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Why Darmok Is a Good Star Trek: TNG Episode
An anonymous reader writes: "Last week, the Ars Technica ran an article listing their staff's least favorite Star Trek: the Next Generation episodes. They hit a few of the predictable ones, like Angel One — wherein Riker's chest hair takes center stage — and Up the Long Ladder — featuring space-Irish. But a surprising suggestion came from Peter Bright, who denounced Darmok, a fan favorite. (You remember: 'Darmok and Jalad, at Tanagra.') Now, Ars's Lee Hutchinson has (jokingly) taken Bright to task, showing how IMDB ratings mark Darmok (5x02) as one of the best episodes of season 5, and among the strongest in the series. He also points out a trend in some of the bad episodes they didn't pick: 'According to the data, the worst episode of TNG by a significant margin is the season 2 finale Shades of Gray, a clipshow episode famously hobbled by the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike. We also managed to not pick season 6's Man of the People (the one where Troi falls in love with a brain vampire and gets really old) or season 4's The Loss (the one where Troi loses her empathic abilities and gets really whiny) or season 2's The Child (the one where Troi has dream sex with a space anomaly and gets really pregnant).' What are your picks for best and worst TNG episode?"
manly tears
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
So basically the worst episodes are those featuring Trio.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I'd go for the royal. Hated that one.
I think you missed the point ... the language was formed out of references to a common body of knowledge. The universal translator was doing just fine figuring out what the individual words meant, but without the common story to refer to they made to sense. It's essentially as if an entire culture communicated only in pop culture references. For example, someone might say "You're such a Samantha", but if you haven't watched many hours of Sex and the City, you would have no idea what they meant despite knowing all of those words.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
I've always been partial to "Who watches the watchers" and thought that "Genesis" (final season) was one of the worst..
"Software is the difference between hardware and reality"
All I can really think to say about your post, and your understanding of the episode, is "Shaka, when the walls fell".
A snooty nerd, as if you don't get beat up enough already.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Darmok is not a good episode. To be fair, it's not among the worst episodes. It's about average or below average. But it's not a good episode, because it's dumb and goofy. But it's dumb and goofy in a way that's fun, so I still enjoy this episode, but it's a guilty pleasure.
Language is glossed over in the whole series. For a single episode they decided to address that one elephant in the room, and they did it well and in a memorable way.
You seem to have missed the point. That is the entire basis of a language, a shared body of specific knowledge. "You're such a Samantha" is from a SatC language, heavily based on English. That is why I and everyone else that know English can understand the words but not the meaning. But, lets assume we know nothing about SatC and English both. In that case "You're such a Samantha" is completely identical to "You're such a slut/bitch/smartypants" (whatever "Samantha" means to SitC fans). Samantha is just a random assortment of sounds/letters that denote an idea, No different than any other word.
Samantha in this case is just a new word that I do not know. There is nothing toilety about the word toilet, for example, the guy that designed it was probably just called Frank Toilet, that does not mean that an Alien culture would be unable to understand the word toilet because it used to be a proper noun.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Darmok was a great episode but I also really like Tapestry where we see that Pickard only got to be captain because of the risks he took http://www.imdb.com/title/tt07...
Four. Lights.
The unbelievable part is that the Tamarian's were advanced enough to built interstellar spacecraft and transporters but somehow they weren't smart enough to say to themselves "hmm, you know what, I bet they can't understand us because we only speak in metaphors".
As somebody who studies language - I agree. You can't make analogies in the first place without a functional language. And if you have a functional language, why make up analogies? And seriously, how can the communicate complex ideas? Can you imagine them trying to write a book explaining microprocessor design?
This is how all languages work.
I once watched an interview of Bob Woodward about his book All the President's Men. He mentioned that it had been translated into other languages, including French, but the title for the translations had been changed to "Nixon and Watergate". The interviewer asked why, and he replied "Because the French don't have Humpty Dumpty".
Some languages use cultural idioms more than others. English has many idioms that refer to our common culturall heritage, but Chinese has far more. You can get by in English without studying idioms specifically. In Chinese, there is no way. You have to learn them or you will fail to comprehend almost every conversation.
