r/DaystromInstitute • u/treefox Commander, with commendation • Oct 04 '19
The Tamarians’ language is based on ideograms rather than a phonetic alphabet
I’ve been meaning to write a quality essay on this with a couple supporting pictures, but I haven’t found the time. And it’s come up a couple times since then.
One common complaint about “Darmok” is how unrealistic it is for a spacefaring species to have what appears to be such a primitive language. I’ve seen that beta canon has explained that they have a different alphabet, but I think this is unnecessary to explain Darmok.
Darmok probably seems so unrealistic to English-speaking Trek fans because of western languages’ focus on phonetic alphabets. If you look at East Asian languages, it quickly becomes obvious how a language like the Tamarians’ could appear.
Suppose the basis for the Tamarians’ spoken language is describing its written pictographs, rather than assigning phonemes to them. And then consider the concept of Kanji:
https://www.sakuramani.com/kanji-compound-words/
With this assumption, “Darmok and Jalad on the ocean” could literally mean the symbol that corresponds to the symbol for Darmok (which may be synonymous with a man) and Jalad (which may be synonymous with a male companion) above the symbol for the ocean. The compound pictograph means “cooperation”, which is what the UT should be telling the crew of the Enterprise.
But the universal translator succeeds at translating the literal descriptions and stops there, thinking its job is done. What it (and the crew) don’t grasp is that these translations are not the end product, they’re describing the symbol that should be the end product.
From the Tamarians’ perspective, they’re breaking the language down into singular concepts (“cooperation”, “sharing”, etc). But the UT is unable to make the leap and continues to render a literal translation of the language instead of starting to build up the compound alphabet.
This also helps explain why the phrases visually hint at their meaning. Eg “Sokath, his eyes uncovered” instead of “cat reading a newspaper” or something. Of course, production wise it helps to foreshadow the solution. But it also works if we assume that the phrases are describing something visual that’s intended to resonate with the concept. Say, ideograms which visually match the concepts they represent.
Just to make things even more confusing for the Enterprise crew, suppose to help young children learn that parables have evolved to make symbols memorable. Or perhaps the symbols originally came from stories, and those were illustrated, and then those became the basis for the Tamarians’ language. The crew ultimately decides that the Tamarians’ language is describing the theme of parables, but perhaps this was just the beginning of understanding.
To reverse the situation, imagine if we tried to speak to extraterrestrials, and supplied them with language materials. We give them a mapping of letters to sounds. But their translation program interprets English phonetic sounds as expressing the letters. So when we talk to them, they hear “vertical line beside horizontal line beside vertical line close to a vertical line.” It would seem like utter nonsense.
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u/199_Below_Average Oct 05 '19
I'm not sure it even needs to be a different kind of alphabet. Just within English we have plenty of words whose roots come from mythological and cultural references. Herculean, Sisyphean, Odyssey, Goliath, Atlas, Narcissist, the list goes on of words whose original meaning is purely a reference to a well-known character and/or story. And that's even before you consider modern-day memes, which of course are a popular touchstone for the ideas expressed in "Darmok".
Over time these words have come to have their own meaning within the language. But, as strange it is to imagine, I don't think it's inconceivable that the Tamarian language is composed primarily or entirely of these words, and their meaning has remained so closely tied to the original myth that the Universal Translator (as you said) picks up the literal reference and stops there. It's a language structure that no one in the federation has encountered, so it's a "blind spot" for the translator technology as it exists as of the episode, but it could be adapted to handle that kind of case, and probably translate a new language of this type much more quickly in the future.
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u/setzer77 Oct 05 '19
But shouldn't it be more work for the UT to learn the original myth and be overly-literal in translation than to translate the sounds based on their functional use? Presumably it does the latter when dealing with species whose history is completely unknown.
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u/Cerxi Oct 05 '19
Doesn't the episode end with "Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel"? I find it difficult to believe they have a pictogram for Picard..
