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It's a peaceful life
(lemmy.nz)
TNG s5e2 " Darmok"
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this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2026
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I think the Tamarians must have a second, more literal language to describe the events the metaphors are about, because you don't understand a metaphor unless you know the story behind it. For example, saying some event is someone's Waterloo only makes sense if you know Waterloo was the site of Napoleon's final defeat. To know "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" is about working together, you have to know that they worked together.
There could also be something like an ancestral memory going on. Some sort of process that imprints the basic meaning of major events onto the next generation that forms the anchor for their meme only language.
Not sure i entirely agree, i think you could conceivably teach someone the meaning of a saying without conveying its origin, through sheer repetition in context.
Isn't that how we came up with language in the first place? Point at a stone and make one specific grunting noise. Grugzug, your fellow caveman, will eventually connect the two if you keep doing it
And i also just thought of the fact that we have plenty of sayings in everyday use, that the people using them can rarely place in their correct historical context. Take Romeo and Juliet, to this day people think of romance first and foremost. And not fucked up teenage suicide and silly blood feuds.
The thing is how would they have even constructed the phrases in the first place?
To use the word 'and' to construct the phrase in the first place, it already had to mean combining the two. Similarly "at" has to have the meaning to specificy the location. On top of Darmok, Jalad, and Tanagra all having names independent of the phrase.
We couldn't have done "Juliet on her balcony" without being able to understand what a balcony even is or Juliet independent of the scene. This also means we can take the larger narrative and break it down into that key piece for the metaphor.
Maybe instead they once had a language and it eroded away into just memes, but then how did they manage to synthesize "Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel" in the end?
I've thought about this way too much as well, and my belief is that they don't actually understand the individual words. The entire idiom conveys the idea, and the individual parts are lost etymology. Like how "bye" conveys a departure but you don't need to have a concept of God to understand it, even though it derives from "God be with you."
Ok, but then how to generate the new metaphor like they did to honor Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel?
Balls. Well, I guess we'll have to assume they understand "and" and "at" at the very least. In that case, new idioms of (person) at (place) could be created, but "Shaka, when the walls fell" would be an idiom from the language spoken beforehand.
And this is just my tortured excuse, but the premise falls apart otherwise.
Yeah, a fun premise but pretty damn near impossible to pull off while preserving the ability for the language to evolve to accommodate new stuff.
I concur. I am not a young person. And yet, I have an idea of what "rule" means in the title of a shitpost, and I shouldn't even know what "shitpost" means. I have never seen a formal definition for either of them. I don't think "rule" (in that context) even has a rigid definition yet. The meaning isn't just communicated by example; it is being invented by example.
I still feel like there has to be a really big turtle at the bottom who is not standing on another turtle. Words that mean things in themselves. But I've never been there.
The whole point was that they communicated through metaphor, which they aren't doing if they simply memorize the sounds. That would make "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" the literal words that mean "working together" like words in any language. To speak in metaphors they don't have to know the whole story, but they at least have to know it's a reference to two people working together.
The Tamarian language is like C++ whilst normal language is binary, or assembly. Sure, all C++ is based on assembly and assembly is based on binary, but once you've invented a higher-level language, you're not gonna have much patience for lower-level languages anymore; that's for the compiler to worry about. You might still use binary - or, more realistically, hexadecimal - for limited purposes like RGB codes, but outside of that it's all higher-level, baby.
A C++ user could never make novel assembly that C++ couldn't already target without also being able to deal in assembly.
So your concept may explain all the speaking in only old metaphors, but in the end they synthesize a new one: Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel. So they clearly could still use the underlying languag.
Also, Dathon listened to Picard tell a story, and Dathon seemed engaged with language as a narrative. This means Dathon was able to grasp the story as constructed from words he ostensibly wouldn't have understood?
Well, it's important to remember that Picard wasn't the only one there trying to figure the other guy out. Dathon was trying, too. So it's like a C++ user spending enough time observing an assembly coder that he was able to invent ONE novel C++ command.
But Dathon didn't make it out alive, so whatever understanding he gained died with him.
We can learn C++ without without knowing binary because we have C++ documentation written in human languages. Likewise, the Tamarians need a non-metaphorical language to explain their metaphors.
They have it. "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" contains the words "and" and "at". Other phrases include words like "his", "eyes", "opened", "when", "the", "walls", "fell", "on", "ocean", etc. That's the binary. What's interesting is that they seem incapable of understanding binary on its own anymore, and only know C++.
It's easy to forget, there is a universal translator in between that is at the root of the misunderstanding. This isn't really a higher level language coming up against a lower one. It's a compiler coming across syntax it wasn't designed for.
Indeed, they would require a base knowledge and more straightforward means to initially communicate.