Re: CHAT: enterprise

TRANSLATION:

Yup, I watched the Enterprise pilot too.   I think the scenes featuring the
linguist can be defended as perfectly plausable--provided we suspend
disbelief in a universal translater.

In the scenes where the linguist is trying to communicate in Klingon, she's
holding a device in her hand that she's constantly glancing at;   I assumed
it was an early model universal translator.   I don't think the translater
broke down;   I just think it wasn't quite up to the task of translating
Klingon, and was giving her partial information.

It makes sense that the early model has to be operated and interpreted by a
linguist, just as early computers were operated only by specialists.   The
linguist hadn't really learned Klingon in a few days;   she was interpreting
the output of her hand-held translator in light of what little she had
learned about Klingon from Vulcan data-bases back on Earth.

HIGH TONES:

In the outdoor classroom scene where we first meet our linguist, we find her
doing very high tones and dramatic trills.   We wouldn't see such vocal
acrobatics in normal human speech, but it's not clear that she was teaching
a human language.

Some ETI's might have superhuman vocal ranges and, as a possible
consequence, tone shifts in normal speech that would seem absurdly dramatic
to us.   Recalling David's remark, maybe it WAS a language that birds spoke.
The Star Trek universe isn't a bad place to look for avian aliens.

Also, maybe the teacher wasn't working on phonology.  Maybe she was working
on brute speech sound production.   If an alien language were very difficult
to pronounce, speech coaching might be a needed concomitant to language
instruction from the first phonology lesson to the final exam on higher
syntax.  After all, it wouldn't do to send people to the Bird Planet, able
to understand the Bird Classics, but unable to speak intelligibly to the
Bird People.

Maybe our linguist teacher wasn't such a crappy teacher after all.

:-)

Jim