Galactic Basic Standard = English or not?

I suppose I should start off with introduing myself to you all: Hello, I am a very new member to this board and I am in search of some good SW-related discussion.

In searching through the older topics in these forums, I've come across a few discussing the huge similarities between the languages of Galactic Basic Standard and English. The languages appear to be phonetically the same, one such example being the name of Admiral Daala's Star Destroyer from one of the novels, the 'Night/Knight Hammer'. It's better described in more detail elsewhere, but I would just like to know how these two languages came to be so alike. And before anyone starts saying that it's all fictional and doesn't matter, I'd like to quote someone on the Wookieepedia site: "It's a fictional universe dominated by the principle of realism." Things like this, in my opinion, are worthy of discussion.

I am of the opinion that the humans of the GFFA originated on Earth, i.e. some ancient alien race took early humans from their home planet and dumped them in the GFFA, most likely on Coruscant. Unfortunately, that hardly helps us much with the language issue. The precursor to current Basic, Old Galactic Standard, is said to have been a mixture of early human tongues, Durese, and Bothese. Modern Basic, its sucessor, is said to have come into use with the addition of the Dromnyr language....but my question is, HOW HAS BASIC COME TO BE PRACTICALLY IDENTICAL TO ENGLISH?!?! And then there's words recognised on Earth but aren't English (A lot of French terminology is used in the novel YODA: DARK RENDEZVOUS).

One admittedly outlandish theory I've recently concocted is that some unknown, incredibly advanced, god-like beings have manipulated the development of various languages throughout the GFFA so that it strongly resembles the speech of Earth humans (though allowing for some exceptions, with words like "Moff", "Darth", etc). Okay, opinions, anyone?

 

Basic has never been confirmed to be English and even scrubbed out in the SE of the films to not reference English at all.

 

If you're going down that road...

It isn't remarkably similar... It's the same. It's late 20th/early 21st century English and American English. It's impossible that it has been used in the GFFA since the beginning; it would have changed too much by now. The fact that it's the same - and that the English in KOTOR is also the same - cannot mean anything else then that it's transcribed. If not... Well, then how do you explain the movies ending up on celluloid? The comics on your bookshelves?

 

It should be the other way around, Humans of Earth originated in the GFFA, i.e. Outbound Flight from 25,000 BBY.

 

Umm...is this a serious question? George Lucas speaks English. He wrote a script in English. He hired English speaking actors to act in his movie with English dialogue. Then his company hires English speaking authors to continue story, English speaking game designers to make games based on his story, etc. It stands to reason that he wrote the script in English because it makes it so us fans could understand the words. This is true for most science fiction stories. The humans in Star Trek, coincidently speak English too...they try to say that you can understand everyone because universal translators or whatever, but if a space universe is created by an English speaking author/filmmaker, chances are REAL good that at least the humans in that universe speak English, so we can understand it all. Sure, Star Wars was translated into French, Japanese, Spanish, German, etc, but, lets be honest. English speaking people are/were his intended audience. By having Han, Luke, Leia etc all speak English, and clearly disguising it as "basic", it gives us a reference point to share with those characters. If a sci-fi epic were to come out of the Hong Kong filmmaking scene, assume that the humans in it all speak a dialect of Chinese. Star Wars speaks English because its creator does.

 

I agree with dp and Watto -- just because it is English to us (the "viewing" audience), doesn't mean it actually is English. Much in the same way that a film may depict a conversation in a foreign language as being spoken in English for the sake of the audience -- for some reason "Roots" springs to mind, which depicted the African slaves speaking in their native tongue, but for the sake of the series, was presented to the audience as if they were speaking English.

So in essence, it's not English and doesn't necessarily even resemble English. They're speaking Basic -- whatever that language may actually be. It's just being presented via English for the sake of the audience's understanding.

 

A good example is The Hunt for Red October.

The Russians are clearly speaking Russian, but McTiernan switches their language over to English for us (the English-speakers) the understand mid-scene until they meet up with actual Americans, at which point they switch back to Russian until speaking actually in English.

 

But what about the fact that the Basic word for 'Knight' sounds the same as the Basic word for 'Night', as it does in English? And then there's character names like Skywalker, Solo, Ben, etc. There are also planet names that originate on Earth, such as Coruscant. How do we account for this?

 

There's a word for Knight in Japanese that, when translated into English, sounds exactly like Night.

How is this a problem?

Canonically, Basic != English.

 

Basic is "translated" into English so we can understand things, otherwise it'd be pretty pointless. Take the example of some films that are translated from English into other languages: names, dialogue, and voices are all changed so that the local audience better understands the intent and meaning behind them. Tolkien did the same thing with Lord of the Rings, and even wrote a section in one of his books about it, IIRC. Whether or not "knight" and "night" are homophones in Basic is irrelevant; that's how they were "translated", presumably carrying over a similar pun from the "original Basic."

Why not ask why they use the metric system or SI units? (And they use the English system every once in a while as well, which is another little anachronism.) Or how humans, ducks, horses, assorted other Earth-based flora and fauna, slang, and customs got to the GFFA from our Solar System, let alone traveling back to "A Long Time Ago"? There's no good answer, save that you're supposed to suspend your disbelief and move along.

