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Author: fulltimeD

Feb 10th 2012 at 2:14:37 PM

Point taken, Piroca, it's distinct. I still would prefer to lump them but that doesn't appear to be the way this is going and I'm in no mood to fight about it.

But, to nitpick:

''StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'' implied that Swahili, Russian, etc... are still spoken because when aliens communicated telepathically with Enterprise crewmembers, Uhura, Chekov and Spock all claimed to hear the aliens' message in Swahili, Russian, etc... There is a single reference in ''StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' that implies French is a dead language, but every other time Earth is described in Trek, diversity is its hat, with thousands of dialects, hundreds of religions and languages. ''StarTrek'' characters usually have a universal translator actively making their speech intelligible not only to aliens but to humans who learned a different first language. So if this is going to be a trope, we must be really, really clear whether an example ACTUALLY fits or is simply due to TranslationConvention, TranslatorMicrobes or something else. I realize all the ''Enterprises'' had "Enterprise" written on the hull in English, but a viewer can always assume the LiteraryAgentHypthesis and make the concession that it's actually Esperanto or some other universal language that Starfleet uses to label its starship hulls.

As pointed out by others, and for many, many reasons, ''BabylonFive'' is not an example of this. ''StarTrek'' is barely a borderline example, and even that is inconsistent from episode to episode.

It's hard to find examples in LiveActionTelevision because not only are TranslatorConvention and TranslatorMicrobes way more common, but "English" is rarely referred to as such in futuristic settings. If the language people speak is even given a name, it's usually some generic descriptor like "Basic" or "Starfleet Common." In ''[[BlakesSeven Blake's 7]]'', for example, one episode calls the language of the main characters "Terran" (as in Terra, or Earth) but not once is there any evidence that the characters are actually speaking English as opposed to Esperanto or [[SouthPark Gooback]]. I can't remember any instances of actually seeing written text on that show until the Scorpio bridge in the 4th season, and that was an independent ship not operating under any official authority, so we can't assume it's indicative of the Federation. Plus, the Scorpio is supposed to be a rather outdated vessel. Can anyone remember seeing written English script in the first 3 seasons of ''Blake's 7?''

Third, is this to be English-specific or can it cover any "universal language of Earth?" I realize people are going for English-specific but for my two cents, I think that's too narrow. I would advise making the trope broader than that.