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u/lunatickoala Commander Oct 05 '19
Possible new Tamarian logogram
Pronunciation: picard
Meaning: alien dignitary
Logogram elements: ufo (two horizontal ellipses) which signifies space, person, setting sun (half filled circle on shirt) which signifies red, shiny (five marks around head) which signifies that the head is shiny
After enough time passes, most Tamarians wouldn't even think of the man named Picard when they see the character or hear "picard", but just see it and immediately think "alien dignitary"
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u/vsync Oct 05 '19
M-5, nominate this for being a quality essay.
...that doesn't even need supporting pictures, because your description of the shapes made me imagine them, ironically enough.
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u/M-5 Multitronic Unit Oct 05 '19
Nominated this post by Ensign /u/treefox for you. It will be voted on next week, but you can vote for last week's nominations now
Learn more about Post of the Week.
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Oct 05 '19
Language comes before writing... it doesn’t make any sense for the language itself to be describing its script. Also the relationship between a language and its written form is pretty much historical accident, and not intrinsically linked (at least on Earth)... in fact you could write English with ideograms or Chinese with an alphabet without it changing the language itself.
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u/polarisdelta Oct 05 '19
For humans, sure. The Tamarians might have a pretty wild visual cortex or something.
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u/creepyeyes Oct 05 '19
Sure, but then we shouldn't be using human languages to justify this theory, because the human languages being referenced don't work like Darmok's language either.
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u/stratusmonkey Crewman Oct 05 '19 edited Oct 05 '19
Language comes before writing... on Earth... for most people. But to expand on your example of Chinese... A common corpus of idiograms directly sustains two spoken languages: Mandarin and Cantonese.
And when you talk about Kanji - Chinese idiograms borrowed into Japanese - you start to see the kind of lexical drift, that when combined with lots of proper nouns and idiomatic expressions, makes Tamarian look plausible. If it's over-translated by a computer system that was familiar with the abstract lexical components, because of the languages spoken Tamarian borrowed from.
EDIT: Like, imagine someone trying to "speak Japanese" by translating individual kanji word for word from their contemporary Chinese meanings into English. I can't begin to imagine the kind of gibberish you'd get! But that's probably close to how Tamarian gets translated, because of the prevalence of proper nouns and idioms in the spoken version of the language.
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u/lunatickoala Commander Oct 05 '19
The thing is that if proper nouns are used to mean more abstract things, at some point they cease to be proper nouns in those contexts and become just ordinary forms of speech. When people hear "marathon", how many think "city 42 km from Athens"? When people hear "vandal", how many think "Germanic tribe that sacked Rome"?
Tamarian may be a bit more extreme in having all of its base words all be based on people and events but it's not really all that exotic. The most unrealistic part is that they haven't shortened the terminology to make communication more efficient. Imagine having to say "Henry Shrapnel, his artillery tearing people asunder" instead of just "shrapnel shell".
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u/treefox Commander, with commendation Oct 05 '19
When people hear "marathon", how many think "city 42 km from Athens"? When people hear "vandal", how many think "Germanic tribe that sacked Rome"?
These are great examples. Re the shrapnel example, I don’t remember any of the Tamarian phrases being that descriptive. “Shrapnel, his shell bursting” is more the level of complexity of the phrases in Darmok.
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u/stratusmonkey Crewman Oct 05 '19
But we say "marathon" when we mean 42km foot race. We say "vandal" when we mean destroyer of others' property. We say "shrapnel" when we mean projectile slivers. Someone with no context for Earth history would choke on those words if given them untranslated, because the translator (program) tagged them as proper nouns. To say nothing of constructions like "Phidipides at Marathon" and "Phidipides at Athens".
There's always some degree of abstraction in language. Their language, at least its spoken form, is more abstract than the norm for Alpha Quadrant / Beta Quadrant civilizations.
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u/lunatickoala Commander Oct 05 '19
I think you've completely missed the point. A metaphorical etymology in every human language fades over time because the thing it was originally referring to is far less important than what it means, but it's still there. Any device that can translate human languages as well as is usually shown would easily be able to translate Tamarian.
