TNG Darmok

[Artabax]

https://sfdebris.com/videos/startrek/t202.php

Alien Captain says "Darmok and Ocelot at Tanagra." to mean Friends. The entire Darmokese language is references to myths. They talk TV tropese. The story is about aliens who are so alien. Picard gets the myth book and the finale is that Picard speaks Darmokese.

Chuck guesses scenarios where this could work. Telepathy means they don't need language. If it's telepathy then send Troii. Can't do that Troii would be useful.

Maybe they write stuff. This is a super dooper alien race, they have written language B4 spoken language?

No. I can't accept it. What is the language of the original myth? Ug and Thag eat the mammoth? What is the language of building a spaceship? Fine, they got "flying chariot of the Sun God" as a word for spaceship; but it is impossible to have a word for Science.


Speaking Darmokese makes Science impossible AND makes telling the original Myth impossible. Inscrutable aliens are fine, but when the aliens cannot scrute each other their society collapses.

Ryker, his face red, his dick flaccid.

[CharlesPhipps]

I think it's actually surprisingly believable that there's languages which wouldn't make sense because of cultural references.

I described the episode to a friend saying, "Imagine Riker is told that a Federation Captain is a Benedict Arnold who has decided to go Moby Dick on his White Whale, a monstrous Jack the Ripper who is worse than Hitler. Riker needs to hunt this guy down Dirty Harry style before he goes Butch and Sundance against his personal Lex Luthor. Because it'll result in his crew going down like the Titanic."

It's a language that is bizarre but if I told that to someone, you can generally get the meaning of the above.

The problem is the Universal Translator has no context for any of the above with the aliens. It doesn't have to be 100% cultural references but probably includes enough that it sounds like gibberish.

It even makes sense with technical terms:

How many miles is a distance unit? "We measure in Saint Paul's pilgrimages."

How power is an explosion? "We measure in mega Michael Bays."

How fast is someone? "XRoad Runners."

[PerrySimm]

The Picard and Dathon story is the clever and touching bit. Though the use of mortal danger is questionable, it's easy enough to suppose it was what Dathon thought was indispensable to the story of Darmok and Jalad.

But it's the Data/Troi subplot which makes the entire Federation First Contact team look really bad. "OK, so you don't understand them. Did you Google anything they said?" ... "No?" "Did you bring any psychics?" ... "No?"

[RobbyB1982]

The flaw with Darmok is that it wasn't first contact. If it was their first time meeting the race, its fine that no one understands them. But none of the previous groups that met the race put in any of the groundwork, or tried using telephathy, or anything? Picard was able to figure out their language in a few hours, a dedicated team spending weeks or months couldn't?

[Karha of Honor]

The flaw with Darmok is that it wasn't first contact. If it was their first time meeting the race, its fine that no one understands them. But none of the previous groups that met the race put in any of the groundwork, or tried using telephathy, or anything? Picard was able to figure out their language in a few hours, a dedicated team spending weeks or months couldn't?

It's the leading man magic.

[clearspira]

I think it's actually surprisingly believable that there's languages which wouldn't make sense because of cultural references.

I described the episode to a friend saying, "Imagine Riker is told that a Federation Captain is a Benedict Arnold who has decided to go Moby Dick on his White Whale, a monstrous Jack the Ripper who is worse than Hitler. Riker needs to hunt this guy down Dirty Harry style before he goes Butch and Sundance against his personal Lex Luthor. Because it'll result in his crew going down like the Titanic."

It's a language that is bizarre but if I told that to someone, you can generally get the meaning of the above.

The problem is the Universal Translator has no context for any of the above with the aliens. It doesn't have to be 100% cultural references but probably includes enough that it sounds like gibberish.

It even makes sense with technical terms:

How many miles is a distance unit? "We measure in Saint Paul's pilgrimages."

How power is an explosion? "We measure in mega Michael Bays."

How fast is someone? "XRoad Runners."

I agree with this in theory, and for things like talking about the weather or day to day work between peers of the same country, fine. But this is going to have to be one very rigid monoculture for this to work reliably on a global scale.

