Or the universal translator from Star Trek. Guys, the more you explain it the less sense it makes.
I always wondered why Leeloo could phonetically read "Please Help," but a) hadn't been around when the Roman alphabet was developed and b) had to guess that it meant "please help" instead of, you know, "Free with Proof of Purchase" or "Working To Serve YOU" or anything else an ad might say.
I always surprise people by saying that one of the more realistic portrayals of multilingualism is Star Wars. You've got two competing lingua francas and a lot of dialects that galactic citizens might be able to understand but not produce, so you get folks speaking different languages to each other and understanding it quite well. It's still got some weirdness, but it's surprisingly less strange than a lot of answers I've seen.
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I always wondered why Leeloo could phonetically read "Please Help," but a) hadn't been around when the Roman alphabet was developed and b) had to guess that it meant "please help" instead of, you know, "Free with Proof of Purchase" or "Working To Serve YOU" or anything else an ad might say.
I always surprise people by saying that one of the more realistic portrayals of multilingualism is Star Wars. You've got two competing lingua francas and a lot of dialects that galactic citizens might be able to understand but not produce, so you get folks speaking different languages to each other and understanding it quite well. It's still got some weirdness, but it's surprisingly less strange than a lot of answers I've seen.