Can you imagine them trying to write a book explaining microprocessor design?
Bardeen and Brattain at Bell Labs. Shockley, his arms wide!
Ezekiel 23:20
I frequently refer to it when discussing what the internet will make us into, except instead of mythohistorical metaphors like "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra", the 22nd century's equivalent of Crime and Punishment will be composed entirely in lolcat snowclones and rageface comics.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
I don't agree with you, but I definitely think it's more probative (and interesting) to talk about people's best and least favorite DS9 episode. Best series of the franchise; TNG at its best is only an average 6th season DS9 episode.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Ya, maybe the episode would not of sucked so bad if their made up language, that was "completely different to all other languages" was not just a pile of bull.
Oh, you mean we could not decode the language because every word was just an arbitrary sequence of sounds denoting an idea, instead of how normal words work?
Data, his technospeak halted! Vanna White, her job made easy. A function calling itself:
Spock at his station, one brow raised. Free flaming hairdos from a biblical tower. Einstein, his M and squared C: A Pulp Fictional briefcase, it's contents unshown. A babbling brook's fish swims in 42 ears. Buddha his belly grown large.
A pig eats pearls at the library of Alexandria. Riker and Picard, both faces palmed. A geek and his card divided.
It was not a matter of collections of sounds, but rather the societal context of those sounds.
"Where's the Beef?" when put into a literal translator will never come up with "this is insufficient", and that is precisely how the aliens communicated. No search of the words "Where" "Is" "The" and "Beef" will ever give you the meaning of the colloquialism. All the translator will do is make you think the person has lost a farm animal.
[back on the planet]
"I made a shelter for us. I think it will protect us from the storms tonight."
[exasperatedly waving arms and pointing at the flimsy shelter] "My cow is missing !"
Some of these episodes are from over 25 years ago.
Although Star Trek TNG was outstanding, the real problem is that there hasn't been much high quality science fiction TV series in the last 25 years.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Best:
Lower Decks
Worst:
First on the list: Anything with Wil Wheaton doing anything more than staying off the set.
Second on the list: Anything that required Jonathan Frakes's character, Riker, to do anything other than say "Yes, sir"
Third on the list: Anything that required Marina Sirtis' character, Troi, to act like she was an empath
Fourth on the list: Anything with Q in it. Anything at all.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
As somebody who studies language - I agree. You can't make analogies in the first place without a functional language.
Ah, I see you haven't studied Egyptian Hieroglyphs then, eh? As someone who teaches networks of neural networks concepts such as object recognition, relational significance, temporal ordering significance and I don't understand your ignorance of the problem. Imagine a Chinese speaker and an English speaker separated by a wall impervious to everything but sound. They would never come to know each other's languages unless they both experienced some event at the same time, and gave it a name, much like your parents do to teach infants. The same thing happened between us and the ancient Egyptians, the wall was time and it was impervious to everything except the symbolic hieroglyphs.
The universal translator had encountered a problem it did not understand, so it got as far as it could and spit out the result, perhaps thinking it had decoded the language. It would be similar to me asking my AI system which understands some English to decipher hieroglyphs without analyzing the Rosetta stone. It would stop at the OCR pass and spit out a series of words naming each symbol: water yolk bird falcon. It translated the symbols into meanings as best it could, but could never grok, "You belong to the god Horus" without a common body of knowledge, much as humans couldn't make the translation even given extensive samples of the language. Aliens with no concept of gods would have an even harder time understanding the sentence. "They say we're following an imaginary legendary figure" ...uh, is that good or bad?
To me you seem like a philosopher studying epistemology without ever studying cybernetics and learning the fundamental principals of classification and cognition. Perhaps in your pursuit to understand languages you should first understand language itself. Learn by doing: Invent an alien language, then write something in it. Then give it to your peers, and see what they make of it without a translation medium.
If you want to bitch about something obvious, then it should be that each space faring alien hadn't invented a new self-describing language based on the concepts of mathematics, physical and temporal dimensions and properties of matter. Then described their common tongues in it, for use as a common medium for conceptual exchange between races.
