On Fri, 25 May 2001 17:16:09 -0600 Otis Lou Bohr pd@powersurfr.com writes:
At 10:14 AM 5/25/01 -0400, Susan Beth wrote:
What's worse, I don't think I'm outside the American norm in this
matter.
Says a lot for our schooling, eh?
On the other hand Americans' obliviousness to everything outside their borders is the Canadian media's primary source of humour (;-p).
Oh, come on, we all know about England. It's that place, you know, kind of east of Nantucket. And weren't they, like, connected with the British somehow? And, oh yeah, Mel Gibson fought them back in the 12th century when they were trying to take over Australia beyond Thunderdome.
ObB7, um...do you suppose everyone speaks with British accents because North America and Australia got wiped out somehow (but English--the language--continued taking over the world), or at some point did the North Americans etc. all start affecting a British accent in order to sound cool?
Well, I've always (always means for at least the past five minutes when it comes to B7 theories) figured that B7 and Star Trek spun off of the same 'history.' At any rate, they both had more or less the same WW III (or maybe WW Nth). After that, the histories diverged.
Common set up: End of war, big messes everywhere. Western hemisphere (probably North America in particular) with more surface resources - higher survival of key personnel, probably more culturally intact (though possibly not politically), etc (etc meaning other stuff that might be important in this scenario that I haven't thought of yet). Eastern hemisphere had fewer surface resources but more deep ones - food production and energy resources, means to reestablish social order and keep it going for the long term (good or bad being up in the air).
In Trek, North America invents warp, contacts friendly aliens, and gets access to the deep resources it needs before mass famines, local feuds, and all that other post-nuclear loveliness manages to destroy everything. A language descended from American English becomes dominant (heavily influenced by Spanish and possibly Portuguese [I also like to think that the Navajo, being one of the larger tribes and centered in a remote area (albeit kind of near certain nuclear testing grounds) came through OK and managed to leave their mark on the linguistic pie]).
So, they might not _really_ be speaking English.
In B7, there was either no warp or no friendly aliens. The Eastern hemisphere became dominant while the West Side fell into decline. Obviously, the British Isles were a center of light and learning, so their language became the lingua franca. I'd still like to toss in a few touches like heavy Slavic influences. Glottal inhalants make my throat sore, so I'd minimize certain African languages. If Arabic allows for sarcasm, it's in. By the same rule, there's obviously been very little language impact from the far east (besides, the one character who had an accent from around there complained that he lacked the connections for advancement. We can make a case for that not being the fashionable quarter of the planet).
So, their language probably isn't really English either.
But they're both similar enough for translation purposes.
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