Waldo_Pepper)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2013, 1:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-wasnt-picard-a-brit/655857/86 "2013-04-18T01:48:36Z")
> [@Great\_Antibob](#): > > Chief O’Brien was unabashedly Irish. And his pal Doctor Bashir’s accent was unabashedly – uh, from somewhere. (Did they ever spell out specifics? I don’t think they got around to bothering.) ---
**Author:** ![Kamino\_Neko](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kamino_neko/32/34_2.png) [@Kamino\_Neko](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kamino_Neko)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2013, 1:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-wasnt-picard-a-brit/655857/87 "2013-04-18T01:59:32Z")
> [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](#): > > And his pal Doctor Bashir’s accent was unabashedly – uh, from somewhere. (Did they ever spell out specifics? I don’t think they got around to bothering.) No. The closest they got is mentioning he had an ancestor named Singh el Bashir. Word of God is that Bashir is culturally English, and his ancestry is probably either Sudanese (like Alexander Siddig), Indian, or Pakistani. ---
**Author:** ![Ranchoth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ranchoth/32/1066_2.png) [@Ranchoth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ranchoth)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2013, 1:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-wasnt-picard-a-brit/655857/88 "2013-04-18T01:59:59Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Which is a continuity problem all on its own. If everyone was speaking their own native language and it was being translated, why did they occasionally say something that was in their native language and required them to translate for everyone else? On top of that, what happens if there’s an accident, and the translator goes offline? (IIRC, over the course of the entire franchise, that’s happened exactly…twice. Which is slightly less than the times when gravity has gone offline.) ---
**Author:** ![Raguleader](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/258eb7/32.png) [@Raguleader](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Raguleader)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2013, 4:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-wasnt-picard-a-brit/655857/89 "2013-04-18T04:22:48Z")
Well, Picard was a huge fan of Shakespeare, so that might have inspired his Britishness. Let’s say he was also a fan of Doctor Who. (I’d go as far as to claim him a Horatio Hornblower fan, but Hornblower, ever the pre-Americanized Englishman, was a coffee drinker and disliked tea). ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2013, 5:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-wasnt-picard-a-brit/655857/90 "2013-04-18T05:21:06Z")
> [@cochrane](#): > > I can understand Chekov described as a “foreign language speaker,” as Russian is his native language, but isn’t English Scotty’s native language? Yes, he has an accent noticeable to American ears, but so would an Australian. I’m sure Scotty is fluent in Gaelic, but even in this day, the majority of Scots speak English. Well, my wife watched **Rebus** with captions on … 😃 I was going more for accents - and it doesn’t matter how inauthentic they were, it mattered how they sounded to mid-1960s viewers. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2013, 5:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-wasnt-picard-a-brit/655857/91 "2013-04-18T05:23:44Z")
> [@terentii](#): > > Certainly no discernable _African_ accent. I’d be interested in what real native Swahili speakers think of her speech in “The Man Trap.” She is a native speaker - in **Changeling** when Nomad zaps her, and she has to be reeducated, Chapel has to remind her to speak English, not Swahili, which she clearly regressed to when she lost her knowledge. ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2013, 6:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-wasnt-picard-a-brit/655857/92 "2013-04-18T06:05:44Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > She is a native speaker. Uhura may be; Nichelle Nichols is not. ---
**Author:** ![Slade](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b5ac83/32.png) [@Slade](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slade)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2013, 7:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-wasnt-picard-a-brit/655857/93 "2013-04-18T07:22:27Z")
> [@dropzone](#): > > Don’t get me started on how everybody from the RSC used to sound the same. There even used to be a show on a local PBS station that featured RSC actors discussing and demonstrating the “correct” pronunciation and phrasing of Shakespeare. Actors I had respected, until then, like Stewart and Jacobi, sounding like jackasses. _thinking_ I think one episode had Brian Blessed. I wish I could remember the name of the show because that could be hilarious. [_Playing Shakespeare_](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Playing-Shakespeare-DVD/dp/B003EQ4YFO/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1366268670&sr=1-1&keywords=playing+shakespeare)? If that is the series you meant, then I think you’re being a little unkind. It was made in 1982, when Received Pronunciation had already been on the fade for at least a decade in British acting. Accents have continued to evolve since, of course, so any series from 30 years ago can’t help sounding somewhat archaic. More to the point, though, _Playing Shakespeare_ is full of insights helping actors (and viewers) to understand the subtleties of Shakespeare’s language and communicate its full force and meaning in performance. I loved it. ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2013, 11:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-wasnt-picard-a-brit/655857/94 "2013-04-18T11:28:37Z")