Oh, but what do I know, I'm just a high school drop out who learned everything he needed to know about you humans from being homeless... To me it seems humans invest too much in your divisionist institutions of learning, and not enough in the process of learning itself.
I liked the first episode and I liked the last episode. There was very little of redeeming value in between. The second season actually had even worse episodes than the first as well as my least favorite character, but it also saw the introduction of an excellent new character and as well as one of the series best episodes ("Measure of a Man"), so no competition, the first season wins hands down as the worst episodes despite not having Dr. Pulaski and "Shades of Grey".
I mean, in two of the first episodes of the first season they could not afford makeup for their aliens, so they just made one alien race all-black and the other all Scandinavian. Talk about phoning it in.
I suppose that my premise, if explicitly stated, is that the show was about exploration, and that most of the episodes were centered on some aspect or issue related to exploration. I imagine they felt that dealing with a language barrier in practically every episode was just too non-immersive for the average audience. However, they addressed it once. I would have been pleased to see them address it more than once, but other episodes were about addressing other things.
The bad episodes are the ones focused on addressing issues that never needed to be addressed at all.
And if you have a functional language, why make up analogies?
I haven't seen the episode, but it's possible to have a taboo against using direct language in public. Plenty of indigenous cultures have "avoidance languages" used to communicate with in-laws. Tamarian could just have a rule to speak in analogies within strangers' earshot.
Bad segments, the The Motion Picture, do a bad job in dealing with the magic. Good segments, like Darmok, use the strength as a weakness. The society has become so dependent on the universal translator doing the brunt of communication, that they have lost the ability to interpret and comprehend. Picard had to relearn that skill in order to save the day.
It is perhaps indicative that geeks, who do not always value the process of communications, do not appreciate this episode.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
All episodes after the first or second season when they started letting Patrick Stewart actually act.
There are.. FOUR lights!
Measure of Man? Eh. It had noble intentions, but it snapped my suspension of disbelief cleanly in two. First of all, the central conflict driving the plot made no sense. "Data is a toaster, and toasters have no rights." Uh, yeah. Toasters aren't granted commissions in Starfleet, either. Surely Data's status as a sentient being had to have been definitively settled when he was admitted to Starfleet Academy. And then the secondary complications were so contrived as to be ludicrous. The Starfleet legal system seems to have been meticulously designed to provide for maximum melodrama. The case has to be prosecuted by the first officer, no one else? Or else the defendant is automatically convicted? Really? Anybody who enjoys Star Trek can't examine the hand-waving too closely, granted. But in this case, the absurdity piled on absurdity was too much for me to take.
There are people who are attracted to Science Fiction as a literature about ideas. 'Darmok' is a relatively pure version of that. It does have a physical threat and there's some facing off between the aliens and the Enterprise so it's not completely devoid of Space Opera, but maybe not enough to please, or maybe not done well enough to please those that were expecting Space Opera.
Also, the idea in 'Darmok' is very subtle and cerebral for TV, and I think that's why a lot of people like it. It must have been a tough one to write. I do think they glossed over some complications. Children would have to learn a more conventional form of language first, in order to be taught about the metaphors for example.
I do vaguely remember reading something like this is in some sci fi book I read once. I think it might have been a Larry Niven book. The protagonist is stuck among some aliens who communicate by singing excerpts from some big epic. He meets another human who was raised among them from the time she was a child and knows some basic usages and teaches him enough to get by. It was just one episode in the protagonist's various adventures in the book.
Suzette Haden Elgin's 'Native Tongue' and Jack Vance's "Languages of Pau" also deal with ideas about language in science fiction but not in the same way as 'Darmok'.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
A holographic doctor is not the same as the tired storyline where there's a holodeck malfunction and the artifical characters threaten the ship. At least with The Doctor they had him grow and develop and mature and be like Data with more personality.
It's not about idioms. It's about meaning. Meaning can be conveyed either through a set of words or a single word. Either way it still requires context and can be translated using that context.
Read this article: http://www.businessinsider.com...
We don't have any trouble turning those literal Chinese phrases into common English phrases, despite the fact that their literal meanings make almost no sense without context or prior knowledge. By the logic in that episode, the TNG Universal Translator would fail to turn Chinese into English. It'd be a useless piece of shit and not work for any language.
