amazonpoodle:

So my phone and my laptop both ran out of charge yesterday on the five-and-a-half hour bus ride from New York to Boston (of course my seat’s outlets weren’t working), so I ended up spending like a good two hours sitting in the dark, staring out at the highway, and thinking about Star Trek, like you do. You’ll also be proud to know that I made good use of Christmas in Brooklyn to interrogate my mother about Swahili and Tanzania and Kenya.

I spent a long time on the bus thinking about my headcanon for Nyota Uhura: she grew up speaking Swahili and Kuyu and Arabic with equal fluency, and chose Latin for her first elective language course on the theory that knowing Latin would make it easier for her to learn Standard English and French and Portuguese. (She was right.) She chose Vulcan as her first elective non-Terran language, because it obviously made the most sense to learn the language of Terra’s first, and most advanced, nonhuman allies. She found Vulcan deeply calming; serenity and control turned out to be crucial when speaking Vulcan, because the human tendency to alter pronunciation during moments of high emotion made spoken Vulcan almost entirely unintelligible.

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