Re: Star Trek

Hallo!

On Wed, 17 May 2006 22:10:50 -0500, Herman Miller wrote:

> 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 ....
Yep.  The humanoidity (if there is such a word) of the alien races makes
little sense, their ability to interbreed even less.  There was indeed an
explanation by means of a "Progenitor" race about 4,000 million years ago
in a TNG episode, but that makes little more sense than the "Heisenberg
compensator" in the transporter.

> > What else?
>
> Romulans and Vulcans, at least.
Which *does* make sense because Romulans are Vulcan emigrants.  They are
the same species.

> 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.
Yes.  Historical linguistics is limited to a time depth of a few thousand
years.  Of course, ancient written records help: it is easy to see that
Sanskrit and Latin are related; it is much more difficult with Hindi and
French.

> 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.
How long ago did they separate from each other?

>       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.
Are Proto-Zireen and Proto-Sangari reconstructible, or are these too too far
remote in the past?

> Just like humans, probably the Vulcans would have had thousands of
> languages
Certainly, at least before the Logical Revolution.

>        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.
Likely.

>       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.
One would expect them to speak a loglang.  I have seen an "Old High Vulcan"
language on the Web a few years ago (I don't remember the URL, and don't
know whether it is still around), but it didn't look particularly loglangy
or in any other way interesting.

... brought to you by the Weeping Elf

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