How do Tamarians.....

[All Seeing Eye]

ask for a drink of tea?

say engage warp drive?

say i'm tired i'm going to bed?

say what time is it?

The concept of the Tamarians on TNG was bonkers, ive never watched such drivel in my life, how can any society communicate like they supposedly do? It would be like us using greek, Norse and roman mythological stories to communicate, it would be impossible to talk to eachother in any depth.
Who the heck wrote this episode!

"Achilles and Hector at Troy." Thats just me asking for a biscuit.

 

[Nardpuncher]

You're right.
The episode is cute, to put it a certain way, but not practical.

What if a truck is coming straight at your buddy? You say " Portek in the Garden of the Stampeding Rhorhnok!!!!" or what?

 

[All Seeing Eye]

You're right.
The episode is cute, to put it a certain way, but not practical.

What if a truck is coming straight at your buddy? You say " Portek in the Garden of the Stampeding Rhorhnok!!!!" or what?

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Maybe they don't always talk like that.

Picard was able to relate the tale of Gilgamesh (the Tamarian captain appeared to understand) with conventional English. Maybe the Tamarians *can* talk that way, but sometimes choose not to.

 

[Frodo Lives]

say i'm tired i'm going to bed?

"It's business time."

 

[tomalak301]

This issue is always brought up, yet the whole thing of sign language never gets a mention. Sign language might be how they get the use of metaphor across. It was shown in the episode that they use the hands a lot. Also, I think it was also mentioned in the episode that they don't really move that much.

 

[Nebusj]

And how do English speakers ever get around to asking anything? All their sentences are loaded up with these adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, subordinate clauses -- absurd! Even when they do have a combination of words that makes sense nearly every word has multiple meanings, sometimes completely contradictory meanings!

A real, practical language is nouns and verbs with discrete, unique, unambiguous meanings. How are you supposed to express what you want when the sentence structure turns into this byzantine labyrinth and you have to figure out what key words mean from context?

I can only hope whoever dreamed up this language was fired. Worst lexicon ever.

 

[AdmiralGarak]

You're right.
The episode is cute, to put it a certain way, but not practical.

What if a truck is coming straight at your buddy? You say " Portek in the Garden of the Stampeding Rhorhnok!!!!" or what?

Actually, we saw Tamarians using short-hand in coversation with one another. For example, they understood "Darmok" without needing to hear "Darmok and Jilad at Tenagra".

English--
"Look out for that approaching tr..."{SPLAT}

abbreviated as:
"LOOK OUT!!!"

Tamarian--
"Portek in the Garden of the..."{SPLAT}

abbreviated as:
"PORTEK!!!"

 

[Kegek]

First, some amusing Star Trek examples.

ask for a drink of tea?

Picard, his Earl Grey hot.

say engage warp drive?

Episode, when the credits roll.

say i'm tired i'm going to bed?

Seven regenerates.

say what time is it?

Scotty, making estimates.

And so on.

The concept of the Tamarians on TNG was bonkers, ive never watched such drivel in my life, how can any society communicate like they supposedly do?

Now this is a problem, but not for the reason you elucidated. The reason is for these metaphorical stories to have value by shorthand, they would have to have been told in the first place. Were all the metaphors explained by metaphors? How does one explain Darmok without saying Darmok? The meaning of the entire lexicon of metaphors must have been explained somehow.

 

[Unicron]

Maybe they don't always talk like that.

Picard was able to relate the tale of Gilgamesh (the Tamarian captain appeared to understand) with conventional English. Maybe the Tamarians *can* talk that way, but sometimes choose not to.

Agreed. I don't think we see enough of the Tamarian language to really be able to tell.

 

[Nebusj]

Now this is a problem, but not for the reason you elucidated. The reason is for these metaphorical stories to have value by shorthand, they would have to have been told in the first place. Were all the metaphors explained by metaphors? How does one explain Darmok without saying Darmok? The meaning of the entire lexicon of metaphors must have been explained somehow.

But that's pretty straightforward. The T*r*ian captain seemed to follow Picard telling the story of Gilgamesh just fine. In English we use a sentence, or at least a healthy part of the sentence, as sort of the basic unit of an expressed thought; the T*r*ians apparently use paragraphs as the basis.

Individual sentences, not assembled into a narrative, probably sound to the T*r*ian like an English speaker talking like Movie Tarzan, without articles or adjectives or the muscle which make a sentence interesting. You can follow the meaning more or less all right, but too much of this leaves you homicidal, which explains the quickly muttered ``Professor Plum in the library with the dikironide phaser''.

 

[Unicron]

^ And there are real life instances of such mistranslations occuring, because the grammatical differences between some languages are significant. Translation becomes more difficult when one language can't approximate certain things from the other. The Engrish website documents this quite well.

 

[Nardpuncher]

Well....looks like most of you went and sucked all the fun out of this. Except for Kegek.

 

[Unicron]

It's in my mod contract.

 

[Kegek]

But that's pretty straightforward. The T*r*ian captain seemed to follow Picard telling the story of Gilgamesh just fine.

Then we have a rather significant narrative problem on our hands. If Dathon could understand Picard's plain straightforward language there, then the Tamarians should have always been able to understand our straightforward - so why didn't say simply speak in it and avoid this risky attempt at commnication? Essentially; the episode no longer makes any sense.

I got the impression that Dathon only vaguely understood what Picard was saying, and that was through the stressing of proper names and general body language.

 

[tomalak301]

Well....looks like most of you went and sucked all the fun out of this. Except for Kegek.

This was supposed to be a fun thread. Funny, I thought we were bashing an episode that I really love because of it's trekkien theme of understanding and respecting others because of that understanding.

 

[CaptainStoner]

The thing to try to wrap one's head around with the Tamarians is that they are supposed to think in metaphor as well as speak it. As for the language, it could be more cumbersome than English, or less so. They probably have some weird forms of mathematics as well.
Maybe they have some mild form of telepathic link. So the context of the metaphors can be felt. It would be capable of much denser communication than English.

 

[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!!

 

[MrPointy]

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

 

[RoJoHen]

English is easier in some ways, but more confusing in others.

I think pronunciation is probably where English becomes difficult, and the fact that one word can mean very different things in different contexts.

As far as sentence structure goes, it's not too bad. And we don't really have to conjugate our verbs (at worst, we add an "s" if it's he/she/they). Of course, I can only compare to Spanish, which is the only other language I've studied.