How do Tamarians.....

[All Seeing Eye]

and the fact that one word can mean very different things in different contexts.

You mean 'There, Their and They're'. I wouldnt say there's that much difficulty to it if those learning the language take a little extra time to focus on this aspect of the language. I always found it difficult when learning French and Spanish with all the different pronunciation letters and the whole He/She business, I even tried learning some Polish from some Polish people I knew and that was the same, totally confusing with the he/she business, when I asked them why they have the whole he/she thing instead of having it like English where ALL words covered both men AND women they didnt have a single clue why and couldnt even answer me why, and the Polish language had silent letters in almost every word like the letters 'z' and 'p' it was very mind numbing stuff.
But it does raise the point that the Tamarian language just wouldnt work for many many reasons.

 

[iguana_tonante]

it could be more cumbersome than English, or less so.

WHAT! English is the easiest language there is to learn and the most straight forward in the world and likely the universe, there's none of that he/she crap like Le and La etc and words are actually shorter than European counterparts by cutting off unnecessary letter E's on the ends. Also there arnt stupid sounding letters like in french etc where letters have those silly dashes at the top like this à è ù.

English rocks!!

You are being sarcastic, are you, right?

 

[All Seeing Eye]

it could be more cumbersome than English, or less so.

WHAT! English is the easiest language there is to learn and the most straight forward in the world and likely the universe, there's none of that he/she crap like Le and La etc and words are actually shorter than European counterparts by cutting off unnecessary letter E's on the ends. Also there arnt stupid sounding letters like in french etc where letters have those silly dashes at the top like this à è ù.

English rocks!!

You are being sarcastic, are you, right?

What have I said that isnt true and accurate?

 

[iguana_tonante]

WHAT! [...]

You are being sarcastic, are you, right?

What have I said that isnt true and accurate?

Where to start?

English is the easiest language to learn.

Highly debatable.

If you are talking about native languages, it is clearly non-sense: children all over the world learn the language of their parent with the same ease. I have to be presented with evidences that English-speaking children are more precocious than others.

If you are talking about second languages, it strongly depends on your starting language. To me, Spanish is a lot simpler to learn that English: the sounds are very similar to Italian, the lexicon is more or less the same, and the grammatical structure is practically identical. The only one to whom English is simpler are the English themselves (and maybe Germans, since the two languages are grammatically related).

it is the most straight forward in the world and likely the universe

Same as above. English is very concise, but sometimes at the expenses of clarity. And how you can generalize about hypothetical alien language is beyond me.

there's none of that he/she crap like Le and La

I suppose that what you call crap are gender-related word suffixes. They can actually help comprehension, since they give you more informations about the subject. Sometimes they can be superfluous, but they are far from useless.

words are actually shorter than European counterparts by cutting off unnecessary letter E's on the ends

Again, what you call unnecessary letters are part of the word. Just because your language do not pronounce them, it doesn't mean they are meaningless. And I'm not sure that shorter is always better.

Also there arnt stupid sounding letters like in french etc where letters have those silly dashes at the top like this à è ù.

From my point of view, English is full of weird sounding words, combinations of letters that are practically unpronounciable, and the way you write a word is insanely different from what it is pronounced. Just to give you an example, in Italian if you hear a word you alway know how it is written, since every letter represent a different sound: you can't get more simple than that.

Don't get me wrong, I love English and I think it is a great language, but are we trying to discuss this intelligently or are you just trying to fool around?

 

[All Seeing Eye]

English is very concise, but sometimes at the expenses of clarity. And how you can generalize about hypothetical alien language is beyond me.

I dont understand whats not clear, where is this clarity lacking? I dont understand what you mean by this..

I suppose that what you call crap are gender-related word suffixes. They can actually help comprehension, since they give you more informations about the subject.

What cant be made clear by a simple he/she and him/her? why is it necessary to put the Le in front of one word and La in front of the other? its like putting Le in front of Apple but La in front of Banana, its completely unnecessary.

Again, what you call unnecessary letters are part of the word. Just because your language do not pronounce them, it doesn't mean they are meaningless.

Of course they are meaningless, take the word 'international' for example, whats the point in having an 'e' on the end like 'internationale'? its a pointless extra letter that just makes it take longer to say the word.