What made them sound like jackasses, exactly? ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2013, 4:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-wasnt-picard-a-brit/655857/95 "2013-04-18T16:08:13Z")
> [@terentii](#): > > I stand corrected. Mea culpa. ☹ Don’t feel bad. I thought she was Argentinian. But I figured I should check before I posted. ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2013, 8:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-wasnt-picard-a-brit/655857/96 "2013-04-18T20:32:00Z")
> [@alphaboi867](#): > > Her accent wasn’t the problem; her acting style was. I’ve seen the clips of her from the pilot, and she comes off as a belivable Starfleet caption. She’d work better in a film than on TV… See for yourself: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SIZcDWKyw0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SIZcDWKyw0) ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2013, 4:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-wasnt-picard-a-brit/655857/97 "2013-04-20T16:40:36Z")
> [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](#): > > See for yourself: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SIZcDWKyw0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SIZcDWKyw0) Nah, she sounds too much like she’s stumbling over the lines, not really knowing what she is saying. It happens a lot in Star Trek with ancillary characters, but it’s not good enough for a main role, even in a movie. Incidentally, there was a lot of that in the pilot, and thus gave you a clue that something was going to happen to those characters. ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2013, 5:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-wasnt-picard-a-brit/655857/98 "2013-04-20T17:11:12Z")
> [@terentii](#): > > FWIW, my daughter has been perfectly bilingual since the age of 2 1/2. Even though she spent the first ten years of her life in Moscow, going to a Russian school and mostly living with her Russian family, she has always spoken English with a flawless American accent since she learned the language from me. There was a huge Russian/Ukranian immigrant population where I last lived, and many of them, particularly those under about 25, had almost unaccented English. I recall more than one incident of walking up to a group (one of some younger saleswomen at Macy’s sticks in my mind) that were chattering along in Slavic, then turned and spoke to me in English that had no hint of Eastern Europe. It’s one of the few language bases I would believe could spawn a perfect English-speaking character. ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2013, 5:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-wasnt-picard-a-brit/655857/99 "2013-04-20T17:27:06Z")
> [@Amateur\_Barbarian](#): > > There was a huge Russian/Ukranian immigrant population where I last lived, and many of them, particularly those under about 25, had almost unaccented English. I recall more than one incident of walking up to a group (one of some younger saleswomen at Macy’s sticks in my mind) that were chattering along in Slavic, then turned and spoke to me in English that had no hint of Eastern Europe. It’s one of the few language bases I would believe could spawn a perfect English-speaking character. Obviously, the younger you are the faster and better you will learn any language. If you’re older and live in a community where you’re forced to use your adopted language on a daily basis, you can still lose your native accent—or, more accurately, acquire your new one—quite quickly. I’ve met Scandinavian and Dutch women (usually former au pairs) who lived and worked in Great Britain and spoke near-flawless English. (Of course, they had all studied it in school earlier.) On the other hand, I knew a 20-something Russian woman in Moscow who had a Scottish boyfriend; after living with him for a few months, I’d’ve sworn she came from from Edinburgh. (She managed to fool more than one employer into thinking she was a native English-speaker.) After just ten months in Moscow, I managed to lose my American accent, though most people took me for Bulgarian or Baltic when they heard me talk. Now, more than 20 years later, my Russian accent is almost perfect (I turned 58 in January). ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2013, 6:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-wasnt-picard-a-brit/655857/100 "2013-04-20T18:50:01Z")
> [@terentii](#): > > On the other hand, I knew a 20-something Russian woman in Moscow who had a Scottish boyfriend; after living with him for a few months, I’d’ve sworn she came from from Edinburgh. I know this well. I worked with an Australian company trying to get a foothold in the US, and after several months I had a perfect Strine accent that fooled even the visiting brass. (At least once in a meeting, a VP or something from Sydney would make an exasperated comment about stupid Americans, and there would be politely British foot-shuffling for a moment before someone pointed out I was a Californian. They really couldn’t tell.) Then some movie about an alligator hunter came out, everyone assumed I was aping the film, and I worked the accent out of my speech. Mostly. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-wasnt-picard-a-brit/655857.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-wasnt-picard-a-brit/655857.md?page=6)