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Fictional Polyglots | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| Lianne Senior Member Canada thetoweringpile.blog Joined 5115 days ago 284 posts - 410 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Toki Pona, German, French | Message 49 of 82 05 May 2011 at 8:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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This one was already mentioned way back in this thread, but Hoshi Sato from Star Trek Enterprise is my personal hero.
My favourite quote of hers is when she's supposed to be learning some language that's not even remotely human. I think it was the one that was based on mathematics, like sine waves or something. She said something like "This is isn't Spanish, you know. It could take me days to learn!" Haha. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Journeyer Triglot Senior Member United States tristan85.blogspot.c Joined 6868 days ago 946 posts - 1110 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German Studies: Sign Language | Message 50 of 82 06 May 2011 at 5:23am | IP Logged | ||
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Are you sure you are not thinking of Uhura, the communications specialist? I thought Sato was another starship commander, and a guy, not a woman (or robot or alien or android...:-P)
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| Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5956 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes Studies: French | Message 51 of 82 06 May 2011 at 8:08am | IP Logged | ||
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Nope, pretty sure Lianne nailed it: sato - approx 0% guy, android or alien, though Uhura would qualify for the thread as well.
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| Journeyer Triglot Senior Member United States tristan85.blogspot.c Joined 6868 days ago 946 posts - 1110 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German Studies: Sign Language | Message 52 of 82 06 May 2011 at 3:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Ahhh, I stand corrected. I don't know much about the TV shows, and I guess I was thinking about Sulu, anyways!
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| Lianne Senior Member Canada thetoweringpile.blog Joined 5115 days ago 284 posts - 410 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Toki Pona, German, French | Message 53 of 82 06 May 2011 at 3:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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Uhura and Sulu are both from Star Trek: The Original Series, not Enterprise. :P Uhura was a communications officer, but I never actually heard her speak any other languages, except possibly a bit of Swahili, which is her first language.
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| Journeyer Triglot Senior Member United States tristan85.blogspot.c Joined 6868 days ago 946 posts - 1110 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German Studies: Sign Language | Message 54 of 82 06 May 2011 at 8:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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In the most recent Star Trek movie, the young Uhura talks about studying xenolinguistics and also understands Vulcan and Romulan, but there are no scenes of her actually speaking them. The only time I saw her speaking a foreign language was in "ST6: The Undiscovered Country" where she speaks some very broken Klingon from out of a reference book.
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| seldnar Senior Member United States Joined 7132 days ago 189 posts - 287 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, French, Greek | Message 55 of 82 06 May 2011 at 10:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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I haven't seen Nicholai Hel the protagonist in Shibumi by Trevanian mentioned
yet. The son of a Russian mother, a German father, who grew up in Shanghai before the war and then later in Japan. He also grew up speaking French thanks to his mother. At some point he also learns English While imprisoned in occupied Japan, he keeps himself from going crazy he asks for books to read. The prison psychologist, gives him what he thinks are French books. They were Basque. One was a bilingual reader (Basque/French) consisting of parables. Another was a Basque/French dictionary. A third was a book entirely in Basque. From these resources, he begins to teach himself Basque. I think the description of how he does it would be interesting to the forum's readers (it also strikes me as something Kato Lomb would have done): "The first dicton in the book of adages was "Zahar hitzak zuhur hitzak" which was translated as "Old sayings are wise sayings." His inadequate dictionary provided him only with the word zahar meaning old. And the first notes of his [i.e., written by him as an aide to learning Basque] amateur little grammar were: Zuhur= wise. Basque plural either "ak" or "zak" Radical for "adages/sayings" is either "hit" or "hitz" Note: verb "to say/to speak" probably built on this radical. Note: is possible that parallel structures do not require verb of simple being. And from this meager beginning Nicholai constructed a grammar of the Basque language word by word, concept by concept, structure by structure. From the first, he forced himself to pronounce the language he was learning, to keep it alive and vital in his mind. Without guidance, he made several errors that were to haunt his spoken Basque forever, much to the amusement of his Basque friends. For instance, he decided that the h would be mute, as in French. Also, he had to choose how he would pronounce the Basque x from a range of possibilities. It might have been a z, or a sh, or a tch, or a guttural Germanic ch. He arbitrarily chose the latter. Wrongly, to his subsequent embarrassment." Page 191, Three Rivers Press edition. Imprisoned for more than three years, he kept his languages active by carrying on conversation in his languages--one day per language. Mondays--English, Tuesdays-- Russian, Wednesdays--Chinese, Thursdays--French, Fridays--German, Saturdays--Basque, Sundays--Japanese. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 7015 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 56 of 82 06 May 2011 at 11:40pm | IP Logged | ||
I think that the latest Star Trek film was meant to be a reboot of the franchise so I don't think that you can compare her language abilities to the older Star Trek 6. P.S. I'd just like to clarify that I'm not a Star Trek geek (are they still called Trekkies?), I just read about this reboot in a film review. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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