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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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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.