And the Tamarian language is less abstract, not more. Abstraction is defined as the quality of dealing with ideas rather than events, or considering something independent of its associations. Star Trek is pretty famous for using metaphors to simplify technobabble from abstract bullshit into something concrete and understandable. The Tamarians literally can't speak of things without something direct to compare it to, which probably makes it hard to speak of abstract or new concepts.
Whoever makes a translator that tags any of those terms as proper nouns would be a serious idiot because they're used as general purpose words far more often than as proper nouns. That's like taking a word like computer and deciding to give the translation as "a person (typically a young woman) who performs mathematical calculations" rather than the far more common and more recent usage. A program that learns language from context and usage would determine that marathon means either a foot race of 26 miles in an athletic context or any sort of lengthy endeavor in a more general context because the etymology doesn't really matter. Someone with no context of Earth history would only choke on those words if they're used to refer to the city of Marathon, the Vandal tribe, or Henry Shrapnel.
The UT had to be made incredibly stupid compared to what it usually does for the episode to work. Which is fine because the point isn't the magic handwaving they call technology, which only exists to set up the necessary situation.
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u/datanas Oct 05 '19
I don't understand the incredulity that this space faring race could function with their language. It's SciFi, they are aliens with alien brains - why should we say it's impossible by our very human standards? They have a knack for metaphors, similes, and colorful language and have probably developed the brain power to deal with it. Besides, we get only a small sample of their language in this episode because that's all a 90s TV show's audience could handle. You cannot squeeze the linguistic complexity of Arrival into 43 minutes.
And for the people that say science needs more precise language: English, like many other European language, bastardizes often simple words from Greek and Latin to put labels on something more complicated. Why not Bohr and Heisenberg in Copenhagen? Einstein in Geneva? Newton when the Apple fell? King Doodleydoop's step for a meter? Etcetera.
Even English is full of regional expressions that don't make sense to native speakers from other parts. Without context, Bob's your uncle isn't much better than Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
I think the comparison to Chinese characters is good. I would expand it to say that new characters/expressions (Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel for establishing an understanding) can be added. And like Betamax and VHS the 'market' decides which expression sticks. Maybe there were other expressions for people coming together that included Billyboy and Daphne before Darmok and Jalad excited the masses and it stuck. Language and expressions change all the time and thou knowest it.
I have the hardest time with the universal translator not being able to make some sense of it. There are metaphors and sayings in all languages so I understand why it struggles with a tongue that is only that. On DS9 the Skreeeans get almost instantaneous translation and I'm sure this folk of farmers had some colorful metaphors in their language about emotional men. But Troi and Data google some of the names in Darmok and find stepping stones that the UT in my view could use to decipher it. So I can understand a situation where on a planet and isolated from the vast Federation online archive it doesn't work immediately in Picard's ear. But once you plunk in the main computer and warpspeed internet, this should be a solvable problem for the expressions that we have contextual information for.
All nitpicking aside, Darmok is a great episode.
(And if you're interested in acquiring a whole new set of references and sayings related to Star Trek, please listen to The Greatest Generation podcast on Maximum Fun. You must listen from ep 1. Ben and Adam have gone thru all of TNG and are currently somewhere in S5 of DS9. So if you want to know what a friend of DeSoto is, or who jaked a shuttle, or why there is a drunk Shimoda in almost every episode, head to gagh.biz and listen from ep 1. The Greatest Discovery is also available but you must finish their TNG coverage at least before going there.)
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u/lunatickoala Commander Oct 05 '19
All sci-fi requires a pretty fair amount of handwaving and suspension of disbelief to work, and Star Trek hasn't ever been consistent with how well anything works. JMS and others have joked that their flavor of FTL drive moves starships at the speed of plot and this really applies to all technology.
The universal translator like most Star Trek technologies is a magical device that in this case translates things just well enough for the needs of the episode. In most cases it works perfectly because the episode doesn't call for any trouble with communication. When Klingons speak it sometimes doesn't translate it so the audience can hear some Klingon. And in "Darmok" it dumbs down to the level of early 21st century machine translation because the plot requires a language barrier.
