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You No Take Candle
- 115 statements
- 21 feature instances
- 336 referencing feature instances
| You No Take Candle | type |
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| You No Take Candle | comment |
When a character or group needs to be portrayed as foreign, primitive, or inferior in intellect, or perhaps just childlike, yet still intelligible and able to communicate, the language of these characters is spoken as a grammatically abhorrent mess. Characters could be speaking a mutilated version of the language they learned from another culture, or a butchered version of their own language, or simply a language so "primitive" it appears from an outside perspective to lack complexity. This trope is Older Than Print, going all the way back to Chaucer. If the work is taking on a superior versus inferior viewpoint, the superior beings might use Spock Speak or Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe to contrast the barbarism of the other group. The inferior race is often shown speaking pidgin English and omitting articles, auxiliary verbs, possessive pronouns, and sometimes prepositions. The speakers often refer to themselves in third person. It is quite similar to Hulk Speak, though even non-combatants can or will use it. In some cases, it is a form of Aliens Speaking English, in which the creatures have their own language and speak English as a very poorly learned secondary language. This trope comes from two sources. First, English as a language has very little inflection, meaning words don't change their forms to cover case, tense, grammatical gender, etc. very much if at all. Instead, English requires a lot of small auxiliary words to convey the same information which other languages do in much fewer but more complex words. At the same time, you don't need these auxiliary words to make a comprehensible sentence (hence the adage, "English is an easy language to speak badly.") This leads to the second source: pidgin languages, which are highly simplified languages used by groups without a common language to communicate. Pidgins are stripped down to the absolute bare minimum of grammar needed to get one's point across, to make them easier to learn; some common English idioms like "long time no see", "sorry, no go" or "no X, no Y" are presumed to have their origin in the Chinese-English pidgin that emerged when the United Kingdom started commercial relationships with China.note Due to modern Mandarin's pretty minimal grammar, some like "long time no see" (or "好久不见") are word-for-word translations of legitimate Chinese phrases anyway. There's actually a scientific term for this kind of speech pattern: agrammatic speech. The Trope Namer is World of Warcraft, where kobolds, who wear candles on their heads to light their way in the mines, say this when attacked by a player character. Supertrope to the more racial Asian Speekee Engrish and Tonto Talk, and like them sometimes Truth in Television, although also like them it can sometimes also be considered offensive or politically incorrect if used poorly. Compare Hulk Speak and Strange-Syntax Speaker. If the character can speak proper language, but nevertheless chooses to speak like this for some reason, it's Elective Broken Language. If the speaker is otherwise very capable in their own language, then it is Eloquent in My Native Tongue. A softer version of this trope is Poirot Speak where characters who speak a language quite fluently will occasionally insert syntax errors or bad grammar to remind the viewer that they are indeed foreigners. Unrelated to You Can't Get Ye Flask, except in sense that we suck compared to computer overlords. |
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Dropped link to FunnyForeigner: Not an Item - FEATURE | |
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Dropped link to Minimalism: Not an Item - FEATURE | |
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| You No Take Candle / int_1c2eee99 | type |
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| You No Take Candle / int_1c2eee99 | comment |
In The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, the Chamblerlain has these speech patterns at all times now, even when among his fellow Skeksis. Considering how smarmy and manipulative he is, the Obfuscating Stupidity answer is likely now canon. | |
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| The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance | hasFeature |
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| You No Take Candle / int_22673a7c | type |
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| You No Take Candle / int_22673a7c | comment |
Subverted in Mongrels. Nelson uses this to try to communicate with Rob the chimpanzee when he first meets him. Rob assumes that Nelson normally talks like that and responds in the same way, until they realise their mistake and switch to normal English. | |
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| You No Take Candle / int_46518682 | type |
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| You No Take Candle / int_46518682 | comment |
Cookie Monster from Sesame Street usually talks this way, referring to himself as "me". | |
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| You No Take Candle / int_46bfa67f | type |
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| You No Take Candle / int_46bfa67f | comment |
Missing Stars takes place in a school in Vienna. Due to its international nature, most students speak in English. Those that don't either speak German or, to a lesser degree, French. Sofiya, unfortunately, cannot speak German and is still learning English. She and her sister Natalya speak English this way. | |
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| You No Take Candle / int_5beb437c | type |
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| You No Take Candle / int_5beb437c | comment |
Last Chance in Xollywood: At times Uz the stunt coordinator seems to talk like this (and is also a Malaproper), because the universal translator isn't really good at translating her dialect. This causes her some grief, since people usually already look down on her for being from Zoberon: a backwater, war-mongering, "fifth-rate" planet. | |
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| You No Take Candle / int_72e9fe23 | type |
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| You No Take Candle / int_72e9fe23 | comment |
Amnesia: Memories: The Good Ending for Kent has his Japanese voice actor say, "I'm sorry for waiting" in English. Since he was the second person to arrive at their meeting place, what he meant was he was sorry for making the heroine wait. The localized version fixed the mangled English sentence. | |
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Our Miss Brooks: The episode "Bartering with Chief Thundercloud" has the eponymous chief and his wife speak in this matter. Miss Brooks is flattered by Mrs. Thudercloud's compliment, however. | |
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| You No Take Candle / int_85f11860 | type |