Stepping back a bit it's probably just a writer having a dig at the idea of machine translation.
In Star Wars (and one excuse when it comes up in Dr Who) they can get away with it because it's a concious entity that knows a lot of stuff about the other languages and cultures doing the translation. Something like C3PO could translate the Tamarian's language by reasoning out the metaphors but apparently the Trek AI is not supposed to be a full artificial person so cannot.
Even in the early 1960s the author Desmond Bagley had a poke at machine translation with "hydraulic ram" coming back as "water sheep".
There are some soap opera episodes, I will give you that. I constantly cherry-pick from the rebroadcasts. But then who doesn't do this?
Babylon 5 has managed to avoid the soapness by having a story.
Or Stargate and Firefly - by having the episodes explore and develop the environment around the characters.
Every episode brought something new to the table.
I thoroughly enjoy the Data character (in addition to Picard) but I also like many "design" aspects of the series.
Data is probably the worst character of them all. He is just a "plot tool", the lowest form of "plot device": it gets screwed and bent all the time to create a short lived twist of the story. Few such eps later it is just "omg this time Data is {insert plot tool}, lol really?".
Resolution usually happens at the end of an episode, "good guys win" (otherwise, what's the point?), intelligent use of special effects.
The inherit problem with soap operas is that they lack development. IOW by the end of the episode the universe comes back to where it has started. Season ending "cliffhanger" episodes try to change something sometimes (and I personally not a huge fan of cliffhangers in general). But in Star Trek they fail to even do that.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
http://graphtv.kevinformatics....
Were that I say, pancakes?
The problem is: we may think it strange that a universal translator that does such a miraculous job everywhere else would be so nonfunctional with this language, Trekkies will come up with some silly technobabble explanation, but the only real reason is that a universal translator is just a handwaving plot device for writers' convenience, and here for once they found it inconvenient. Their way of dealing with it may be illogical, but tossing the crutch for one episode allows them to explore new ground.
Almost every piece of technology in Star Trek is there for one of two reasons: it made the writers' jobs easier (e.g. universal translator, replicator, the badly overused holodeck) or it made the set designers' and special effects guys' jobs easier, esp. in the original series (e.g. transporter). In each case, these technologies would have vast and far reaching impacts that the series never took into account because it wouldn't serve the items' purpose as handwaving conveniences. You have replicators, but whenever you want to have an object be valuable or difficult to obtain, somehow the replicator just can't get it quite right. You have transporters that can teleport tremendously fragile objects like people instantly across thousands of miles, but whenever you want characters to have an adventure physically retrieving an object, or whenever you want characters to be in real peril off ship, somehow the object is inherently untransportable or the transporters can't get a lock on people.
Fridge logic and dubious explanations abound, yet somehow the show goes on.
To me you seem like a philosopher studying epistemology without ever studying cybernetics and learning the fundamental principals of classification and cognition. Perhaps in your pursuit to understand languages you should first understand language itself. Learn by doing: Invent an alien language, then write something in it. Then give it to your peers, and see what they make of it without a translation medium.
This is the most idiotic thing I've ever heard. You want to learn how natural language works? You study NATURAL language. That's one of the biggest impediments to people working on AI translation -- all of you folks assume that natural languages must work according to some broken metaphors about meaning (like atomistic denotative words, or fundamental laws of syntax which work according to generative grammars or whatever model's in vogue at the moment) that assume that constructed languages work like natural ones. The process of constructing a language requires you to find certain kinds of order that you assume exist in natural languages -- effectively prioritizing the types of structures you think "work" to generate a self-consistent grammar, while ignoring all the exceptions and complexity of natural langauge patterns.
While that can be a fun exercise, it doesn't necessarily teach you much about how natural languages work, beyond what you already know about language before starting the process of creating the new language. It's kind of like assuming that neural networks (i.e., simplistic mathematical algorithms) actually tell us something useful about how the human brain really computes stuff at the basic neuron level. You might be able to get a simple algorithm to spit out similar results to a brain a certain percentage of the time, but it doesn't mean that the underlying mechanisms are anything alike.
