GENERAL DISCUSSIONS

Why they speak Chinese... I think...

POSTED BY: GAMBIT3
UPDATED: Monday, October 21, 2002 00:40
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Friday, October 11, 2002 9:25 AM

GAMBIT3


While surfing CNN, I ended up at the EW website, and decided to check out their "preview" of Firefly, and about halfway down the article, I ran into this little nugget:

Mal and his steely second-in-command, Zoe (''Cleopatra 2525'''s Gina Torres), were rebels in a civil war between independent-minded planets and the Alliance, composed of Earth's last remaining superpowers, the U.S. and China.

Interesting, huh? I thought so, at least. I don't know the source that EW got the info from, so take it as you will. Well, you can find the whole article here:

http://www.ew.com/ew/report/0,6115,345660~3~0~welookatfirefly,00.html


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Friday, October 11, 2002 3:41 PM

JUGGERNAUT


I read an article in the New York Times Magazine (I can't remember how far back it was) about Whedon, Firefly and Buffy; it mentioned something about the Alliance being essentially the Alliance between the last two superpowers of the U.S. and China.

Sorry I can't quote the article; I could look it up, but I'm at work, and on a tight deadline (Tropical Storm Kyle swept through and dropped a tornado on us).

Anyway, it mentioned something like that.

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Friday, October 11, 2002 4:48 PM

NEOOLONG


My thought is that because the U.S. and China were the only superpowers, space travel, which is really expensive, meant that any colony ships would be paid for by both sides. Therefore maybe an agreement was reached that Chinese and American crews would both be required for each mission. This would probably lead to a mix of cultures over time, at least on the frontier. Then again that's just a thought.

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Sunday, October 13, 2002 9:55 AM

KESIYUAN


They are speaking Chinese ( I lived in Taiwan for 3 years and studied mandarin in college). Their accents are really horrendous so sometimes I can't understand what they are saying. Takes a couple viewings with replay TV usually. But this is understandable, it's a hard language to pronounce.



kesiyuan

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Wednesday, October 16, 2002 4:25 AM

GATORMARC


Does anyone else think that Engrish or something like it could end up being a dominant world language in the future? I already see a lot of it in Asia where the US Culture has mixed. It's always interesting to see anime where they regularly mix English with Japanese in the dialogue.

Gotta wonder if something similar would happen if the world's oldest culture were to meat head on with the greatest economic power in history.

This future seems very plausable to me.

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Wednesday, October 16, 2002 10:53 AM

REXRAYGUN


Quote:

Originally posted by GatorMarc:
Gotta wonder if something similar would happen if the world's oldest culture were to meat head on with the greatest economic power in history.



Actually, I believe the Jews are an older culture by about a thousand years. I personally think it would be great for the intergalactic language to be Yiddish!

"Oy vey, Cap'n!"

Just my dos pesos,

Rex!

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Wednesday, October 16, 2002 11:01 AM

GATORMARC


Rex,
I'm sure you are right... I kinda forgot about the Jewish culture and their influences over the last 7000 years. Sorry about that.

Hopefully, Israel will still be around in 500 years to influence that culture. There are enough people in the mideast who won't be happy until every Jew is dead, so nothing is certain.

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Wednesday, October 16, 2002 12:59 PM

TINYTIMM


Quote:

Originally posted by GatorMarc:
Does anyone else think that Engrish or something like it could end up being a dominant world language in the future? I already see a lot of it in Asia where the US Culture has mixed.



English has become the world trade language. The USofA has been a hot bed of data generation and to keep up the world speaks English. It has the advantage of being an official language in the second most populus country on Earth (India) and dozens of other countries. It also has no "American" attached to it. In the USofA they have no native language, they swiped it from the old British Empire, like most of the other ex-colonies. ;->

Jeff
Who also notes English follows the path of least resistance. It get simpler. Despite my efforts.

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Thursday, October 17, 2002 3:01 AM

GATORMARC


Quote:

Originally posted by TinyTimm:
It also has no "American" attached to it. In the USofA they have no native language, they swiped it from the old British Empire, like most of the other ex-colonies. ;->



What are you talking about? Those of us here in the states don't speak English! We speak 'Merican!



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Thursday, October 17, 2002 12:36 PM

DARKANGELSLAYER


Native American languages are native languages from the US, and possibly Hawaiian.

Actually in other countries they learn English English, not American English, and English is big in India cuz India used to be a British colony, so it's not like most people in the world speak english cuz of the US, or not only because of the US.

I remember reading somewhere that English is the most spoken language in the world, and Chinese second? So it makes sense that they'll dominate 500 years from now.


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Thursday, October 17, 2002 1:39 PM

ROBERTSPARLING


Well, it seems that we're all forgetting an important aspect of the series, and how it relates to the charaters' habit of muttering in Chinese: that pesky Alliance/Independents Civil War.

