Funnimetric

Dear Sci-Fi apologist,

Why does every population in Stargate speak English, but beings need translator microbes in Farscape?

Curious and confused at USC

Well, C and C, apparently linguistics is another casualty of education budget cuts. Basically, the Goa'uld took people from Earth to populate their planets with the slave labor necessary to mine Naqahdah, the basic power source for the Goa'uld. According to leading linguistic experts (I must defer to them for although I am familiar with the subject, I consider myself primarily a physicist), a population isolated from any other human group will eventually develop a language similar to English and speak it with a Canadian accent.

Aha! you say. In the original movie, they did not speak English. Well, Ra, the Goa'uld ruler of Abydos, was a particularly tyrannical ruler and you may remember from the docudrama, Stargate, that he prohibited all forms of writing and reading, thus stunting the humans’ linguistic growth. After the great defeat of Ra in 1992 (Stargate, for all of its purported accuracy, contains many historical errors of which the exact date is one; the movie is set in 1993. I've contacted the DVD distributors to include a clarification in the DVD version.), linguistic development developed at an accelerated rate, pushed along even further by renowned yet misunderstood archaeologist Daniel Jackson’s genius. By the time of Stargate SG-1, the Abydosians closed the gap between them and the rest of the galaxy.

Ancients, though not actually human, speak English because of their highly evolved minds. For Ancients, picking up a language is as easy as learning a particular dance is for humans.

Thanks,

Sci-Fi apologist.

Although James Spader was closer to the original Daniel Jackson in appearance, he couldn't fully represent his physical prowess; a suitable replacement was found in Michael Shanks.