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How realistic is Star Trek’s Tamarian language? - Darmok and Jalad (www.youtube.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I thought this video was absolutely fascinating throughout, even the ad.

The main thrust of it is about how natural Earth languages make use of idiom and metaphor frequently, and how Tamarian is subtly different from this. But we do also make use of a similar direct literary allusion, to different degrees in different languages. Mandarin has a number of examples, but we can also point to "crossing the Rubicon" as an example in English.

More recently, the use of memes has taken on a very Tamarian-like role.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I saw an amazing post on the alien site a while ago—I think it was in Daystrom, but I’m not sure—that suggested the Tamarians may have 2 or 3 different "modes" of speaking. This would explain both how their language’s function words exist and how children might acquire language.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I think this probably happened the other way round. They had a separate more traditional language until they struck out and discovered other civilizations that spoke other languages. An allegorical language that can be modified with context under observation would actually be a fairly good way to relate and then exchange languages using tamarian as sort of a Rosetta stone.