2) It’s of course true that if there were a people like the Tamarians, they would have to employ abstract thought, or they couldn’t have developed the technologies they use. But to make this point, is, I think, to refuse the thought-experiment of the episode, which is: What if they *didn’t* have any abstractions, could only cite historical examples? Could Picard adapt to that?
3) I don’t think Dathon really follows Picard’s spirited retelling of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, in the sense that he couldn’t re-tell the story himself. But he intuits what *kind* of thing Picard is doing, and in his last moments this comforts him. (A moving scene, for me.) It would be as though you were dying in a strange land and the people there began playing music for you, music whose structure and idiom you don’t understand, but which you know to be music. You would feel the appropriateness of it even if you don’t grasp it and feel it as the strangers do.
4) Your reference to BABEL-17 is a good one. I had actually thought of extending my post by a riff on Miéville’s EMBASSYTOWN. A Trek/Delany/Miéville linguistic triangulation would be fascinating.
5) Maybe we could extend these thoughts even further by invoking Ernest Fenollosa's THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER AS A MEDIUM FOR POETRY, which is wrong, but for the purposes of this discussion interestingly wrong.
6) Alan supports no football club. Alan needs no football club.
I had Embassytown thoughts too- to the extent I've always wondered if Miéville was doing an intention pastiche. One way to frame the Tamarian's gambit is similarly to intentional construct a scenario that can be linguistically referenced by others, as in Embassytown.
I have edited the post, leaving your point (1) hanging incomprehensibly. You're welcome.
(2) I take the force of this: a proper SFnal exploration of a culture that was incapable of abstraction would be an interesting exercise. (3) I agree with you that the final scenes of the episode are moving! Not just Picard retelling Gilgamesh to the dying Dathon, but Picard back on his bridge finally able to talk to the aliens, and relating the sad news. And of course you're right that the specifics in this former case don't really matter. (5) I'll confess I had thought the Fenollosa book was simply wrong (rather than interestingly wrong) about written Chinese, but perhaps you mean that though wrong on Chinese characters it's interesting about poetry (and as you know, I take science fiction in all its forms to be a type of poetry). (6) "Arteta, his trophy cabinet bare." (Not strictly true this, but then Tamarian isn't strictly, or precisely, accurate).
What I meant re: Fenollosa is that he's wrong about Chinese but maybe right about Tamarian. It would be an interesting exercise.
"Wenger, when Arteta had his players grappling over yet another long throw-in" — same facial expression as appropriate for "Shaka, when the walls fell."
I've always been a "Darmok" Truther. It is not an entertaining episode and it is especially not a very rewatchable episode -- it is frustratingly slow, because our characters need to be made artificially stupid not to catch on to the conceit much quicker. That's because "Darmok" is an *idea*, not a story, and the only way to fill the time of a story with an idea is to spin your wheels. And rather than the various theories showing that the episode is exceptionally rich, I prefer to interpret this situation as indicating that the Tamarian language is an incoherent concept that doesn't actually make sense.
To me, the richest reading of the episode is as a sly critique of Star Trek fans (and young men generally) who talk to each other in a code made up of pop culture references.
The Chinese analogy is interesting. My [more than extremely limited] understanding of the language --influenced most recently by David Porter's "Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe" and, noblesse oblige, my ongoing Duolingo+online hanzi dictionary experience-- is that that sort of composite meaning building is true to a limited extent --the fact that a certain element means "woman" if often useful to memorize the meaning of more complex ones-- but it's not really the case that you can recover the meaning of the whole from the elements (also many of the elements don't really have a meaning associated); and it's not true that there's one character for each idea.
My reading of "Darmok" aligns a bit with your idea of Dathon attempting to provide a linguistic (or, I would argue, a cultural/psychological/cognitive) primer rather than using his language in its full capabilities, but I take the analogy with memes more seriously. I think a way to imagine a Tamarian compatible with both what we see in the episode and a highly advanced technical culture would be a language where the balance of shorthand-by-cultural-reference and the more flexible grounds-up combination of mostly arbitrary words we're familiar with is more heterogeneous than ours, and leans more to the former than in our spoken languages. That is, they have a perhaps large and growing set of cultural references that pack a relatively dense set of meanings that can be referenced to by the listener and applied to the situation ---your 100,000+ images--- but complement it with a more flexible language construct as needed; in this sense the language seems so alien to us because the cultural preferences are alien to us, but not to the point where the whole language is built like that.
