The one that comes most vividly to my mind (and I make fun of all the time) “The Survivors” I just couldn’t STAND that music box and the Deanna’s reaction to it.

  • Mechanismatic
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    1 year ago

    I came to say the same. The vocabulary of the Vori language was just too clumsy and substitutionary. There was no explanation why the universal translator couldn’t use the words that speakers meant in English rather than the synonyms.

    My SO and I still joke about “glimpsing with our glimpses” when one of us doesn’t see something we’re looking for.

    Apparently the balance Biller tried to strike wasn’t successful:

    “The Vori language seems strange, but it merely substitutes various words with lesser-known synonyms (e.g., “glimpses” instead of “sees” or “eyes”). Janeway actress Kate Mulgrew commented about the Vori’s vernacular, “Almost Chaucerian, they speak in what is like Old English.” (Star Trek Monthly issue 32, p. 9) Regarding the creation of this communication style, Ken Biller commented, “I tried to create an interesting language for the aliens. Our aliens either sound too Human or they sound kind of hokey, and it’s tough to find a balance. I decided to try to do something that was more stylized, where the language itself became part of the indoctrination, so that they spoke differently than our people do, and Chakotay began to speak with their language as he became more and more indoctrinated into this culture.””

    https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Vori_language