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.
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.
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.
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.
😅 😀 ⏳ 🫠 😤 👉 🌍 🟰 🦻 2️⃣ 🫒 📍.