I think most of that reading comes from my own experiences in some online spaces, including technical ones: we do need a familiar kind of language to describe relatively novel situations, but then you can see a long list of memes shorthanding emotional responses or even recommendations -- although the meaning of those scenes sometimes required that language at their point of inception. I have posted a "Ripley, when she said to nuke it from orbit - it was the only way to make sure" (or rather a gif of the scene, but I think the grammar is the same) as a self-contained call for rebuilding a server from scratch.
I don't know, and of course maybe we can't know - there's probably more than one way to think about this more or less compatible with what we see in the episode; certainly this view is more conservative, as perhaps differences in cognitive architecture (maybe everybody has what we'd call perfect linguistic memory) make possible the idea of one cultural reference per phrase you could ever need to utter, with new and extremely specialized messages being built on the fly and somehow being distributed extremely quickly across the culture ("Dathon, with the alien in the planet"). If nothing else, online practice seems to suggest that even if you have a more familiar language around you can do a surprising amount of day-to-day communication with cultural references, as after all our personal experiences and interpersonal communications are much less individual than we'd like to think.
It sounds like you have considerably more understanding of Chinese than I do, and what you say here makes sense. The notion that Tamarian is actually a "balance of shorthand-by-cultural-reference and the more flexible grounds-up combination of mostly arbitrary words we're familiar with" is attractive, and feasible, although I'd have to say it's not what the episode shows us ... and perhaps undermines the alienness of the alien language deep structure, bringing it closer to the logic of a human language. But perhaps that's inevitable.
Your experience of communication by meme-shorthand/gif is interesting, and I'd say probably quite common, in various situations. I'm interested in the way actual meme language is so often ironic. The dog drinking coffee in the burning room "this is fine" meme is a way of saying things are *not* fine. One does not simply walk into Mordor pulls against the fact that Frodo and Sam do precisely that (though perhaps that's not the point of the meme"). How would things have gone if Picard, instead of retelling Gilgamesh, had tried to explain "My I Don't Violate The Prime Directive T-Shirt Is Raising a Lot of Questions Already Answered By My T-Shirt" to Dathon instead.
> I'd have to say it's not what the episode shows us ... and perhaps undermines the alienness of the alien language deep structure, bringing it closer to the logic of a human language.
Yeah. I think that alienness can be rescued --and I'd love to-- but that calls for a much different cognitive architecture and cultural mechanisms. One mechanism I thought of would be a sort of continuous involuntary telepathy --closer to a shared unconscious than direct communication-- so specific experiences with short labels quickly "seep" across the culture: when you hear "Bob, his warp coils misaligned" it triggers a complex set of experiences and memories you did not know you had (although it might take personal experience to sharpen or make sense of them). So it's not that Dathon ever said any phrase in our sense of phrase: rather, he said a more or less arbitrary set of phonemes that the universal translator managed to turn into the most salient/superficial/older meaning of, like managing to translate the title and cover of a book.
(Culturally, there could even be some sort of consensus effect where these frames become more or less universal as people find more or less useful or vibrant, etc.) Of course this is like five hundred other things the episode doesn't show. But overall I think the price/fun of making the conceit work requires a bit more biological differences than implied by the episode.
Couple of references I thought of along the way: I think what I wrote above might have been a bit influenced by "Solaris" (the book version) as a less anthropomorphic case, and of course there's the Borg. Also, have you read Borges' "Funes, the Memorious?" It's a short story about somebody who gains perfect memory during an accident; one of the ways in which the narrator (one suspects, the author) points out how this has led him into bizarre cognitive directions is that Funes comes up with the idea of a number system where every number is represented by a different, arbitrary word, which of course makes arithmetic absurd -- you can't calculate, just memorize operations.
