Picard and Darmok at El-Adrel, Chinese chengyu, and memes aplenty. How realistic is Star Trek's Tamarian?Special thanks to Timekettle for letting me try out ...

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.

  • JWBananas@kbin.social
    3·
    1 year ago

    Like dealing with someone who lies all too often, “they are the boy who cried wolf” gets used. Meaning, one of these days they are going to tell the truth but no one will believe them.

    Or, you know, that you should never tell the same lie twice.