I am reminded that I did not issue a disclaimer for the HMS Anemone episode "The Sea-Wolves of Aquataine".
The crew of the Anemone are (mostly) from Elizabethan England, and hence speak Early Modern English. EME, e.g. Bacon, Shakespeare, Marlowe, is readily distinguished from, but also readily intelligible to, the Modern English that we speak, and I've been ignoring the difference.
In "The Sea-Wolves of Aquataine", the party encountered a small colony that had been founded by refugees from Aquitaine when it was taken from Anglo-Norman control in, I think, the 13th century. Maybe the 12th, I don't remember. In any case, even assuming that the refugees are fleeing because they're ethnically English, they'd be speaking, at best, Middle English, and Middle English and EME are not mutually intelligible. And if not MidE, they'd have been speaking Anglo-Norman or Provençal (i.e. Old Occitan, langue d'oc).
I ignored the language issue, and I shouldn't have.
Posted by Greg at November 29, 2006 1:03 PM
I disagree - you did exactly right by ignoring the issue. Or at least, if you had not ignored the issue then at most you should have had them speaking in some sort of accent, but still entirely understandable by us.
This show is not about historical accuracy. And it's not about having to get around language barriers either. There's a reason Star Trek uses a Universal Translator. If your plot specifically involves playing up how foreign some folks are, then fine, let there be a language barrier. But don't do it for the sake of historical accuracy - not in this game, at least.
Well, there's a reason the original series bible called for a character with facility with languages and the Pidgin feat.
I don't have as good a feel for the capacities of the new characters, and given our attendance issues, I didn't want to bring up the language issue out of concern that it'd be insurmountable if the character who could communicate was absent.
But I should have planned for it more than I did.
I just wnt you to know that my brain initially translated Pidgin feat into pigeon feet. It's amusing on so many levels! ;)