In war, proabably the most important commodity is intelligence. Knowing what your enemy is going to do bwfore he does it, means you win. Communication between battalions and the like are also important. So if the Alliance is comprised of the remenants of China and the US, all their communications would be in either English or Chinese. The Independents would have to know both languages to accurately counter the Alliance. They would also have to know both languages to do any code-breaking of Alliance encrypted communications.

So, knowing both languages would be essential to Mal nad Zoe. But now you're asking "What about that lovable galout Jayne, and the rest of the crew?" Oh man, do I have some answers.

First, Simon and River both grew up in Alliance space, so they will undoubtably know both languages, they being a part of their former gov't.

Inara, a prominent companion, is a woman of training, etiquette and intellect. I'm sure that in being a companion, she is taught both languages, as well as a slew of others to better serve her in her role as a courtesan.

Jayne, Wash, Kaylee and Book are harder to pin down, but not impossible. Wash said he went to flight school in the thrid ep, right? Would he be able to get a job flying anything reputable without an Alliance-made liscense? I doubt it. So he was probably at least familiar with both languages, if not as fluent as others.

Book's a preacher, looking to save the heathens. How do you bring the "word of the lord" to the masses when the culture is multi-lingual? Easy, he knows more than one language. Let's here it for the Christian need to proseletize!

Jayne said he "didn't fight in no war" in The Heist. Which excludes him from the War theory. But doesn't he seem like someone who played both sides against the middle? We assume he's a mercenary, but what do you do if you can't understand what language your boss-of-the-week is speaking? Learn the language.

Kaylee is the only one that really troubles me. She could have picked up all her engineering skills working on ships without really needing to pick up Chinese. I can only assume she learned it from various former crewmates.

And I'm not sure everyone is exactly fluent in Chinese. They mostly appear to swear or jibe each other with it, not compose spontaneous haikus.

That's all from me

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HASSAN CHOP! HASSAN CHOP NOW!!!

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Thursday, October 17, 2002 9:46 PM

REXRAYGUN


I think another view of things might be that, whle the characters would be bilingual, each of their native communities would probably have a preferred language. In Canada, both French and English are tought, and signs are in both languages, and that seems to be the case in Firefly too.

Living in South Texas for most of my life, I speak more than a smattering of Spanish, yet understand a lot more than I speak. Not to mention that my accent, though reportedly pretty good, is probably quite noticable to a native speaker, and I was surrounded by the language. If you want to get a fair idea of these multicultural linguistics, rent Lone Star. It's a great movie and it really gives you a feel for the benefits as well as the difficulties, of multiculturalization. I would imagine the same thing might occur with English- and Chinese-speaking populations forced into close proximity for survival urposes.

I see a lot of complaints about the characters' pronunciation of Chinese. Imagine how bad one's accent would be if they were from the midwest, trying to speak Spanish. I don't care what they show on Smallville, the midwest is not the breadbasket of cultural pluralism! ;)

Just my dos pesos,

Rex!

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Thursday, October 17, 2002 10:00 PM

REXRAYGUN


Quote:

Originally posted by Thegn:
I don't know for sure if you can really call the Jews a continuously existing culture. The Jews that are discussed in the later biblical age seem to have begun to vanish by the end of the 2nd century CE. There is no real evidence to suggest that that culture has ever re-emerged. So essentially, the Jews that we know from the Bible disappeared before the fall of the Roman Empire. Since then, Judaism has been defined as a religious aspect of other cultures. So it depends, largely, on what your qualifications are for a "culture." Certainly, Judaism can be called a culture, but I don't think it can be compared as a culture in the same way the Chinese culture is one.

Yiddish is a good example of what I mean. Except for religious text, Hebrew, until 1948, was a dead language. Yiddish is not Hebrew, but a dialect of German. And the evolution of the German language shares no cultural link with the Hebrew language. They are culturally unrelated. Essentially, we are not talking about a distinct Jewish culture but a German culture that happens to be Jewish. The same is true of other Jewish peoples around the world.



I think you may be mistaking culture for country. Jews have been a continuous culture, even apart from religion, for thousands of years. With very few exceptions, Jews were not allowed to assimilate, not that they would probably choose to do so completely. Yiddish is a case in point. Yes, Yiddish is taken from Middle German, but it is not the same. You are quite mistaken in believing for an instant that Yiddish culture is even close to German culture.

Yiddish has different inflection, phrasing, concepts, etc. It is a truly Jewish language that, though once thought to be dying out, has recently begun to make a resurgence. There are Yiddish newspapers and brilliant Yiddish theater. Its authors have even won the nobel prizee for literature. It has influenced the American English, especially in areas of high Jewish concentration, such as New York, immensely. Hebrew was the language of the fathers, while Yiddish was the mame loshen (mother's language) spoken in the home.

