Re: Star Trek
| From: | Herman Miller <hmiller@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, May 18, 2006, 3:11 |
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Michael Adams wrote:
> One thing I noticed with Star Trek, is that the humans, vulcans,
> romulans, Rigelians and Klingons seem to have a common ancestor
> or what?
>
> Humans can breed with Vulcans and produce fertile offspring?
>
> Humans can breed with Klingons and do the same or ...
There was an attempt to explain this in one of the ST:TNG episodes. I
don't think it was a very successful explanation, but ... well, they
can't explain the transporter or warp drive either ....
> What else?
Romulans and Vulcans, at least. Oh, and Humans with Betazoids. Probably
others that I'm forgetting....
> Why this, is cause of they can interbreed and have a possible
> common origin, would their languages have some possible common
> ancestor, or if anything sounds and such in common and some
> words in common or structures?
>
> Mike
Potentially with races as closely related as Romulans and Vulcans, if
the period of separation is not too long. At least you might expect that
their languages have similar sounds. With humans at least, words become
unrecognizable after only a few thousand years.
In my fictional reality (Azir), the Zireen and Sangari are closely
enough related to interbreed, but they've been separated for so long
that none of their languages or words in their languages (beyond recent
borrowings) are recognizable as being related. There's a general
tendency for their languages to have ergative/absolutive syntax and
morphology (in contrast to the "Elvish" languages which are more
nominative/accusative), but not much else in common.
Just like humans, probably the Vulcans would have had thousands of
languages and the Klingons thousands of their own languages. At least
with the Klingons you have the official language as the language spoken
by the current emperor, which might tend to reduce the diversification
of other Klingon languages. Vulcans might decide on a common language
for "logical" reasons of their own, although the value they place on
diversity could encourage the continuation of many distinct Vulcan
languages.
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