If you want to understand language itself, spend more time actually studying language. Throw all sorts of potential models and metrics at all. Try building new theories that presuppose that meaning resides in completely different elements. Run corpus studies to check your models with statistical evidence. Inventing a language according to preconceived ideas about how language MUST work (according to you) and then running tests on your made-up thing is a stupid way to try to learn something about a complex natural phenomenon. It would be like trying to analyze the complete works of Mozart by building some sort of oversimplifed computer model that makes crappy music which doesn't really sound like Mozart, but at least spits out pretty sounds -- and then saying that the best way to learn about how Mozart's music works is to study your crappy computer model.
The GP perhaps is both right and wrong, as you are both right and wrong. Perhaps the problem is our conception that denotative meaning and analogy are fundamentally different processes. The reality is that analogies which become idiomatic (as they clearly are in this Star Trek episode) become effectively denotative, and most actual words in the core of any actual natural language lexicon do not have as precise single denotative meanings as we'd like to imagine. The problem with this episode is not necessarily that SOMETHING like the alien language couldn't exist, but rather that all languages share enough features with it that the universal translator should NEVER function well.
DS9 had too many annoying Bajoran and prophet based episodes and the series didn't get interesting until the 4th season.
I disagree. The point is that the words mean different things depending on what they're a reference to. So "Samantha" does not mean "bitch" in the way that words in normal languages have meanings, because the same word could mean something utterly different depending on the context. Since I didn't watch that show, I can't come up with examples (which kinda supports my point). But let's use Star Trek for examples: "Picard at Farpoint" and "Picard when he saw four lights" and "Picard after the Borg" and "Picard smiling at Lwaxana" and "Picard and Ro" mean utterly different things, because of the context of those stories that gives meaning unrelated to the actual words. So it's impossible to make sense of the word "Picard" without knowing the stories, because there are hundreds of stories that the translator would need to infer. And if the references weren't phrased literally the same way every time, but were more natural references to the stories, then even the phrases would be impossible to decode.
Of course, the universal translator deals with simpler versions of this every week. The premise is that the translator can deal with simpler symbolic translation of words from direct context, but can't deal with the deeper metaphore-based communications. For a popular mass media show, that's a pretty subtle idea. If you're going to quibble about that, you shouldn't bother watching anything on TV - none of it stands up to really deep digging, because they're trying to tell entertaining stories to normal people in 44 minutes (or 22 minutes), not publish defensible scientific thesis. :-)
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
As somebody who studies language - I agree. You can't make analogies in the first place without a functional language. And if you have a functional language, why make up analogies? And seriously, how can the communicate complex ideas? Can you imagine them trying to write a book explaining microprocessor design?
Well I'm a mathematician, and basically you're wrong. It is far easier for me to present 3 concrete examples of a problem, the method of solution, and then write down the general case than it is to bother with trying to define the minutae of required to functionally explain the general case and how the method actually works. Most people will learn by following the examples and through them "grokking" the general method than will ever learn from reading a formally descriptive algorithm of the process.
What's funny is that you think you're disagreeing with the GP when you're actually making his point. Analogies are abstractions here.
Try to imagine "bootstrapping" the alien language in this episode. How do kids learn who Darmok is in order to understand what he represents in the many different metaphors and analogies in which his name could appear?
Well, in order to teach kids enough knowledge to get the abstract concept of "Darmok," they need to hear the stories of who Darmok was. Once they have all sorts of specific examples of stories about Darmok, then they could have an abstract conception of the person "Darmok" (with certain personality traits, certain historical events he participated in, certain places he visited, etc.) who could then be used in linguistic utterances with varieties of meanings depending on situation.
In essence, in order to use the alien metaphorical language, you'd have to assume an underlying body of practical knowledge about the proper names and persons evoked in the analogies. Or, in your terms, you'd have to give kids "concrete examples" of Darmok and what he represents, so that they can then understand the "general case" of "Darmok" when his name is evoked in a variety of different contexts.
Unless this species communicates primarily through telepathy or something (which is never implied in the episode), it's hard to imagine how they could "bootstrap" the linguistic meanings for their kids without telling the stories of the mythos in some non-metaphorical language.