Moby Dick, Dirty Harry and Benedict Arnold work great if you are a Westerner talking to a Westerner, but how would any of this translate to the Far East, especially pre-internet? They have different stories, different heroes and villains. They are not going to be using Moby Dick, Dirty Harry and Benedict Arnold; they are going to be using the analogue in their country and culture. How many stories are you going to have to walk around with in your head every time you go on vacation? Every basic conversation is going to take twice as long, and this amplifies dramatically the more complicated the discussion gets.

I can only imagine how complicated it would be to try and teach this system to a child, or to even do something as basic as describing exactly how you like your espresso made without knowing the entire history of coffee in whatever region you are in.
For me, it is not a question of if this language could work, it is a question of if it would SURVIVE without the language evolving into something quicker and more concise.

[CharlesPhipps]

Except, that's the exact same problem when dealing with language in the real world. While all the above references are things a Westerner would know and not, necessarily, a guy from China--the same can be said for any language's words for "traitor", "revenge", "evil", "Rogue Cop", and so on.

Presumably, they'd have universal translators for their own species.

Children would also get these references even without the context.

"The genesis of something" is a word without knowing the Bible.

[Madner Kami]

Except, that's the exact same problem when dealing with language in the real world. While all the above references are things a Westerner would know and not, necessarily, a guy from China--the same can be said for any language's words for "traitor", "revenge", "evil", "Rogue Cop", and so on.

Presumably, they'd have universal translators for their own species.

Children would also get these references even without the context.

"The genesis of something" is a word without knowing the Bible.

I was just about to say it. You don't need to know the entire story to get a picture and there are plenty of references in our world as well. You don't need to know about Queequeg, Starbuck or even Ahab himself, to have an idea what "hunting a white whale" means. It has meaning in the context it's used and that context and contextual reference can and is taught. As a matter of fact, you could argue that simple words are entirely meaningless without their context as well. Imagine you have a parrot that can "talk". Teach him to vocalize a word and whenever he vocalizes that word, he gets a treat. To the parrot, that word or vocalization will have the meaning of "I want a treat", while to you it could mean car, shit, heaven or even the name of the parrot. It's the context that is taught to that parrot and to our own children. Whether you teach your child "Car", whenever a 4-wheeled motorized personell carrier comes by or "horrifically loud air-polluting monster", the child will learn that and use it in that context.

[Riedquat]

The universal translator worked in this case because the issue was all about the meaning of the words, the words themselves had been translated. The issue with actual translation is that the UT is a bit too magicky, so it shouldn't have much in the way of limits, yet here it does. Sometimes one language will use several words where one exist in another language, and a literal translation isn't always meaningful, the aliens in Darmok arguably just do that more often than most. So it should be able to cope. The translator was just a convenience in the first place (as was the transporter for that matter) to help keep the plot going, something which can occasionally bite you. It would've been better if that could've been answered, or at least given the impression of having an answer, along with why Federation experts hadn't cottoned on after previous meetings (someone said it would've worked better if it was a first contact situation).

When it comes to the plausibility clearly the language was capable of being used literally, otherwise we wouldn't have got the translations we did. Two people on the ocean - means what it says it does presumably. A culture that's evolved with an awful lot of stories though could get so used to explaining things with references that they might stare at each other blankly until someone pipes in with "Oh, you mean like Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra?" "Yes, that's it!" Hard to build spaceships like that though (and IIRC there was reference to communication being made by a mathematical sequence), which suggests that they don't 100% rely on it.

So the story has weaknesses that makes it suffer on repeat viewings, or after viewing but holds up as an attempt to do the sort of thing science fiction is for IMO, in this case deal with encountering a species with a significantly different way of thinking.

[Mindworm]

I described the episode to a friend saying, "Imagine Riker is told that a Federation Captain is a Benedict Arnold who has decided to go Moby Dick on his White Whale, a monstrous Jack the Ripper who is worse than Hitler. Riker needs to hunt this guy down Dirty Harry style before he goes Butch and Sundance against his personal Lex Luthor. Because it'll result in his crew going down like the Titanic."

Riker: "S**t, I'm still only in Saigon".