#but I am VERY surprised I could not find a single fanfic written in Tamarian I am disappointed in y'all

[improbabledreams900]

So I watched the Star Trek TNG episode with the Tamarian language, and it’s just...so interesting???

The gist is that the Tamarians speak in metaphors that reference shared stories. The Enterprise’s universal translators don’t work properly because the language includes so many proper nouns.

For instance, “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” is a phrase that means “cooperation.” It is referencing an old Tamarian myth about two people, Darmok and Jalad, who ended up marooned on the same island (Tanagra) and had to work together to find a way home. In the episode, they compare this to “Juliet on her balcony” meaning “romance.” Or “Caesar crossing the Rubicon” to mean “something you can’t come back from.”

BUT there is so much more opportunity for depth than the examples used in the episode. The Tamarian language has prepositions, nouns, and basic verbs, so the metaphors are used to express ideas and, presumably, complex emotions. How many emotions does English not have a name for? Schadenfreude? The feeling of freshness and vigor after it rains? Or emotions that are very situational, like grief manifesting as bouts of frustration years after the loss?

Because that’s what the Tamarian metaphors do—provide context. Consider a phrase like “Aziraphale in the gazebo.” That conveys SO MUCH information. Rejection of a romantic advance or longtime friend, doing something you don’t want to do but believe that you must because of intense external pressure, refusing someone even though it breaks your heart to do so, and so on. If I, distraught, called a close friend and said a personal relationship was in tatters and that “it was just like Aziraphale in the gazebo scene,” that shared metaphor/experience would immediately convey a great deal of information about my current emotional state. As a second example, “the band on the Titanic” would evoke an emotion of similar complexity: keeping on with your job because there’s nothing else you can do, using your talents to calm others in a hopeless situation, facing death with your boots on, etc.

And this works because the metaphors rely on stories. You can evoke thousands of words of backstory and context with a few words. It’s like when an author calls back to an earlier character beat, and just a short phrase calls back the entire force of the character arc. Or when a small detail in your life resembles a past trauma, resulting in the sudden, unexpected recollection of that trauma.

And, most interestingly of all, Tamarian metaphors more accurately reflect the way we process emotions. When we think about emotions, particularly strong or unfamiliar ones, we compare them to other things we’ve felt or have felt vicariously through fictional characters. When I write an emotional scene, I physically feel the emotion and have to actively think about what it feels LIKE in order to translate that emotion into words. I convert the emotion into descriptions of the character’s actions, tone of voice, etc., hoping that the reader will perform the same translation in reverse, from description to emotion. But in Tamarian, you don’t have to do that—you provide only enough words to evoke an existing memory in the reader, based on an emotional response to a completely unrelated piece of media. Which is really a fantastically intuitive and efficient means of communication, provided both parties share a cultural stockpile of stories.

#languages #star trek #I want to do something with this idea but I don't know what #but I am VERY surprised I could not find a single fanfic written in Tamarian I am disappointed in y'all #tamarian