From my point of view, English is full of weird sounding words, combinations of letters that are practically unpronounceable, and the way you write a word is insanely different from what it is pronounced.

Now this i'd like an example of, I cant think of any words that are weird sounding and practically unpronouncable, do you have an example of some?

 

[iguana_tonante]

English is very concise, but sometimes at the expenses of clarity. And how you can generalize about hypothetical alien language is beyond me.

I dont understand whats not clear, where is this clarity lacking? I dont understand what you mean by this..

I give you just an example: if you say "you are Italian", you could be talking about one person (of either gender) or a group of people. It's impossible to tell without context.

In Italian, there are different forms to convey different meanings:
"tu (you singular) sei (are, singular) Italiano (Italian, singular and male)"
"tu (you, singular) sei (are, singular) Italiana (Italian, singular and female)"
"voi (you, plural) siete (are, plural) Italiani (Italian, plural and male)"
"voi (you, plural) siete (are, plural) Italiane (Italian, plural and female)"

I'm not trying to say that Italian is better, just that different language have different characteristics.

What cant be made clear by a simple he/she and him/her? why is it necessary to put the Le in front of one word and La in front of the other? its like putting Le in front of Apple but La in front of Banana, its completely unnecessary.

Ah, you were talking about articles, I see. Well, articles are not very useful in general. Some languages, like Latin or Japanese, does not use them altogether and do just fine, so I fail to see how English is special in that view.

And, gender-related suffixes give the same information of "he/she" or "her/him", but they could be used instead of those. In English you can say "she is beautiful", in Italian you can say "è bella" and discard the pronoun altogether. (this is an instance in which Italian is more concise than English, for example.)

Of course they are meaningless, take the word 'international' for example, whats the point in having an 'e' on the end like 'internationale'? its a pointless extra letter that just makes it take longer to say the word.

In the same view, you can just leave out the "l", since it does not give the word additional meaning: "internationa" could do just fine. However, I fail to see how truncating words would make a language better than the other.

Now this i'd like an example of, I cant think of any words that are weird sounding and practically unpronouncable, do you have an example of some?

Do you understand that different languages have different sounds? My fist language is Italian, and there are sounds in English that are completely alien to me. For example, something as simple as "the" is very difficult to pronounce properly, since that sound does not exist in Italian, just as the French ü does not exist in English. And don't get me started on the stunted "r" sound at the end of words like "mister": it tooks me year to pronounce it properly, and even now I tend to pronounce it "mistah" if I do not pay close attention to what I say.

Are you really suggesting that English is the better language in the world, or event that there is a better language in general?

 

[All Seeing Eye]

Ive got to go now so cant make a decent reply but i've got one thing to say, in Latvian (if i remember correctly) the word 'Slinks' means lazy and I kept calling a lot of Latvians I once knew lazy just for a laugh (they laughed about it too), it was days later that I was made aware that 'Slinks' was only for women and for men I had to say 'Slinka' to which I was pretty dumbfounded by because why is it necssary to do that? cant both sexes just be Slinks or slinka? why does there have to be a different word for the genders? seems like an illogical thing to do, and makes learning the language harder.
Anyway, i'm off. Au Revoir.

PS: We'd best get back on topic anyway because we'll get a pasteing from the Mods because its no longer Trek related.

 

[iguana_tonante]

Ive got to go now so cant make a decent reply but i've got one thing to say, in Latvian (if i remember correctly) the word 'Slinks' means lazy and I kept calling a lot of Latvians I once knew lazy just for a laugh (they laughed about it too), it was days later that I was made aware that 'Slinks' was only for women and for men I had to say 'Slinka' to which I was pretty dumbfounded by because why is it necssary to do that? cant both sexes just be Slinks or slinka? why does there have to be a different word for the genders? seems like an illogical thing to do, and makes learning the language harder.
Anyway, i'm off. Au Revoir.

Very quick reply: you can use different forms to give informations on people that are not present. If you say "my colleague is lazy", you can be talking about a man or a woman. If you say "my colleague is slink" everybody will know that he is a man: if you want to convey the same amount in English, you'll have to say "my male colleague is lazy".

And just for general information, they aren't different words, just different terminals: if Latvian is something like Italian, everything that ends in -a would be feminine, so the confusion is greatly reduced.