 

As Rouge Follower explained Galactic Basic is Translated to English for our convieniance, in universe Galactic Basic is a competely alien language that we wouldnt understand.

This explains how it stays constant, despite millenia of use.

If you read the introduction of "Tales from Jabba's Palace" it says quite plainly "All dialouge overheard and retold from these accounts were spoken in Galactic Basic and various Galactic languages then translated for your convieniance." or something to that affect.

I dont have access to my copy ATM so if some one could check for me...

 

I should note there are many puns which are translated across languages. Look at the Dutch edition of the Discworld for some particularly good examples or, indeed, the English version of the Asterix comics.

 

What I was referring to was the instance in one of the earlier Bantam novels where Daala has a Star Destroyer called the 'Night Hammer', but when it's used to attack the Jedi on Yavin IV, she renames it 'Knight Hammer', thereby proving that the two words sound the same in her native language, otherwise the pun wouldn't exist. It can't just simply be translated into English.

 

Yes it can, as I've pointed out above.

 

Indeed. It doesn't have to be a direct translation, so long as the meaning and/or impact of the joke are similar.

 

Abel Peña wrote an interesting essay on the use of the word "consecrate" in SW. Long story short, while it exists in English, according to The Truce at Bakura Sourcebook it doesn't exist in Basic.

For the Knight/Night Hammer thing, imagine that in the "real" Basic version, it was actually something like Dark Hammer/Jedi Hammer, and the Basic word for "Dark" is something like "Jehdai". When they "translate" it, they pick the two words in English closest in meaning that still preserve the pun. Tolkien wrote a whole bunch of notes on "translating" Westron to English for Lord of the Rings (published in The Peoples of Middle-Earth), and talks about the same sort of idea on preserving meanings and puns. Very interesting stuff, if you're into linguistic quirks like that.

 

I'm sure it's not correct but it's what I always assumed made sense, the other name for basic is Aurebresh(sp?) & that is the universal written & spoken language of the SWU. We the audience that are getting to see glimpses of the happenings of this universe would essentially all have a Babel Fish in our ear, understanding nearly all the languages spoken in the GFFA except for the odd Geonosian, Huttese or Aqualish.

If one of us were to get into a time machine & go to this galaxy that's far far way & a long time ago, we'd be crippled in that we couldn't understand a thing being said by species that look remarkably the same as us or even quite different. We'd have to fall into hand gestures & the like until we are taken to an Imperial learning station & are given electronic fast learning courses in speaking & understanding Basic. After a few hours of that then we can hang out on a street corner amid the Jawa's begging for credits.

 

Aurabesh isn't a language, just an alphabet. They speak and write Basic, and they write it in Aurabesh.

 

Yes, Galactic Basic = English, with a few nonce words (e.g. Moff, kriff, transparisteel) included.

The Aurebesh writing in Star Wars, when read, exactly duplicates English. THAT'S something they don't do in movies - they either don't translate writing at all, they subtitle it, or they directly translate it into English in the Latin alphabet. They *don't* phonetically spell out English words in the foreign alphabet.

Furthermore, as others have pointed out, puns and wordplay seem to directly translate easily and freely. In and of itself, this isn't of major significance (as others have mentioned, translators often find appropriate equivalent jokes to include in a "place where a joke should go" in a work), but when taken with the above, and in light of how freely and easily it seems to be done, it's evidence.

 

There's nothing canonically to validate your assertion.

 

And the nonexistence of "consecrate" in Basic is evidence against.

 

Or we could just agree with 000 and conclude that Voren is a moron.

 

Is Galactic Basic really English?

As jSarek said, there's quite a lot of information suggesting that it is. To this, we can add what are clearly English-linked words in other Star Wars languages - "outman" (Huttese for "foreigner"), for example...

Either it's English, or it's a language relatively closely related to English... or, it might be that the entire series has been "translated" in a way resembling Tolkien.

Try not to think about it?

- The Imperial Ewok

 

It was translated, put to celluloid, videotape, and dvd.
Or are DVDs canon, too?

 

This is a prime example of the "suspension of disbelief" theory. Would Star Wars have worked if it was done similarly to Passion of the Christ's all Aremeaic(sp?) speaking with english subtitles, would that work in a story/movie intended for children? I think not.

Lucas is not the genius that Douglas Adams was, why is it that nearly no one else in the fantasy/sci-fi genre has invented their own version of the Babel Fish? Protocal droids work for in universe chars speaking to & understanding each other, but how do we who are on the other side of the 4th wall know what is going on?

When we in our own world are split into many different lands & speak many different languages, like for example black people the world over speaking English, Swahili, Afrikaans, Haitian, Puerto Rican, Zulu, French, etc..............what makes you think that humanoids that either descended from us or us from them in a whole other galaxy would speak & understand the Queen's English as we do?

I did go over this same arguement on the Age of Conan forums a while back, it was kinda fun!I'd want to be Conan's best friend & sidekick too, but how would we ever sucessfully get our ideas across to each other?