You like quoting the real-world laws of war, but only when it suits you. Well, remember that incident a while back where Israel blew up a Jordanian neighborhood? Guess what the LoAC had to say about that? NOTHING! Jordanian citizens had hidden rocket launchers in their houses and were firing them across the border into Israel. That made them valid targets, the presence of women and children does not prevent a building from being a military target..
We're not talking about a building. We're talking about an entire planet with a population minimum thousands of people. A Maquis raider has a crew of a couple dozen, a Peregrine fighter has a crew of two.
Your own sense of scale needs a bit of tweaking. A minimum population could be in the low hundreds, and, if memory serves, was in the low hundreds in some colonies portrayed throughout the franchise's history.
Anyway, since you don't seem to be crying foul over the 'women and children' bit itself, I should probably take this moment to point out that only the children on the colony can be reasonably assumed to be completely innocent in the matter.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
Okay, so here's something new to talk about. The TrekMovie.com Twitter just said the new series has signed Joe Menosky onto the writing team. He wrote a bunch of episodes of TNG, DS9, and VOY, including co-writing "Darmok" and "Year of Hell".
Hmm. Darmok was not all that special. Year of Hell is of course a VOY classic. ANd in a way reminds me of why the magic reset button annoys me so much. But I would not be surprised if the magic reset buttons were not his choice.
EDIT:
Well, I'll keep trying. Menosky also wrote the Letheans' introductory episode, "Distant Voices", as well as co-writing "Scorpion" with Braga.
Interesting. I was just thinking further about how Year of Hell was both great and a missed opportunity - one of the beauties of showing characters in extreme situations is that we and they learn something about them. Resetting things means the learnings are lost.
Distant Voices was also an attempt to look closer into Bashir's character. (I am not convinced it was a good one, though).
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Darmok was, IMO, the best attempt on Trek yet to show a truly alien viewpoint. Not entirely successful, of course, but at least the Children of Tama aren't just a thinly-disguised modern Earth culture with rubber foreheads. And I did appreciate the script pointing out that groups of sounds aren't necessarily unique ("Darmok" is a folk hero on this world, a frozen dessert on that one, etc). Reminiscent of the Gynnan Tonix in The Restaurant At the End of the Universe. (For those who didn't read that, for shame. And also, one of the odd facts of the galaxy is that every culture has invented a drink that sounds like "gin and tonic", or "gynnan tonnyx", or "jian anto'nicks". That's all they have in common - one is tepid tap water, another is a drink so potent it's been compared to a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster - but young students of evolutionary linguistics tend to get all excited about this, then become old and cynical students of evolutionary linguistics when they learn that all of this is mere coincidence, and start drinking Ouisgian Zodahs.)
Darmok was, IMO, the best attempt on Trek yet to show a truly alien viewpoint. Not entirely successful, of course, but at least the Children of Tama aren't just a thinly-disguised modern Earth culture with rubber foreheads. And I did appreciate the script pointing out that groups of sounds aren't necessarily unique ("Darmok" is a folk hero on this world, a frozen dessert on that one, etc).
Darmok was, IMO, the best attempt on Trek yet to show a truly alien viewpoint. Not entirely successful, of course, but at least the Children of Tama aren't just a thinly-disguised modern Earth culture with rubber foreheads.
Aw... weren't you just calling me a hipster for pointing out that exact thing?
4: given the nature of the weapons used it'd probably take more than one ship per planet to mount an effective defense anyways.
5: What would those ships be called away from to do this task? The Federation isn't known for keeping ships sitting around inactive...
I dunno, where'd they get the thousands-strong fleets the Federation marshaled for the Dominion war half a season later? By this point in the series Ron Moore's intent was that Starfleet had gone through a massive buildup after Wolf 359: where the loss of 39 starships was a crippling blow in 2366, by 2373 Starfleet has around 30,000 effectives. Just pull a few ships from less-critical core areas that aren't under threat, such as around Earth, Vulcan, and Andoria.
I still maintain it was an ideological and moral blow, not a resources one.
Considering there were originally supposed to only be twelve Galaxy-class ships and half of them were mothballed? I doubt it. Remember, this is the overconfident early TNG Federation we're talking about.
Darmok was, IMO, the best attempt on Trek yet to show a truly alien viewpoint. Not entirely successful, of course, but at least the Children of Tama aren't just a thinly-disguised modern Earth culture with rubber foreheads. And I did appreciate the script pointing out that groups of sounds aren't necessarily unique ("Darmok" is a folk hero on this world, a frozen dessert on that one, etc). Reminiscent of the Gynnan Tonix in The Restaurant At the End of the Universe. (For those who didn't read that, for shame. And also, one of the odd facts of the galaxy is that every culture has invented a drink that sounds like "gin and tonic", or "gynnan tonnyx", or "jian anto'nicks". That's all they have in common - one is tepid tap water, another is a drink so potent it's been compared to a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster - but young students of evolutionary linguistics tend to get all excited about this, then become old and cynical students of evolutionary linguistics when they learn that all of this is mere coincidence, and start drinking Ouisgian Zodahs.)
I'm reminded of a funny bit in one of the Stardoc novels (Shockball, I think) where Cherijo and Duncan are arguing over baby names for their daughter. Cherijo keeps choosing Anglosphere names, Duncan keeps shooting them down after noting what nasty thing they mean in the bajillion alien languages he speaks. She shoots down his suggestions because she has trouble pronouncing them ("It has to have vowels.").