> . I'm interested in the way actual meme language is so often ironic. [...] How would things have gone if Picard, instead of retelling Gilgamesh, had tried to explain "My I Don't Violate The Prime Directive T-Shirt Is Raising a Lot of Questions Already Answered By My T-Shirt" to Dathon instead.
The direct referents of Dathon's phrases had all an "epic flavor," so to speak; I can headcanon that the basic terms for common situations are probably the oldest ones, and therefore refer to other historical contexts (just like words in most languages for common concepts are older; if they carried with themselves scenes from where they were first used they'd also look like that). But I can also imagine that Dathon was as much of a history and classical literature nerd as Picard; perhaps a different Tamarian would have used a different linguistic register, or the choice of scene/meme carries particular emotional or social information (e.g. maybe a Tamarian Picard would describe a bad situation that has to be endured with some Shakespearean reference and a Tamarian Mariner would have used the "I'm Fine" meme).
My problem with Darmok is that they have to selectively break the universal translator to make it work. Assuming a universal translator were possible, it makes no sense that it would translate each word in a stock phrase rather than translating the phrase. That is to say, assuming the alien says (their equivalent to) "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra", there's no really no reason that the translator shouldn't hear (the equivalent of) darmokandjaladattanagra and translate that as the word "collaboration". Each phrase— tembahisarmswide—would be translated into direct English words (giving). Etc.
Of course they don't do that for two reasons. There's the obvious: it would eliminate the story. But there's also the less obvious: it would show how utterly preposterous the idea of a universal translator is.
(I don't recall the episode well enough to say, but it might be that you could make a parallel argument for within the language—that is, that either they would be able to recombine words ("Temba" "Arms" "Wide"), and thus could say new things, or they couldn't, and literally read each just as a unit... in which case they would basically be just a long word, not a story at all.)
Incidentally, this argument also applies to any other show which uses a universal translator, e.g. all of John Chricton's quips on Farscape.
On the Chinese point: I don't speak it either, so take all this with an appropriate amoutn of salt, but from what I've read the description in this essay is not how it works. E.g. it's true most Hanzi are made of multiple parts, but the most common pattern is that one is a (badly outdated) phonetic component, one a semantic one. Let me paraphrase one example from John DeFrancis's really excellent book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, which I highly recommend. Imagine English was written like Chinese, and that we had a symbol that read like "rane". What does it mean if you say "the rane lasted for forty days"? Well, if the character pairs the phonetic symbol "rane" with the radical for water, then it means "the rain lasted for forty days"; if you pair it with the one for human beings, then it means "the reign lasted for forty days". Of course the characters are centuries (or millennia) old, and the pronunciations are now out of date to anyone but a scholar; in practice they're read as a unit. But that's the point: they're read as a unit, not as parts making up a whole.
(But I bring this up mostly to plug DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy is great; it teaches you a lot about how Chinese characters work even if you don't work to learn them. I also recommend his book Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems, which takes a broader approach, and demonstrates how all speech has elements of both phonetics and semantics (the former is obvious in English, but for the latter, consider the differences between rain/reign, which is purely semantic.))
I'm a person that talks about Star Trek on the internet, which is to say I'm a person that's poked at whether the Tamarian language could *really* work, but truthfully I think that's the least interesting part of the episode. Whether or not it works in the particulars is perhaps a little spiteful in light of the fact that its general thrusts are both patently universal and broadly ignored by the rest of the setting.
The first such truth is that this is what the Enterprise would be doing essentially all of the time. The universal translator is of course a magic wand, but if the problem of coming to a linguistic understanding in the absence of an intermediate 'Rosetta stone' language is every addressed, the gestures are towards a Sagan-scented insistence on the universality of mathematics- linguacode, the sequences of primes in this very episode, etc. Well, I love me some Sagan, but the number of first-contact languages on Earth worked out through the universality of mathematics is zero, and the number translated via real-time interactions in a shared context is...all of them. Here's a video I love of an anthropologist doing it for real- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYpWp7g7XWU
The second is that all languages are the Tamarian's language- all language is analogical, even weights and measures and the like (the foot was first the king's foot, and then your foot, and then the stick that was like your foot, and then the memory of the stick, and then...) As Picard points out at the end, your own language is fundamentally a protracted metaphor for ancestral storytelling *even if you don't know the stories*. Any dive into etymology reveals everyday words as metaphors for extinct literalisms, any probing at idioms reveals long-forgotten legends and pop culture.