It makes a language a little harder to learn? Absolutely. Just like the crazy pronunciation rules (or lack thereof) make English difficult to learn, or Japanese ideograms, or Chinese tonal differences, and everything else.

Ciao!

 

[Timo]

One of the weirder concepts in English is that there are no pronunciation rules whatsoever, or at least nothing you could count on. That's very difficult to grasp the first time around, and it never really gets easier. There is absolutely no way to tell beforehand how for example "bough" or "mutton" or "automobile" should sound, because they have all been borrowed from different languages at different times, and a different set of original pronunciation rules from those languages and times is being paid lip service.

That in itself is not the problem. The problem is that this makes it extremely difficult to learn to speak English by reading English, or vice versa.

Overall, I'd say "Darmok" was a pretty good description of the difficulties faced in any language learning process. It's always culturally rooted, so there is no "king's road" to the end result: one can't just choose to do it "the simple and logical way" because that will appear insanely complex and nonsensical to the other side more often than not.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Smiley]

For a more serious answer to this topic, see Christopher L. Bennett's story in The Sky's the Limit and the annotations on his website.

 

[Blueicus]

I'm more curious as to what the Tamarians use for scientific or mathematical discourse. There's a significant difference between "Go really fast" and "Proceed at Warp 7" or even "The speed limit is 110 km/h".

 

[CaptainStoner]

How would a Tamarian say he/she's going to pinch a loaf?

"Mister Hankey, his head emerging."

To continue the debate, Tamarian could easily be more efficient than English by virtue of its density. Not at all more accesible, but containing more information than English. Our humorous attempts at translating what they might say are way off. A Tamarian could say in one sentence what it might take a paragraph of English.
I think there is something to the theory that Tamarians might have some low level telepathy going on. The ability of the Tamarian Captain to somewhat follow Picard's Gilgamesh might be evidence of this.

 

[CaptainStoner]

I'm more curious as to what the Tamarians use for scientific or mathematical discourse. There's a significant difference between "Go really fast" and "Proceed at Warp 7" or even "The speed limit is 110 km/h".

Given their technology, they must have an advanced math system, being another "language" itself.

 

[RoJoHen]

and the fact that one word can mean very different things in different contexts.

You mean 'There, Their and They're'.

No, I don't. Those are 3 distinct words. They have the same pronunciation, but they're different words.

I mean words that have identical spellings but mean completely different things.

I am going to the park.
I am going to park my car.

That's the right answer.
Turn right (the opposite of left) here.
Turn right (now, at this next corner) here.
Turn right right here.

 

[Timo]

That's a classic problem for languages whose vocabularies are extensively borrowed from abroad: soundalikes may coalesce into a single word while retaining the various different meanings.

But the multiple meanings of "right" are a culturally common trait, really. Many a language sees a connection between "the opposite of left" and "the opposite of wrong"... And thus we have for example Arabia Felix / Eudaimon Arabia, the "happy Arabia" which also happens to be the "rightside Arabia" (the Arabia of South, since south is to the right in Arabian maps). That (deliberate) double meaning has persisted through translation upon translation.

Now that's a nice mystery unto itself: why is left considered bad and wrong? In English, "lyft" appears to have originally meant "feeble"; many other languages derive their words for left from similar roots. Does the global dissing of the "sinister side" derive simply from the fact that we are right-handed, then?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Spider]

PS: We'd best get back on topic anyway because we'll get a pasteing from the Mods because its no longer Trek related.

Not at all. As long as the debate remains civil and informative, I find this very interesting. The key word here being civil.

 

[alpha_leonis]

Here's my thought on the general topic. I've always associated the Tamarian *spoken* language in some degree with the Japanese *written* language.

In Japanese, there are two major styles of writing: Kanji (ideographic writing where one character represents an entire word), and Kana (where each symbol represents a spoken syllable, disassociated from meaning).

Kanji can be interpreted metaphorically. For example, the kanji meaning "East" is a picture of the sun rising behind a tree. The sun rises in the east, therefore the written symbol is a metaphor for the eastern direction. There is no clue in the writing of that character that it is pronounced "higashi" -- the pronunciation component has to be learned separately.

