Language/dialogue/accents (esp in later seasons)

[Quetz]

Hey guys

Love SG1, but something that still really bugs me when I watch episodes again (esp in later season) is why oh why humans from other planets speak like 'modern' humans from Earth.

I know, for practicality, it's to save the writers having to come up with a new language for every planet the team visit (fair enough). However some eps really annoy me when these alien humans start saying things like 'guys' or 'gonna' or speak with american accents (simply because any humans transplanted on other planets through Earth's Stargate would have been taken from here before American culture arose). It's so noticeable in Season 10, in particular, it's as if the writer's just stopped caring!

I know the show's over and it seems pointless complaining now but does anybody else find this annoying?


J

[metalheart777]

Wow, uhh, I won't say that your opinion is not legitimate, but I personally think that it's nitpicking. The fact that English as it sounds today doesn't even sound close to English before the Great Vowel Shift, which occured in the middle ages, is reason enough for me not to pay much attention at all to this aspect of the show. The "English" these aliens are speaking should sound closer to German than Modern English.

On another note, this show is made in North America, and these 'accents' or Americanisms are not abnormal to us. They don't stand out to us, or at least not to me.


~ mh777

[Fan-e-Gate]

Well it is logistics and they don't want to be spending the first ten minutes trying to figure what the other alien is trying to say
Seriously the galaxy should have been speaking Goauld as they were the leaders of most planets. Planets that weren't subjugated could have their own language.
Also Its funny because Artificial intelligence with its quick learning/adaptablity are the only races we have difficulty speaking to.

In regards to accents-yeah that is a bit of a joke. Worse is when they start talking slang (its never in your face). Only Tealc never really shortened words or understood metaphors/idioms/catch phrases but he was the one alien that actually mattered.

[apostrophe]

Hey guys
Love SG1, but something that still really bugs me when I watch episodes again (esp in later season) is why oh why humans from other planets speak like 'modern' humans from Earth.
...

I know the show's over and it seems pointless complaining now but does anybody else find this annoying?
J

Yes, a little. I noticed the deterioration over time as well. I think that the problem is, that the writers have forgotten why, at least the younger ones, per my impression of certain remarks made by Martin Garo in one of the commentaries.

But there is a good reason.

Wow, uhh, I won't say that your opinion is not legitimate, but I personally think that it's nitpicking. The fact that English as it sounds today doesn't even sound close to English before the Great Vowel Shift, which occured in the middle ages, is reason enough for me not to pay much attention at all to this aspect of the show. The "English" these aliens are speaking should sound closer to German than Modern English.

On another note, this show is made in North America, and these 'accents' or Americanisms are not abnormal to us. They don't stand out to us, or at least not to me.
~ mh777

I believe it is a pitfall in writing Sci-Fi that each alien world can get reduced to just another city that could be on Earth. Actually, there is a lot of variety on Earth, so maybe we are talking just a single city like Vancouver's environs. Obviously there are cost factors with sets and props unlike a book.

Language nuances are a way to add a lot of flavor to a setting (or color to a plot for that matter). A way to make places seem different from one another. It doesn't cost a lot, just cleverness and creativity on the part of the writer.

Instead we seem to have alot of overcompensating with trying to go bigger and bigger with spectacle, I guess, to try to draw attention away from the flatness of so many of the ostensible "alien vistas".

I like the big space battles and so forth, but, trying to outdo the last time every season is tough. "Let's see, we blew up the universe last time. What else? Oh. There isn't anything else. OK, this time we blow it up twice"...
"What do you mean, 'Ho Hum'?"

Well it is logistics and they don't want to be spending the first ten minutes trying to figure what the other alien is trying to say
Seriously the galaxy should have been speaking Goauld as they were the leaders of most planets. Planets that weren't subjugated could have their own language.
Also Its funny because Artificial intelligence with its quick learning/adaptablity are the only races we have difficulty speaking to.

In regards to accents-yeah that is a bit of a joke. Worse is when they start talking slang (its never in your face). Only Tealc never really shortened words or understood metaphors/idioms/catch phrases but he was the one alien that actually mattered.

Teyla continues (continued?) to convey "it" properly too.

The thing is, what is supposed to be happening is what happens when you read a (presumably well-written) novel that has characters speaking different languages.

The prime assumption is that the reader is able to understand. We get to be omniscient in regard to languages because we are not actually part of the characters' reality, we are up there with the invisible narrator (such as there might be one). So, with people off conversing in a foreign tongue, we get to "hear" how they sound to each other, how the basic information is conveyed.

Now, I'm pretty sure that contractions are pretty unique to North American English. Typically French nationals, non-Western, or at least people speaking dead or made-up languages are not going to use contractions, certainly in not the same way. We get a stretch to be able to pretend that we can do fluent on-the-fly one-pass translations but we don't go so far as to be able to go an extra step to substitute in our own tidbits of slang, contractions and idiom. That "breaks" the literary contraption.

Sometimes it's useful to the plot or setting that we take a non-fluent character's point of view in which we hear the foreign or alien language in native form. Unfortunatly, that has really fallen to the wayside.

The other problem, of how characters from Earth and alien worlds can understand each other so readily, hasn't been handled well either, especially lately.

Star Trek neatly circumvents the problem with their Universal Tanslator devices. We don't have those in SG. That makes things more difficult but not impossible.