What I love about Darmok is that this is one of the few episodes where we see the sort of work that explorers dedicated to seeking out new civilizations would actually have to do *constantly.* But that story is ultimately kind of heartbreaking. It says that connections between people are dangerous, and costly, and imperfect. But of course they are, and that does nothing to diminish their necessity.
Yes. The universal translator is a dramatic convenience (a magic wand, as you say) much as everyone on both sides speaks English in war movies, to avoid a whole bunch the narratively-clogging translating back and forth and/or subtitling ("Inglorious Basterds" is an exception, but there Tarantino wants to build tension he uses the dragging of multiple languages as an assist: when we get to the bang-bang moments, like the shoot-out in the underground bar, ordinary German soldiers suddenly acquire remarkable fluency). There's a handwave that all humanoid aliens in Trek have a shared genetic inheritance, and so maybe their languages are more easily exchanged, though "Darmok", by foregrounding the friction of speaking different languages, rather contradicts that.
That's a really interesting piece. I think, as per the Delany example, we can imagine more than one way of “describing object, so that if you lost it & wanted it recovered at the police station someone else would know this is your particular object, & not anyone else’s” ... one, certainly, would be to pile-on more and more specific descriptive detail, layering your account until every particularity of the item was accounted for (and I agree, *actually* doing that, being wholly exhaustive, would be an impossible infinite geometric sequence, converging on but never reaching completion. But by the same token one could say "it's my First Folio Shakespeare with my name on the flyleaf", or Cinderella could say "its the shoe that fits my foot": that there could be indexical brevities that did the job.
Thanks for this, Adam. As Smerdyakov says, It’s always worthwhile talking with a clever man.
1) I am new specifically to this series, but not, as I mentioned in an email to you, to Trek: https://blog.ayjay.org/excerpt-from-my-sent-folder-trek/
2) It’s of course true that if there were a people like the Tamarians, they would have to employ abstract thought, or they couldn’t have developed the technologies they use. But to make this point, is, I think, to refuse the thought-experiment of the episode, which is: What if they *didn’t* have any abstractions, could only cite historical examples? Could Picard adapt to that?
3) I don’t think Dathon really follows Picard’s spirited retelling of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, in the sense that he couldn’t re-tell the story himself. But he intuits what *kind* of thing Picard is doing, and in his last moments this comforts him. (A moving scene, for me.) It would be as though you were dying in a strange land and the people there began playing music for you, music whose structure and idiom you don’t understand, but which you know to be music. You would feel the appropriateness of it even if you don’t grasp it and feel it as the strangers do.
4) Your reference to BABEL-17 is a good one. I had actually thought of extending my post by a riff on Miéville’s EMBASSYTOWN. A Trek/Delany/Miéville linguistic triangulation would be fascinating.
5) Maybe we could extend these thoughts even further by invoking Ernest Fenollosa's THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER AS A MEDIUM FOR POETRY, which is wrong, but for the purposes of this discussion interestingly wrong.
6) Alan supports no football club. Alan needs no football club.
I had Embassytown thoughts too- to the extent I've always wondered if Miéville was doing an intention pastiche. One way to frame the Tamarian's gambit is similarly to intentional construct a scenario that can be linguistically referenced by others, as in Embassytown.
I have edited the post, leaving your point (1) hanging incomprehensibly. You're welcome.
(2) I take the force of this: a proper SFnal exploration of a culture that was incapable of abstraction would be an interesting exercise. (3) I agree with you that the final scenes of the episode are moving! Not just Picard retelling Gilgamesh to the dying Dathon, but Picard back on his bridge finally able to talk to the aliens, and relating the sad news. And of course you're right that the specifics in this former case don't really matter. (5) I'll confess I had thought the Fenollosa book was simply wrong (rather than interestingly wrong) about written Chinese, but perhaps you mean that though wrong on Chinese characters it's interesting about poetry (and as you know, I take science fiction in all its forms to be a type of poetry). (6) "Arteta, his trophy cabinet bare." (Not strictly true this, but then Tamarian isn't strictly, or precisely, accurate).
