• Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
    22·
    4 days ago

    Thing about a metaphoric language is that you also need a regular language to hear the stories the metaphors are based on so the references make sense. “The red thingy moving toward the green thingy” means nothing if you never saw Galaxy Quest.

    • TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee
      15·
      4 days ago

      Yeah, linguistics is always an absolute abomination in Trek. i’m just getting through Enterprise now and despite the idea of the development of the universal translator being done by a hot korean linguist of my dreams, you’d think this show would culminate in everything i love in the world, and yet it’s tacky, poorly thought out, and leaves so much unexplained. yeah, okay, she can communicate in a brand new language if she just believes in herself. right, that’s how it works. they just can’t handle linguistics in Trek. i wish they just overlooked it altogether and attributed it to narrative limitations.

      BUT that said, the Darmok people communicate via allegory. you’re right that allegory would need something to be based on, which indicates that the proto-language for the Allegorical Language was something that did have more familiar semantics. but over time it evolved to only use the allegories as signifiers themselves, thus words like “welcome” fell into antiquity while “his arms wide” came into common usage. honestly this episode was one of the rare times when linguistic questions were handled with somewhat appropriate depth and care! there’s a lot of cool questions we could look at from the idea of an allegorical language.

      also props to Enterprise for at least suggesting something cool in the Risa episode of S1: “i can’t say it any slower; it’d change the meaning”. i have never heard of an Earth language with this property. do you know if there is one? what other Trek episodes do linguistics well?

      • Singletona082@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        4 days ago

        Well take ‘dude’

        ‘Dude!’ fast and excited is a declaritive.

        ‘Duuuuude’ drawn out tends to be more empathetic.

        ‘Dood’ has its own subset of meanings.

        Similar context clues also apply for ‘Cool.’

      • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        4 days ago

        Can’t think of a human language where speed of talking is key to the meaning, but little nuances like that make alien languages interesting. One thing I liked about Hoshi was the weird disorientation she felt when the ship went into warp. It reminded me of something similar I remembered from some old school sci fi story and I wanted to experience the feeling myself.

    • xia@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      4·
      4 days ago

      As a thought experiment, imagine a newborn growing up in this hypothetical culture a metaphors.

      It may be that nobody alive remembers who Darmok is, but they learn it “because that’s what we say to mean <X>”… sorta like each word is just a huge number of syllables.

      So i think in principal such a language could perpetuate one generation to the next (with some interesting consequnces or exceptions regarding names), but the more interesting thing is how new words and phrases would come into being… which AFAIK would be impossible.

      So maybe it’s more interesting to consider it a disease or failure mode of language or thought itself.

      As I recall picard was eventually able to pickup the metaphor concept, and it would surely be easy to clue-in the translator to translate mega-syllable-with-vocal-pauses words, but the other guy did not pickup any of picard’s words.

      In my head-canon that makes them a stagnant or dying race, absent a medical solution.

      • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
        31·
        4 days ago

        I’ve actually thought about that very idea in detail. If the metaphors were all you learned, they would essentially just be words in your language. The problem is that the metaphors are so compact they lose too much detail to be really useful. A phrase like “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” could convey the emotional content of a situation, the irony, the moral of the story,. or whatever, but it lacks details about the situation it applies to right now. Did the Tenagra situation today happen while people were having a fight or shopping for shoes? The language would devolve to saying a momentous event happened, a comical misunderstanding occurred, I had a heart-wrenching disappointment… it would be like everybody talking by holding up cards with memes on them - a world I wouldn’t even consider living in LOL.