And if they never bothered to tell the kids the actual stories of Darmok, then within a couple generations, no one would remember who Darmok was. And linguistic utterances like "Darmok at X" or "Darmok in situation Y" would no longer BE metaphors -- they would simply be denotative phrases with specific meanings, having nothing to do with the abstraction "Darmok." Kinda like how we have examples in English of words which may ultimately come from the same root word, but the meanings diverged over time. We don't understand these words any more by looking up the etymology and taking apart the individual parts of the word (except as an abstract exercise -- if the word is common, we just learn it by hearing its context and abstract its meaning from concrete examples). The added suffixes or different morphology of the new words serves to provide the meaning... the original root is no longer necessary and often forgotten.
So you want to strap yourself to an exploding console? Neat!
I actually wonder at the many plot devices that placed high power conduits through control consoles. I mean, really? Why wouldn't you design the bridge system as low power system sending control signals to high power equipment in some cabinets a few firewalls away?
http://www.moonlight3d.eu/
I can think of one really good episode. It involved the captain getting his brain rewired and living an entire lifetime on another planed in a dream induced by an alien probe. Why was it good? Because it focused on one character (played by Patrick Stewart) and really developed him.
The one with Picard leading the kids up the lift shaft was also good.
And I enjoyed the whole "Sometimes a cake is just a cake" episode. I mean, it was absurd, but it was amusing.
Worst episode? Anything with Wesley Crusher. They were almost all painfully written. How many times can a single kid put everybody in mortal danger and then somehow manage to save the day in some contrived fashion?
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I idiots who write shit like this. Stop with the fucking links for every word in a sentence. You are not hip, cool, or witty.
Ummm, you say "It's not about idioms. It's about meaning," and then explain how it's about context. It's all about context. Context is key and why words pulled out of context have different meaning. It's also why people who are philologists or armchair philologists enjoy the Darmok episode. To bash that episode only proves how little someone actually knows about language, culture and meaning, the basis of context. The worst episodes of TNG are like the worst of any screenwriting. Most of the 24x7 (that's 24 episodes by 7 seasons) were very well written, some not so much. Hey, even the best home run hitter strikes out every now and then, but you don't poo-poo his career because he had seven strike outs and 120 home runs.
It's the 24th century. Why does it need to be piloted at all by anything other than the computer?
Union rules. Not you don't see Uber or Lyft shuttles either.
And where the fuck is the local Federation OSHA bureaucrat, anyway?
Ironically, that role has been replaced by a computer. :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I don't remember the season, several in I think, but it seems like there was a brief window when they started letting Troi become an actual decent character instead of just exposition and eye-candy, but that didn't last long.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
English has many idioms that refer to our common culturall heritage, but Chinese has far more. You can get by in English without studying idioms specifically. In Chinese, there is no way. You have to learn them or you will fail to comprehend almost every conversation.
Bingo. For an example going in the other direction, I had to explain "cross the Rubicon" to my wife just yesterday, in fact. (Her English is good, but it's mostly everyday/around-the-house English with a big dollop of technical stuff relating to her job as a mechanical engineer--and she's had few opportunities to read much literature. I'm trying to get her started on The Hobbit and then maybe after that something from Jonathan Swift or Mark Twain.)
In any event, I always "got" the premise of that episode, but I don't believe that I really *appreciated* Darmok until I started learning chengyu. And as soon as I started learning some of them, it wasn't long before I thought of it.
(And, since you asked--No, *this* wife sounds *nothing* like Kate Mulgrew, thank $_DEITY_OR_DEITIES_.)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
We don't have any trouble turning those literal Chinese phrases into common English phrases
Have you ever actually tried this? I have because my girlfriend is Chinese and I don't speak it, and it never works properly. In fact most of the time it doesn't work at all. She keeps talking to me about something Google calls "China powder", which I found out actually refers to pollen (allergy season).