And yes to the "Embassytown" point! Also: Jack Vance's "The Languages of Pao".
What I meant re: Fenollosa is that he's wrong about Chinese but maybe right about Tamarian. It would be an interesting exercise.
"Wenger, when Arteta had his players grappling over yet another long throw-in" — same facial expression as appropriate for "Shaka, when the walls fell."
Ah I see!
I've always been a "Darmok" Truther. It is not an entertaining episode and it is especially not a very rewatchable episode -- it is frustratingly slow, because our characters need to be made artificially stupid not to catch on to the conceit much quicker. That's because "Darmok" is an *idea*, not a story, and the only way to fill the time of a story with an idea is to spin your wheels. And rather than the various theories showing that the episode is exceptionally rich, I prefer to interpret this situation as indicating that the Tamarian language is an incoherent concept that doesn't actually make sense.
To me, the richest reading of the episode is as a sly critique of Star Trek fans (and young men generally) who talk to each other in a code made up of pop culture references.
Kotsko, his finger wagging.
The Chinese analogy is interesting. My [more than extremely limited] understanding of the language --influenced most recently by David Porter's "Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe" and, noblesse oblige, my ongoing Duolingo+online hanzi dictionary experience-- is that that sort of composite meaning building is true to a limited extent --the fact that a certain element means "woman" if often useful to memorize the meaning of more complex ones-- but it's not really the case that you can recover the meaning of the whole from the elements (also many of the elements don't really have a meaning associated); and it's not true that there's one character for each idea.
My reading of "Darmok" aligns a bit with your idea of Dathon attempting to provide a linguistic (or, I would argue, a cultural/psychological/cognitive) primer rather than using his language in its full capabilities, but I take the analogy with memes more seriously. I think a way to imagine a Tamarian compatible with both what we see in the episode and a highly advanced technical culture would be a language where the balance of shorthand-by-cultural-reference and the more flexible grounds-up combination of mostly arbitrary words we're familiar with is more heterogeneous than ours, and leans more to the former than in our spoken languages. That is, they have a perhaps large and growing set of cultural references that pack a relatively dense set of meanings that can be referenced to by the listener and applied to the situation ---your 100,000+ images--- but complement it with a more flexible language construct as needed; in this sense the language seems so alien to us because the cultural preferences are alien to us, but not to the point where the whole language is built like that.
I think most of that reading comes from my own experiences in some online spaces, including technical ones: we do need a familiar kind of language to describe relatively novel situations, but then you can see a long list of memes shorthanding emotional responses or even recommendations -- although the meaning of those scenes sometimes required that language at their point of inception. I have posted a "Ripley, when she said to nuke it from orbit - it was the only way to make sure" (or rather a gif of the scene, but I think the grammar is the same) as a self-contained call for rebuilding a server from scratch.
I don't know, and of course maybe we can't know - there's probably more than one way to think about this more or less compatible with what we see in the episode; certainly this view is more conservative, as perhaps differences in cognitive architecture (maybe everybody has what we'd call perfect linguistic memory) make possible the idea of one cultural reference per phrase you could ever need to utter, with new and extremely specialized messages being built on the fly and somehow being distributed extremely quickly across the culture ("Dathon, with the alien in the planet"). If nothing else, online practice seems to suggest that even if you have a more familiar language around you can do a surprising amount of day-to-day communication with cultural references, as after all our personal experiences and interpersonal communications are much less individual than we'd like to think.
It sounds like you have considerably more understanding of Chinese than I do, and what you say here makes sense. The notion that Tamarian is actually a "balance of shorthand-by-cultural-reference and the more flexible grounds-up combination of mostly arbitrary words we're familiar with" is attractive, and feasible, although I'd have to say it's not what the episode shows us ... and perhaps undermines the alienness of the alien language deep structure, bringing it closer to the logic of a human language. But perhaps that's inevitable.
