tparadox: lyricwritesprose:kyraneko:garrettauthor:should-be-sleeping:dvandom:allthingsling
tparadox: lyricwritesprose: kyraneko: garrettauthor: should-be-sleeping: dvandom: allthingslinguistic: technologistrevolution: emptymanuscript: flavoracle: isaacfhtagn: mindcrankismycommander: bass-borot: bass-borot: mscottwrites: shadow27: Chewbacca… his arms open. This is some NEXT LEVEL nerd-ing and I nearly cried reading it. I don’t get it Please explain ;_; There is a star trek TNG episode where Picard encounters a race that doesn’t speak in actual structured sentences but conveys ideas through story parralels. The ones referenced here are “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” - cooperation, “Shaka, when the walls fell” - failure and Temba, his arms wide/open" - signifying a gift. http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Tamarian_language nice OK, but here’s what’s awesome/hilarious about this. The whole point about why communicating with the Tamarians was so frustrating was because all of their communication was contextual. The problem wasn’t that Picard couldn’t understand what words they were saying (the universal translator worked fine) the problem was that he didn’t understand what THOSE WORDS TOGETHER HAD TO DO WITH ANYTHING. Why is this hilarious/fascinating to me? Because this is essentially what people are doing today with memes. They are posting pictures and writing sentences THAT MAKE NO SENSE WITHOUT PRIOR CONTEXT. If Picard beamed down right now, and you told him that Data is a cinnamon roll… you are a Tamarian. Reblogging because A) YES! and B) That commentary. It’s so true, it’s scary. I also just want more. ^_^ Actually, this isn’t something just present in memes but it seems to be a foundation of human language and partly why a universal translator could never work (or if it somehow did, it should be programmable to handle Tamarian). It’s just that most metaphors in language are so accepted or necessary to fluency that we don’t really notice them (or they seem to be a common human perspective… which aliens don’t necessarily have to share). It is why when speaking German I have to remember it is, “How much Clock is it?” and not “What time is it?”. The metaphor in English seems to be that moments are separate entities/temporal locations that we visit through the day so we need to determine what one we are visiting now. Whereas in German, leaving aside the fact the “clock” can clearly be a stand-in metaphor for “time” the overall metaphor there seems to be that moments in time are accumulative entities that we collect through the day and we need to determine how much we’ve collected. And speaking of time, human languages tend towards two metaphors, either favouring one or the other or happily indulging in both… either time is a stationary path which the focus moves along (”… as we’re traveling into the month February…”) or time is a river the flows past a stationary focus (”his birthday is rapidly approaching”). Technically those are metaphors to handle an abstract concept, time could just as easily be metaphorically an object that “appears” rather than “approaches” or a location you “turn towards” instead of “move into”… and I don’t know if any human language allows you to metaphorically be a man in a boat traveling up a river (or what that would look like/imply) but it is a possibility (especially if you are considering an alien perspective on time). Leaving behind time, some emotions are metaphorically a direction. Happy is up, sometimes way up ‘til you’re “on Cloud 9″ (and there’s no obvious reason for it to be the 9th cloud but you accept it) and on the opposite end of that spectrum sadness is down (in the dumps) when it isn’t busy being a colour (blue). And naturally you yourself are a container for your emotions, or more specifically your heart is (at least in English, in Indonesian it’s your liver) and the container can be put under pressure until it is “bursting with joy” or it “explodes in anger”. And then there are true idioms which actually do reference historic events (which is what I assume is happening in Tamarian’s “Shaka, when the walls fell”) like “Read The Riot Act” or if you “heard it through the grapevine” your people had a mess of telegraph wires at some point and grapevines to compare them to. And “apple of one’s eye” is weird for being a double metaphor… the pupil was once believed to be a solid object metaphorically called an “apple” but then, after Shakespeare popularized the phrase in reference to a person in terms of affection, and science let us know the pupil is not apple-like at all, it came to exclusively mean “this person is very dear to me” and we all forgot why apples were involved in the first place. Of course, I am far from a linguistic expert so you should take this all “with a grain of salt” ;) Yes, and there’s even an Official Academic name for this: intertextuality! Aka “texts referring to other texts” – whether those texts are song lyrics, proverbs, historical references, movie quotes, clichés, memes, metaphors, in-jokes, parody, fanfic, and so on. It doesn’t even have to be as explicit as an idiom or metaphor: even a turn of phrase will do. For example, saying something “is a truth universally acknowledged” invokes Pride and Prejudice, or “a thing of beauty and a joy forever” invokes Keats (although for me it invokes Mary Poppins, because obviously as a kid I watched that movie long before I’d ever heard of Keats), or “Strange women lying in rivers distributing words” invokes Monty Python. Intertexuality is one of the reasons people study literary works within the context of what other literary works were important at that place and time, so as to catch the intertextual references that the author may be making. Obi-Wan and Skywalker at Mustafar. ☹ Yoda, his head bowed. Imagine saying “keep your temper” in an emotionally-charged moment and the “universal” translator decides that the closest thing to it is “retain the color of your sword.” Actually, that would work AMAZINGLY for a Star Wars canon in which Dark Side users “bleed” their lightsabers, hurting them to change their color to red, but for everyone else … wait a sec, that STILL works perfectly because “keep it the color that it is” can mean “don’t turn it blood-colored.” But honestly, imagine the shenanigans that could be had in a Star Trek remake if the universal translators are regularly tripping over abstractions, contexts, and metaphors. As someone who has written a story with a universal translator, I firmly maintain that the best way to write one is to google translate your phrase to Japanese, and translate that to Hebrew, and then translate the resulting hash back into English. This does two things. First, it makes the alien’s dialogue borderline incomprehensible, such that your characters have to really work at communication. Second, you’ll find that your characters start to speak in a really stilted way, with fairly simple grammar and as few metaphors as they can get away with, to avoid giving the damn translator a case of the hiccups. (Does it work? No. But they try.) Honestly if universal translators were a thing, then interpreting the garbage they spat out would be a job in itself. My wife’s first language is Spanish, and while a significant reason we don’t use translation software as much as we did when we first met is because we’ve learned a lot of each other’s languages, especially her, she also understand my English better than anyone else’s because when I’m speaking to her, not only do I speak slowly and simply for her, I’ve also learned a lot of Spanish idiomatic constructions and I’ll use those even if I’m speaking English (ex: “making exercise” instead of “exercising”).And then when we do use translation, I’ve also learned a lot of the things the translator is weak on and speak clearly around them. -- source link