We both speak Japanese as a second langauge and that is how we talk most of the time. It wasn't too bad for her but I had to unlearn a lot of stuff and really get into the Japanese mindset for it to make much sense. It's the classic "why do the Japanese say 'yes' when the mean 'no'?" Of course they don't really, but beginners and machines doing translations are unable to cope with the way they ask and answer questions because it's more than just language, it's culture.
Paraphrasing and translating to common English phrases gives you the gist of what is being said most of the time, but if you were trying to negotiate over something it's often inadequate.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Straczynski had the main arc in mind, but he could not foresee where the show will end up.
So, he had "trap doors" written for all characters. But episodes and characters still had to be written as they went along.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The same way they learn about triangles. Somebody shows them a picture.
But to learn what "Darmok" means, you'd have to have an entire comic book or something -- "Darmok on the ocean" means something like "loneliness." "Darmok and Jilhad at Tanagra" means something like "people coming together to face a common obstacle or foe or problem." "Darmok and Jilhad on the ocean" means something like "friendship," perhaps "friendship resulting from overcoming a shared problem."
Recall the scene where the alien captain tells Picard this story. And Picard has to spend time filling in all the gaps, explaining what the alien captain says and puzzling out the implications behind each sentence with 4 or 5 sentences of his own. It makes perfect sense for someone with all the knowledge of a common mythos to understand the meaning of the captain's tale. But a kid who is being exposed to these stories for the first time wouldn't be able to grasp all those implied meanings that Picard was able to puzzle out. If you've spent any time reading books or telling stories to little kids, you know exactly what I mean. You have to "fill in the explanations" for them whenever they encounter new words or situations they've never encountered before. Unless you have specific denotative words or concepts to draw on to build up that language gradually, it's hard to fathom how these people ever explain the stories to their kids.
I think it's more than possible to pick up the meanings of works without knowing any of their original context. Perhaps your knowledge would be the poorer, but you would still be able to hold a conversation.
Obviously. That's how real language works. And again, you seem to be agreeing with my point even though you think you are offering some sort of counterexamples. The fact is that little kids learn language through some sort of probabilistic guesswork -- trying out utterances that they have heard in order to accomplish things they want or to tell their parents what they need or are thinking or feeling. They don't learn it through reading dictionary definitions, and certainly not through abstract etymological study. They try out things, and when the language works, they use it again. When it doesn't work, they try something else, or a parent corrects them. There is no sense of an "abstract" meaning a priori.
The conversation we are holding right now, in english, uses dozens of words which come from another language altogether, and to whose original context and meaning most English speakers are oblivious of.
Absolutely. Again, you seem to be agreeing with my point. But if that were true of this alien race, things like "Darmok" would cease to have their original means, and utterances like "Darmok on the ocean" would just MEAN "loneliness" -- literally. If you asked an average speaker of the language to explain "Darmok," he'd probably just look at you funny, just like most people would look at your funny if you asked someone for the etymology of most common English words.
Faced with this, it is not such a stretch to put a language based on idioms into an episode of a science fiction show.
That's the POINT. ALL languages are based on IDIOMS (whose original meanings have generally been lost or are at least are unknown to most speakers). Yet for some reason, this episode insists that rather than using IDIOMS for communication, this alien species communicates through METAPHOR or ANALOGY, implying that they have some sort of abstract understanding of "Darmok" which is then utilized in various contexts to mean vastly different things. If it were based on IDIOMS, then they wouldn't actually know who "Darmok" as an abstraction was, and by itself "Darmok" would probably be meaningless... it's only in "Darmok at Tanagra" or whatever phrase that any meaningful communication could happen.
The idiocy in this episode is not the idea that languages could be
I like strong female characters that know how to handle themselves.
So you've chosen to pick the character that turned to mush after her unconsummated lover sacrificed himself for her? Ivanova was cool, but Kira Neryes kicks her ass in the "strong female" department.
Ivanova turns to mush after her lover(s) dies, Kira keeps going. Ivanova has PTSD after watching her Mother get tortured to death by the Psi-Corps, while Kira picks up a phaser and starts fighting after her Father is tortured to death. Ivanova defers to the Minbari dominated Interstellar Alliance at the expense of Earth, Kira defends her people against everybody, including the Federation when necessary.
No comparison between those characters.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.