Your experience of communication by meme-shorthand/gif is interesting, and I'd say probably quite common, in various situations. I'm interested in the way actual meme language is so often ironic. The dog drinking coffee in the burning room "this is fine" meme is a way of saying things are *not* fine. One does not simply walk into Mordor pulls against the fact that Frodo and Sam do precisely that (though perhaps that's not the point of the meme"). How would things have gone if Picard, instead of retelling Gilgamesh, had tried to explain "My I Don't Violate The Prime Directive T-Shirt Is Raising a Lot of Questions Already Answered By My T-Shirt" to Dathon instead.
> I'd have to say it's not what the episode shows us ... and perhaps undermines the alienness of the alien language deep structure, bringing it closer to the logic of a human language.
Yeah. I think that alienness can be rescued --and I'd love to-- but that calls for a much different cognitive architecture and cultural mechanisms. One mechanism I thought of would be a sort of continuous involuntary telepathy --closer to a shared unconscious than direct communication-- so specific experiences with short labels quickly "seep" across the culture: when you hear "Bob, his warp coils misaligned" it triggers a complex set of experiences and memories you did not know you had (although it might take personal experience to sharpen or make sense of them). So it's not that Dathon ever said any phrase in our sense of phrase: rather, he said a more or less arbitrary set of phonemes that the universal translator managed to turn into the most salient/superficial/older meaning of, like managing to translate the title and cover of a book.
(Culturally, there could even be some sort of consensus effect where these frames become more or less universal as people find more or less useful or vibrant, etc.) Of course this is like five hundred other things the episode doesn't show. But overall I think the price/fun of making the conceit work requires a bit more biological differences than implied by the episode.
Couple of references I thought of along the way: I think what I wrote above might have been a bit influenced by "Solaris" (the book version) as a less anthropomorphic case, and of course there's the Borg. Also, have you read Borges' "Funes, the Memorious?" It's a short story about somebody who gains perfect memory during an accident; one of the ways in which the narrator (one suspects, the author) points out how this has led him into bizarre cognitive directions is that Funes comes up with the idea of a number system where every number is represented by a different, arbitrary word, which of course makes arithmetic absurd -- you can't calculate, just memorize operations.
> . I'm interested in the way actual meme language is so often ironic. [...] How would things have gone if Picard, instead of retelling Gilgamesh, had tried to explain "My I Don't Violate The Prime Directive T-Shirt Is Raising a Lot of Questions Already Answered By My T-Shirt" to Dathon instead.
The direct referents of Dathon's phrases had all an "epic flavor," so to speak; I can headcanon that the basic terms for common situations are probably the oldest ones, and therefore refer to other historical contexts (just like words in most languages for common concepts are older; if they carried with themselves scenes from where they were first used they'd also look like that). But I can also imagine that Dathon was as much of a history and classical literature nerd as Picard; perhaps a different Tamarian would have used a different linguistic register, or the choice of scene/meme carries particular emotional or social information (e.g. maybe a Tamarian Picard would describe a bad situation that has to be endured with some Shakespearean reference and a Tamarian Mariner would have used the "I'm Fine" meme).
My problem with Darmok is that they have to selectively break the universal translator to make it work. Assuming a universal translator were possible, it makes no sense that it would translate each word in a stock phrase rather than translating the phrase. That is to say, assuming the alien says (their equivalent to) "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra", there's no really no reason that the translator shouldn't hear (the equivalent of) darmokandjaladattanagra and translate that as the word "collaboration". Each phrase— tembahisarmswide—would be translated into direct English words (giving). Etc.
Of course they don't do that for two reasons. There's the obvious: it would eliminate the story. But there's also the less obvious: it would show how utterly preposterous the idea of a universal translator is.
(I don't recall the episode well enough to say, but it might be that you could make a parallel argument for within the language—that is, that either they would be able to recombine words ("Temba" "Arms" "Wide"), and thus could say new things, or they couldn't, and literally read each just as a unit... in which case they would basically be just a long word, not a story at all.)
Incidentally, this argument also applies to any other show which uses a universal translator, e.g. all of John Chricton's quips on Farscape.