The pronunciation, however, can also be written with three kana symbols: "Hi-Ga-Shi". That's just a bare-bones, sound-only writing that has no metaphor attached to it. Just the facts, ma'am.

Now, in Japanese culture, knowledge of a large number of kanji is taken as a sign of education. Children, who have limited kanji knowledge, tend to read and write in kana only. The ability to read kanji, and interpret the metaphors that go with them, is something they learn in school and on into young adulthood. If one Japanese adult writes to another using only kana, that could be perceived as an insult.

I can see spoken Tamarian as something similar. A nuts-and-bolts Tamarian "grammatical language" like ours might (and probably does) exist. But it's reserved for children to speak to each oher, and to their parents. It's the language in which Tamarian children *learn* the stories in which the main thrust of the adult Tamarian language is communicated. To revert back to the grammatical nuts and bolts would be considered a childish insult. I can see how that may apply even to such a situation in the "Darmok" episode: the Tamarian Captain wouldn't dare to insult Picard, a fellow starship captain, by speaking to him in children's language. Metaphorical language is simply too ingrained in him as an adult.

Now here's another question I've always had: I'm assuming that different "languages" on the Tamarian homeworld would correspond to a different set of source story material. Would that, by definition, be equivalent to different religions? In other words, if humans spoke Darmok-style languages, would there be different languages for Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Buddhists? (Okay, so maybe the first three would be different dialects, rather than separate languages, but I digress ...)

 

[EnsignRicky]

All I know is that thier version of 'Wheel Of Fortune' has gotta be like four hours long.

 

[Kegek]

Here's my thought on the general topic. I've always associated the Tamarian *spoken* language in some degree with the Japanese *written* language.

That's a very interesting analogy. But the problem is Tamarians don't seem to understand plainly spoken language - it would be as if the Japanese only wrote in kanji and found kana perplexing. Dathon risks and ultimately loses his life in an effort to be comprehensible to Picard, so if he really did understand Picard's speech as a child language, he would have at least tried it.

 

[alpha_leonis]

That's a very interesting analogy. But the problem is Tamarians don't seem to understand plainly spoken language - it would be as if the Japanese only wrote in kanji and found kana perplexing. Dathon risks and ultimately loses his life in an effort to be comprehensible to Picard, so if he really did understand Picard's speech as a child language, he would have at least tried it.

That is a good counterpoint, Kegek. My response would be to expand a bit on my Japanese analogy. (Recognizing, of course, that any discussion is only hypothetical, since the episode doesn't really give us enough information to do more than speculate.)

A lot of non-native Japanese students consider written Japanese a very difficult system to learn, and rightly so. Japanese literally has the most complicated written language on Earth -- not only because of the kanji-kana combination, but also because there are literally thousands of individual kanji to learn (while less than a hundred kana, even if you count both of its forms). One has to know about 2,000 kanji just to read a Japanese newspaper; 3,000 or more to read a college textbook. All of this requires a huge expenditure of the country's educational resources -- a Japanese person literally has to be a high school graduate in order to be considered literate in the language.

But once that effort has been put in, Japanese people tell me that it's actually harder to go back and read Japanese in kana alone. It's a quirk of spoken Japanese that there is a limited sound inventory, which leads to a lot of homonyms (multiple words with different meanings that are pronounced the same). Japanese can be written in kana by itself, but it's not -- the metaphorical meanings that are connected with each kanji make up for the limited sound system. Kanji clarifies the content of the writing, while kana alone would only carry the sound -- and sound-writing only is not enough for a language like Japanese.

The best analogy I can think of is that reading Japanese without kanji is a lot like reading English without any spaces between the words. It can be written that way, but it's much harder to read.

The only way a Tamarian-style language makes sense to me is if spoken Tamarian has the same dual nature. They must have basic grammar: "Darmok and Jilad at Tenagra", in the original Tamarian, must have words that the Universal Translator understands as "and" and "at".

Somehow, for reasons unknown to us in the audience, speaking Tamarian only with basic grammar may be more difficult to speak and understand than attaching the metaphorical content to a "real" conversation. Due to Tamarian culture, psychology or biology, it may be very difficult (or impossible) for them to revert to basic-grammar conversations once they've learned their metaphorical language, in much the same way it's more difficult to read Japanese in kana only.