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| You No Take Candle / int_85f11860 | comment |
Yoshihiro Tajiri English sentences tend to be either overly simplistic or rudeness of the Cluster F-Bomb variety. It's played with however in that these almost always impress just because so few people know he can even speak English at all. Ditto his ECW rival Super Crazy. | |
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| You No Take Candle / int_8906d354 | type |
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| You No Take Candle / int_8906d354 | comment |
Demonstrated by Massacration, a Brazilian Affectionate Parody of metal bands. "Far away/across the sea/Master never grow/Now the way/Against the fear/Master will is sure." | |
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| You No Take Candle / int_8d82d7ce | type |
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| You No Take Candle / int_8d82d7ce | comment |
All the puppets in Oobi talk this way. | |
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| You No Take Candle / int_90e2f673 | type |
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| You No Take Candle / int_90e2f673 | comment |
This is played straight within the BattleTech universe. The Clans, in their fanatical devotion to restoring the ancient Star League, speak strictly in Star League Standard English (with some new terminology and shorthand as needed to reflect their unique culture, but never contractions). Conversely, they consider the mishmashing of languages used by the Successor States and the mediocre quality of their English as further proof of their descent into barbarism. Although according to The Powers That Be, Star League Standard English sounds like Valley Girl-speak. Also, most of the Successor States use English as a secondary language and use a different language or languages as their primary one, such as German (the Lyran Commonwealth/Lyran Alliance), French (the Federated Suns), Mandarin (the Capellan Confederation), or Swedenese (a creole language of Swedish and Japanese used in the Free Rasalhague Republic). Despite this, all the characters in the novels speak perfectly understandable English with few notable accents or grammar problems. |
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| You No Take Candle / int_959dd815 | type |
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| You No Take Candle / int_959dd815 | comment |
In Chris Jericho's autobiography, he mentions that while he worked in Japan, he couldn't really speak the language and a couple of the friends he made there couldn't really speak English. However, he said that because he was fluent in "broken English" that he could still communicate; asking his friends "Would you like to go to the music store with me?" wouldn't work, but saying, "Maybe you me go CD shop?" would. | |
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| You No Take Candle / int_b9821fa9 | type |
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| You No Take Candle / int_b9821fa9 | comment |
In The Dark Crystal, the otherwise well-spoken Skeksis Chamberlain speaks this way during his encounter with the Gelflings. In the original cut of the film, this would have been the only scene in the film in which a Skeksis actually speaks English, before it was changed to make their speech always understandable. The moment therefore makes little sense unless you assume that either Translation Convention is in effect for all other scenes featuring the Skeksis, or else that the Chamberlain is using Obfuscating Stupidity to unsuccessfully put the Gelflings at ease. In The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, the Chamblerlain has these speech patterns at all times now, even when among his fellow Skeksis. Considering how smarmy and manipulative he is, the Obfuscating Stupidity answer is likely now canon. |
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| You No Take Candle / int_bcadd7cb | type |
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| You No Take Candle / int_bcadd7cb | comment |
Warhammer 40,000 Orks can use a bastardized version of Low Gothic (known as English in the millennium we live in) aside from their original language which is mostly guttural yells with a glyph writing system. Their grammar is likewise bastardized. | |
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| You No Take Candle / int_c2da0a36 | type |
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| You No Take Candle / int_c2da0a36 | comment |
Poetry For Neanderthals forces the players to speak like this when describing something by making them use only one-syllable words. | |
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| You No Take Candle / int_cf39ca4f | type |
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| You No Take Candle / int_cf39ca4f | comment |
The crocodiles in Pearls Before Swine mostly talk like this to convey their lack of intelligence. | |
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| You No Take Candle / int_d3ec742 | type |
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| You No Take Candle / int_d3ec742 | comment |
In one B.C. strip, the Italian Anno Domini and the Amerind Conahonty converse in this way. When asked how they can understand each other, coming as they do from different parts of the world, they explain, "Is universal language. Is broken English." | |
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| You No Take Candle / int_d52dfe03 | comment |
Artur from Big Nate, hailing from Belarus, speaks in this manner. All the girls at P.S. 38 find this adorable. | |
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| You No Take Candle / int_e5feb1e | type |
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| You No Take Candle / int_e5feb1e | comment |
Ace Attorney: Machi Tobaye from Apollo Justice: justified in that his knowledge of English is rudimentary. Him not speaking English prior to Apollo proving he knew it in court was probably equally because parsing it was inconvenient. Played straight with Zinc Lablanc from Investigations. Averted with the entire population of Khura'in in Spirit of Justice. They all speak English rather fluently, despite being a foreign nation which still actively uses its own cultural language and writing system. This is partly explained by a heavy dependence on tourism, though that doesn't necessarily explain why everyone is fluent. |
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| You No Take Candle / int_f4345923 | comment |
Parodied in a 1949 Bob & Ray skit featuring Pronto, sidekick to the Lone Agent: | |
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| You No Take Candle / int_f7d8fd70 | comment |
The Goon Show occasionally had "primitive" characters (Africans, Arabs, Red Indians, etc), who were usually played by the show's resident (black) singer Ray Ellington. Any Unfortunate Implications of this were partly subverted by Ellington's character clearly being more intelligent than any of the white characters. And it was the 1950s... | |
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