On the Chinese point: I don't speak it either, so take all this with an appropriate amoutn of salt, but from what I've read the description in this essay is not how it works. E.g. it's true most Hanzi are made of multiple parts, but the most common pattern is that one is a (badly outdated) phonetic component, one a semantic one. Let me paraphrase one example from John DeFrancis's really excellent book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, which I highly recommend. Imagine English was written like Chinese, and that we had a symbol that read like "rane". What does it mean if you say "the rane lasted for forty days"? Well, if the character pairs the phonetic symbol "rane" with the radical for water, then it means "the rain lasted for forty days"; if you pair it with the one for human beings, then it means "the reign lasted for forty days". Of course the characters are centuries (or millennia) old, and the pronunciations are now out of date to anyone but a scholar; in practice they're read as a unit. But that's the point: they're read as a unit, not as parts making up a whole.
(But I bring this up mostly to plug DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy is great; it teaches you a lot about how Chinese characters work even if you don't work to learn them. I also recommend his book Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems, which takes a broader approach, and demonstrates how all speech has elements of both phonetics and semantics (the former is obvious in English, but for the latter, consider the differences between rain/reign, which is purely semantic.))
I'm a person that talks about Star Trek on the internet, which is to say I'm a person that's poked at whether the Tamarian language could *really* work, but truthfully I think that's the least interesting part of the episode. Whether or not it works in the particulars is perhaps a little spiteful in light of the fact that its general thrusts are both patently universal and broadly ignored by the rest of the setting.
The first such truth is that this is what the Enterprise would be doing essentially all of the time. The universal translator is of course a magic wand, but if the problem of coming to a linguistic understanding in the absence of an intermediate 'Rosetta stone' language is every addressed, the gestures are towards a Sagan-scented insistence on the universality of mathematics- linguacode, the sequences of primes in this very episode, etc. Well, I love me some Sagan, but the number of first-contact languages on Earth worked out through the universality of mathematics is zero, and the number translated via real-time interactions in a shared context is...all of them. Here's a video I love of an anthropologist doing it for real- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYpWp7g7XWU
The second is that all languages are the Tamarian's language- all language is analogical, even weights and measures and the like (the foot was first the king's foot, and then your foot, and then the stick that was like your foot, and then the memory of the stick, and then...) As Picard points out at the end, your own language is fundamentally a protracted metaphor for ancestral storytelling *even if you don't know the stories*. Any dive into etymology reveals everyday words as metaphors for extinct literalisms, any probing at idioms reveals long-forgotten legends and pop culture.
What I love about Darmok is that this is one of the few episodes where we see the sort of work that explorers dedicated to seeking out new civilizations would actually have to do *constantly.* But that story is ultimately kind of heartbreaking. It says that connections between people are dangerous, and costly, and imperfect. But of course they are, and that does nothing to diminish their necessity.
Yes. The universal translator is a dramatic convenience (a magic wand, as you say) much as everyone on both sides speaks English in war movies, to avoid a whole bunch the narratively-clogging translating back and forth and/or subtitling ("Inglorious Basterds" is an exception, but there Tarantino wants to build tension he uses the dragging of multiple languages as an assist: when we get to the bang-bang moments, like the shoot-out in the underground bar, ordinary German soldiers suddenly acquire remarkable fluency). There's a handwave that all humanoid aliens in Trek have a shared genetic inheritance, and so maybe their languages are more easily exchanged, though "Darmok", by foregrounding the friction of speaking different languages, rather contradicts that.
i wrote this (not lately): https://substack.com/@graywyvern/p-136931367
That's a really interesting piece. I think, as per the Delany example, we can imagine more than one way of “describing object, so that if you lost it & wanted it recovered at the police station someone else would know this is your particular object, & not anyone else’s” ... one, certainly, would be to pile-on more and more specific descriptive detail, layering your account until every particularity of the item was accounted for (and I agree, *actually* doing that, being wholly exhaustive, would be an impossible infinite geometric sequence, converging on but never reaching completion. But by the same token one could say "it's my First Folio Shakespeare with my name on the flyleaf", or Cinderella could say "its the shoe that fits my foot": that there could be indexical brevities that did the job.
I didn't know Samuel Delany before, but I'll certainly seek out his work. That sounds fantastic!