Tossed off in the dining sequence of "The Undiscovered Country" was Chancellor Gorkon's remark that, "You have never experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon." This Klingon claim to something curiously non-Klingon allegedly hails back to similar German claims during the second World War. But what really makes that remark remarkable is that Trek has always paid tribute to its mother tongue. (Unfortunately at times it also uses the English system of measurement, but that's a rant for another column.)

Space Seed acknowledges canonically that the language spoken in TOS is, in fact, English ("I thought I dreamed hearing it"). It's not a "we can convert to it" sort of thing; they're actually speaking English. Yet doesn't every species do so in Trek? Non-human languages (except for Vulcan) are extremely rare. Kirk speaks Klingon, but Klingons speak English. In "The Enterprise Incident" the Romulans speak English. Twentieth Century Romans speak English, not Latin. It takes a Horta or other strange alien to get a language of its own. Even the Medusan comments, "This thing you call language, though... most remarkable. You depend on it for so very much. But is any one of you really its master?"

My understanding is that English began settling to its contemporary form with the arrival of the printing press, the King James Bible, and the works of Shakespeare. The Quran did a similar trick with Arabic, and it wouldn't surprise me to learn about more important writings that tend to lock a language into place. Star Trek - perhaps generalized to the omnipresent popular culture and the internet - may have the same effect. The dominant language used to develop computers may end up being the language the computers assume for quite some time, similar to the old Roman chariot wheels establishing the width between modern locomotive tracks.

And it has certainly rewarded the vernacular with contributions of its own! Warp speed, transporters - even a non-Trek fan knows what "beam me up" means and can probably say which officer should do the beaming! Even should the language dwindle somebody somewhere will continue to speak it to access the show in its original form. I play tridimensional chess with several people from around the planet. When I asked a native-German speaker how to translate "Star Trek" the answer came back, "Star Trek." It's nice to think that, should one fall in a freezer for several hundred years, they might wake up to ask, "How long?" and expect an actual answer!