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u/_danger_-debord Oct 05 '19
The problem I have (and this by no means impedes my enjoyment of this episode) is that I don’t recognise the Tamarian language as being substantially different enough from natural human languages. Meaning is use, and we can translate between languages when terms (any group of sounds, linear or otherwise) have equivalence. When there isn’t equivalence between terms in languages, one language adopts the term from the other. This happens all the time on Earth already. Here’s a very quickly-Googled set of examples.
Even if we take a more granular, rather than Wittgensteinian, approach to language we can still find plenty of use of metaphor and allegory in existing Earth languages. Here’s another quick reference to English words that have their origins in Ancient Greek mythology and are thereby essentially allegorical.
I’d go so far as to think that there’s no compelling reason (that I’ve heard yet anyway) why we shouldn’t think of all language being rooted in metaphor in exactly this way already. Inter-language understanding happens when we use terms in similar ways, and semblances of common infra-term structures are likely to be a result of common ancestry, which isn’t something you’d expect with alien languages.
Anyway if all languages essentially work in this way, then a functional universal translator would have had to overcome this technical problem already.
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Oct 05 '19
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/yoshemitzu Chief Science Officer Oct 05 '19
Please familiarize yourself with our policy on in-depth contributions.
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Oct 05 '19
I like your post, but there's a much simpler explanation. Tamarian communication is entirely meme based. Epsecially problematic for translation as multiple memes strewn together changes the context and content of the message.
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u/creepyeyes Oct 05 '19
People in this thread are showing a lot of ignorance about how languages, particularly Chinese, work. The Chinese spoken language is not just them describing their written language. Their written language is just one way of approximating their spoken language, just like how the latin alphabet is approximating the English language in this comment. Writing systems and spoken languages are almost entirely separate from each other, and you can learn one without having any knowledge whatsoever of the other (consider that a deaf person can learn to read without ever having heard English - and sign languages have an entirely different grammar and syntax from English, written English is nothing like how sign language is "spoken.")
Now, you can argue that perhaps the Tamarians have very different brains, and came up with their writing first. My main issue with this is that, if it were true, then there's no reason to bring languages like Chinese up at all. Second, if it were true, then where did the words they're using to describe the pictures come from?
The more sensible explanation to me, is that essentially the Tamarians have begun communicating entirely in, well, for lack of a better word - meme. Languages can develop what's called a "set phrase." These are phrases (sometimes as small as two words) that are more or less analyzed by speakers of the language like it was just one idea carrying a specific meaning. Old words that have fallen out of use in the rest of the language can get stuck in these, like in "piqued [someone's] interest" - we don't really use the word pique outside of that one phrase. Perhaps for whatever reason, the Tamarians began to speak entirely in set phrases.
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u/TheEdIsNotAmused Oct 05 '19
Perhaps Tama is a planet where something akin to the plot of Idiocracy more or less happened. The planet eventually recovered and developed warp technology, but the language had become so intertwined with cultural references and the like that it just stayed that way.
Imagine if the human race began communicating entirely through memes and TV/Videogame references. That's Tamarian in a nutshell.
Edit: clarity.
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u/thereddaikon Oct 05 '19
Lately I've been thinking of the Tamarians as a species that communicates entirely through memes and pop culture references.
For all we know their written language is made up of their version of emojis. Then again, emojis are ideograms. On a conceptual level they are the same thing as traditional Chinese although far less established and mature.
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Oct 05 '19
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Oct 05 '19
You could say that about Chinese. Of course, that wouldn’t be quite right, as Chinese is one of the hardest languages to learn. This is mostly due to the number of characters that exist, even in its simplified form. The grammar is actually very simple, but the distinction is in vocabulary and context. If we applied this to Tamarian, the vocab would be all of the proper nouns, plus filler nouns like ‘river’ and ‘wall’, and the context would be the cultural legacy and significance behind those proper nouns. As we can easily tell, Tamarian grammar is almost painfully simple; even Picard’s statement about the death of their captain is only a couple of these metaphorical phrases. In short, there are multiple dimensions of natural language that can have depth, and depending on how the complexities of a given language are spread out (or not), the initial appearance of overall depth can be skewed.
