Chekov reminds me of the Smothers Brothers’ “Volga Boatman” routine about drinking wodka, and when you’ve drunk enough wodka you womit.
Nitpick, but Cote de Pablo is from Chile not Columbia.
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?
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:
That’s the one! But no Brian Blessed. 
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.
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.”
I stand corrected. Mea culpa.
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.
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.)
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).
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.
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.
Uhura may be; Nichelle Nichols is not.
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.
What made them sound like jackasses, exactly?
Don’t feel bad. I thought she was Argentinian. But I figured I should check before I posted.
See for yourself: 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.
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).
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.