We can just assume that everybody is a fast learner. We almost have to now...

But wouldn't fast learners Weir and Teyla have been that much more valuable if there was more reliance on their skills, at least initially. One of Weir's great qualifications was as a language expert, but she was apparently left with little to do in that regard. In SG1 the mysterious Gouald language, when it kept popping up, gave more mystique and weight (or should I say gravitus) to the viewer's alien experiance.

We could assume what most everyone in Pegasus speaks is something as close as possible to modern English, without actually being English (old Germanic or, well, Ancient has same Latin root words). Something that wouldn't be all that hard to learn either way (for fast language learners). Perhaps like Spanish-English isn't too bad, compared to say, English-Chinese... Earth's "best and brightest" might have also been selected for language abilities.

Could have had some interesting episodes as each side learned to understand the other. Even in Star Trek, Enterprise was the early years and the Universal Translator wasn't fully developed, nor totally reliable. There was a pretty funny scene wherein Hoshi (comm officer) is trying to communicate with a Klingon for the first time. In fact, at least one time, a whole episode climaxed around the crisis of trying to succesfully communicate with an alien species (i.e. or be destroyed).

There has been some really clever stuff like with Daniel Jackson figuring out the meaning of the name of the "Lost City".

Maybe network inspired paranoia over the constant threat of cancellation has caused what seems to be an increasng tendancy to go beyond "tightness" into "frenzied" territory. Or a shift in planning toward future catering to the presumed shorter attention span of a "new" younger audience aka SGU?

I wonder if anybody figured on, with a crashing economy, the young generation may not have anywhere near the money to spend like they did in the recent prolonged period of easy credit. That now appears to quite possibly be over. Chances are, the only people with any money or credit left (e.g. to respond to marketing) will tend to be a bit older(e.g the current average SG viewer).

[NIKIN]

This is something that bothers me too, I don't mind the english but they use very english terms like slang and contractions. The one thing that I remember standing out very badly was tealc saying something along the lines of

"Yeah, but do they... (then he asks some question)" he shouldn't talk like that, it should be like Data in TNG, he never used contractions.

At least in earlier seasons they tried to have people living in a medieval village talk like they would live there, not like they followed the team through the gate

[heliosphere]

I handwave the all english thing, because it had to happen for viewing ease. Daniel's position on the team would be very important in translation or picking up visual cultural cues. Just standing next to someone too close or not close enough would be a cue to pick up. But it's all part of the fantasy. Saying that though, I do wish the more common slang for the US and Canada shouldn't pop into the speech of someone from another planet. There's only so much I can suspend my reality.

[Quetz]

Totally agree with last two points. If we're so aware of this though I wonder why professional screenwriters didn't notice? Or did they just not really care? I mean how hard would it have been to exclude contractions in the dialogue of ppl from other planets? Or occasionally write a strange language for a new planet?

The latest example was in AOT, the first scene set 'millions of years ago', they should've had those characters speaking an unrecognised language or Ancient and have subtitles, it was only a brief scene really so I dont think many ppl would mind.

[Cagranosalis]

Language nuances are a way to add a lot of flavor to a setting (or color to a plot for that matter). A way to make places seem different from one another. It doesn't cost a lot, just cleverness and creativity on the part of the writer.

Sometimes it's useful to the plot or setting that we take a non-fluent character's point of view in which we hear the foreign or alien language in native form. Unfortunatly, that has really fallen to the wayside.

The other problem, of how characters from Earth and alien worlds can understand each other so readily, hasn't been handled well either, especially lately.

Valid points I can't disagree with at all. I think, on the whole, language as a means to alienise (?) a culture is a great and very cheap way of doing it so, yes, rather frustrating that one of their biggest cues and they seem to have ignored it for a large part.

Star Trek neatly circumvents the problem with their Universal Tanslator devices. We don't have those in SG. That makes things more difficult but not impossible.

Could have had some interesting episodes as each side learned to understand the other. Even in Star Trek, Enterprise was the early years and the Universal Translator wasn't fully developed, nor totally reliable. There was a pretty funny scene wherein Hoshi (comm officer) is trying to communicate with a Klingon for the first time. In fact, at least one time, a whole episode climaxed around the crisis of trying to succesfully communicate with an alien species (i.e. or be destroyed).

Yes, the Universal Translator never always worked, even when refined in the 24th century and, even if it did that's the 24 century and their technlogy anod not contemporary.
In one of the early Fandemonium SG1 novels it's suggested the gate itself has some kind of universal translator device built in that automatically compensates for langauges. I know the books aren't canon, (thankfully, because that's just naff) but even if that were so it leaves lot of nits to be picked; how come if doesn't translate them all and how come it knows North American slang for starters?

On the whole, I can live with it being English most of the time unless plot directly dictates language barriers, because otherwise it would get tiresome having it translated all the time. However it would not have taken much effort to make it sound alien just by, maybe adding an accent or making it clipped or very proper or even being clever and adding their own slang - Farscape did it very effectively, after all.

The latest example was in AOT, the first scene set 'millions of years ago', they should've had those characters speaking an unrecognised language or Ancient and have subtitles, it was only a brief scene really so I dont think many ppl would mind.

Even more frustrating when you know they know this trick because they did actually start one episode with 5 minutes of Russian and no translation at all. We still got what was happening.