In addition, Jews were generally separated into their own communities, by force or by choice, and governed by Talmudic law. Every Jew, both before and since the diaspora, has been intrinsically llinked to every other Jew, by a common culture and rituals, such as the breaking of bread on Shabbat. Though the Jewish religion may have drastically changed since the second burning of the temple of Jerusalem and the subsequent diaspora, the Jewish culture has continued, unhalted.

Just my dos pesos,

Rex!

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Thursday, October 17, 2002 11:44 PM

LIVINGIMPAIRED


Quote:

Originally posted by RobertSparling:
Wash said he went to flight school in the thrid ep, right? Would he be able to get a job flying anything reputable without an Alliance-made liscense? I doubt it. So he was probably at least familiar with both languages, if not as fluent as others.



As it is now, to be a pilot, you must be able to read, write, speak, and understand the English language. Every avaition-related radio communication in the world MUST be done in English, no matter what country you are in.

________________

"You still don't get it. It's not about right. It's not about wrong... It's about Power." —Morph-O-Monster, "Lessons"

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Saturday, October 19, 2002 8:59 PM

TECHBOY


Quote:



And I'm not sure everyone is exactly fluent in Chinese. They mostly appear to swear or jibe each other with it, not compose spontaneous haikus.



That and haikus are Japanese.

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If you like that, check this out.[url= http://bofh.ntk.net/]

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Sunday, October 20, 2002 6:54 AM

SORAYA


Well, I read Joss' interview with SciFi so I know how the Chinese came to be in FIREFLY. But actually, my theory as to why they all speak Chinese still differs.

The most revealing part about their use of Chinese is the SITUATIONS in which the characters use it. It's mostly in moments of high emotional distress that they switch tongue - a pattern you usually see in people who don't use their mother tongue in every day life. Only when the subconsiousness blurts something out (as in "Our Mrs Reynolds" when Jayne confronts Mal with "Vera" and Mal finally realizes this *won't* be a shoot-out) they return to the language grew up with. Being a German who speaks English most of the times, I know what I'm talking about :-) (been there, done that).

So, my very personal (already dis-proven) opinion would be that they all grew up with Chinese being the first language... and English only coming later (bi-lingual ed from very small age).

Anyone in on this?

- Soraya

Mal: "You got the right, same as anyone, to live and try to kill people. You know, people that are... it's a dumb planet!"

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Sunday, October 20, 2002 9:06 AM

VISIONARY


One thing that may or may not be important is this: have you noticed that while they all speak chinese, there are NO chinese people...anywhere. There haven't even been any asian extras.

Why? Does that mean something?

Just a thought

"Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair" Ozymandius - Percy Shelley

"It is a reminder to me that all things end" Spock

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Sunday, October 20, 2002 11:22 AM

REXRAYGUN


Quote:

Originally posted by Soraya:
The most revealing part about their use of Chinese is the SITUATIONS in which the characters use it. It's mostly in moments of high emotional distress that they switch tongue - a pattern you usually see in people who don't use their mother tongue in every day life. Only when the subconsiousness blurts something out (as in "Our Mrs Reynolds" when Jayne confronts Mal with "Vera" and Mal finally realizes this *won't* be a shoot-out) they return to the language grew up with. Being a German who speaks English most of the times, I know what I'm talking about :-) (been there, done that).

So, my very personal (already dis-proven) opinion would be that they all grew up with Chinese being the first language... and English only coming later (bi-lingual ed from very small age).

Anyone in on this?



I hadn't noticed that, but you are right. It's like me swearing in Spanish or Yiddish, or choosing words from those languages because they are more appropriate, or have a better "fit" or "feel" to them. Brilliant!

Just my dos pesos,

Rex!

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Sunday, October 20, 2002 2:37 PM

NEOOLONG


Quote:

Originally posted by Visionary:
One thing that may or may not be important is this: have you noticed that while they all speak chinese, there are NO chinese people...anywhere. There haven't even been any asian extras.

Why? Does that mean something?

Just a thought

"Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair" Ozymandius - Percy Shelley

"It is a reminder to me that all things end" Spock



Uh, actually there have been Asian extras. They are in the background and can be easily dismissable unless you are actually looking. I think Jaynestown had them a bit more visible though.

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Monday, October 21, 2002 12:40 AM

TINYTIMM


Quote:

Originally posted by Visionary:
One thing that may or may not be important is this: have you noticed that while they all speak chinese, there are NO chinese people...anywhere.
Why? Does that mean something?



Note the PRC is conducting large scale social engineering with bioweapons and simple thuggery.
Given that almost all surviving chinese children are currently male.
Given that the chinese oligarchs are rolling in money. (PRC's first billionaire was the son of the General commanding the PRC Air Force.)
Given that they are exterminating the lowest classes. (See current reports on Chinese AIDS.)
Given that blondes are stylish and not very bright.

Hummm. Could be a distinct lack of chinese looking humans real soon now.

Jeff
Who sincerely hopes this is mindless and silly speculation.

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