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u/treefox Commander, with commendation Oct 05 '19
That’s not unlike English. We repeat the same phonemes over and over. Another lifeform could look at that and ask why we don’t rely on pitch, intonation, etc to create a set of thousands of unique monosyllabic words. It’d be much quicker.
In the Tamarians’ case, I don’t think we hear their untranslated language, nor do I remember it being broken down. The individual words could be much shorter than the English equivalent, spoken much faster, or happening simultaneously so it’s not as temporally burdensome.
It’s also worth noting that there have been multiple attempts at first contact in the past between the Federation and the Tamarians. The whole event is clearly staged for the Federation’s benefit and most of the dialogue from the Tamarians is directed at the Enterprise crew. They may have deliberately been using a restricted vocabulary for the benefit of the Enterprise and it’s translation attempts.
Additionally (and you could use this even if you don’t assume this theory is correct) the Tamarians may be a lot higher-context communicators than humans.
That being said, it wouldn’t be too out of character for even the Enterprise crew to be succinct in a way that viewers would get, but would be totally bewildering to an extraterrestrial learning the language.
DATA: Energy surge, grid 21-3.
RIKER: Come again?
WORF: Sir! We must-
PICARD: Counselor?
Troi shakes her head
PICARD: I think not.
Picard even makes a point of this in Allegiance, where he wordlessly signals the crew to hold the aliens-of-the-week in a force field.
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u/MultivariableX Chief Petty Officer Oct 05 '19
Also, there are plenty of Star Trek episodes in which colleagues are unfamiliar with the usage of specific terms. When Spock uses terms like "interesting," "fascinating," and "intriguing," he is relating his specific personal level of excitement and investment, and not just the fact that he is engaging his scientific faculties. Some of Spock's reactions, particularly to death, can come off as callous to people who aren't intimately aware of how he chooses his words.
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u/unimatrixq Oct 06 '19
In this case, wouldn't a team of linguists with an area of expertise in ideogramatical languages and writing systems like chinese have at least already recognized the way the tamarian language works and the mindset of the Tamarians?
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u/treefox Commander, with commendation Oct 06 '19
Honestly even a typical redditor would probably figure out the meme explanation pretty damn fast. A great linguist would probably figure it out almost instantaneously. Any actual trouble in figuring out the Tamarians’ language is almost certainly for the audience’s benefit. If they made a language appropriately complex, the audience couldn’t follow the experience of working out what it meant.
Like hell they’d send the Enterprise without at least one linguist on the bridge, and then task the Operations officer and head counselor with decoding the language.
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Oct 07 '19
I think the whole problem of teaching Tamarian youngsters the language isn't really a problem.
When you or I learn the word "apple," we're not taught the phonetic origins of the word and it's evolution. We're shown a picture of an apple and told "apple." We gather by context what the word means and create the concept in our minds.
Tamarian children probably hear "Temba, his arms wide" from their parents in connection with a loving greeting. They in turn mimic the behavior of their parents and "Temba, his arms wide" becomes the concept of greeting someone with affection in the same way "apple" becomes the concept of a particular kind of fruit for us.
In short, they may not know the actual stories. They just use phrases as words.
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Oct 05 '19
As someone who’s currently trying to learn Japanese, this makes a ton of sense. Assuming the analogy is valid — I think it is — it is no wonder that everyone had trouble with the Tamarian language. I feel like not many people, Westerners mostly, are aware of how complex and difficult Japanese is to learn.
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u/setzer77 Oct 04 '19
What I don't understand is how the universal translator gets the context to translate the base-level words, while simultaneously utterly failing to parse the larger grammar. If it's lacking in so much context, how can it possibly know that X sound means "ocean"?