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
I think the jump from TNG's implied low fleet sizes to DS9's huge fleet sizes might best be explained by the Federation refitting old mothballed ships (explaining why there were so many Miranda and Excelsior class ships in the DS9 battles). Remember this is a post-scarcity world, so re-equipping several hundred old retired ships wouldn't be to difficult for the Federation, if anything the real challenge would be scraping up enough manpower for the crews.
As for the comments about colony sizes... I've always found it sad how most colonies in the shows are treated like they are just small little rural towns on other planets. Even the ones that are said to be really old typically only have populations of a few hundred people. Most of them seem to have populations so low that they couldn't possibly be viable in the long term. I realize it is a budgetary thing, with them not having the resources to portray the colonies as being full planetary nations, but it still bugs me.
(...) Remember this is a post-scarcity world, so re-equipping several hundred old retired ships wouldn't be to difficult for the Federation, if anything the real challenge would be scraping up enough manpower for the crews.
(...)
In my opinion this is one of the most common misconceptions about Trek. Earth and only Earth evolved to a point that poverty and scarcity of livelihoods doesn't exist any more. This is mostly not true for any other world and building starships is still a resource straining process which is also the TM reason for just a couple of Galaxy capital ships being build.
I also don't think Starfleet only having twenty ships total makes a lot of sense. This comes up often but neither can it be proven nor sufficiently convincing be extrapolated. It makes more sense to assume the loss of 39 ships is a huge blow because big fleets are something generally rare in Trek, engagements rarely had more than a hooffull of ships and attempted invasions were made with three transporters. The Dominion and DS9s visual attempt to get closer to other franchises changed that, but by far and large it seems to be a rule in this universe that there just aren't hundreds of ships at a time in a fleet. The sheer size of the UFP and Starfeet's mission however makes a crippling blow in sheer numbers after Wolf 359 unlikely.
^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
"No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
"A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
"That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
Frankly, I'll be disappointed if it's not set in the 25th century or later, I'm tired of Star Trek going backward.
Whereas I WELCOMEany choice of eras where the setting hadn't yet gone post-singularity, blowing it narrative brains out with casual, targeted time travel in the hands of Starfleet...
Darmok was, IMO, the best attempt on Trek yet to show a truly alien viewpoint. Not entirely successful, of course, but at least the Children of Tama aren't just a thinly-disguised modern Earth culture with rubber foreheads. And I did appreciate the script pointing out that groups of sounds aren't necessarily unique ("Darmok" is a folk hero on this world, a frozen dessert on that one, etc). Reminiscent of the Gynnan Tonix in The Restaurant At the End of the Universe. (For those who didn't read that, for shame. And also, one of the odd facts of the galaxy is that every culture has invented a drink that sounds like "gin and tonic", or "gynnan tonnyx", or "jian anto'nicks". That's all they have in common - one is tepid tap water, another is a drink so potent it's been compared to a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster - but young students of evolutionary linguistics tend to get all excited about this, then become old and cynical students of evolutionary linguistics w0hen they learn that all of this is mere coincidence, and start drinking Ouisgian Zodahs.)
Excuse me, I am dumb. I confused a DS9 episode with some Bajoran creature attacking a village with the TNG episode. Go on, nothing to see here.
Darmok was in fact an excellent episode. (Though to be honest, its linguistic problem seems like a non-issue if the universal translators were a real thing. The difference between a metaphor in a foreign langue and a word in foreign language word is non-existent if you don't speak the language in the first place. Only if they started out speaking English and then added the metaphor layer could there be an issue, because the universal translator detects english and doesn't try translating.)
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Frankly, I'll be disappointed if it's not set in the 25th century or later, I'm tired of Star Trek going backward.
Whereas I WELCOMEany choice of eras where the setting hadn't yet gone post-singularity, blowing it narrative brains out with casual, targeted time travel in the hands of Starfleet...
If it was me, I'd retcon the sh*t out of casual time travel in Star Trek. There will certainly never be an "era" where time travel is standard operating procedure in my headcanon.
If you can't find strong limits for your time travel, you can't really have a meaningful story. Unless you kinda go all crazy like Doctor Who perhaps. (And Doctor Who is awesome, no doubts about that, but it's also totally different from Star Trek.)
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Darmok was, IMO, the best attempt on Trek yet to show a truly alien viewpoint. Not entirely successful, of course, but at least the Children of Tama aren't just a thinly-disguised modern Earth culture with rubber foreheads. And I did appreciate the script pointing out that groups of sounds aren't necessarily unique ("Darmok" is a folk hero on this world, a frozen dessert on that one, etc). Reminiscent of the Gynnan Tonix in The Restaurant At the End of the Universe. (For those who didn't read that, for shame. And also, one of the odd facts of the galaxy is that every culture has invented a drink that sounds like "gin and tonic", or "gynnan tonnyx", or "jian anto'nicks". That's all they have in common - one is tepid tap water, another is a drink so potent it's been compared to a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster - but young students of evolutionary linguistics tend to get all excited about this, then become old and cynical students of evolutionary linguistics w0hen they learn that all of this is mere coincidence, and start drinking Ouisgian Zodahs.)
Excuse me, I am dumb. I confused a DS9 episode with some Bajoran creature attacking a village with the TNG episode. Go on, nothing to see here.
Darmok was in fact an excellent episode. (Though to be honest, its linguistic problem seems like a non-issue if the universal translators were a real thing. The difference between a metaphor in a foreign langue and a word in foreign language word is non-existent if you don't speak the language in the first place. Only if they started out speaking English and then added the metaphor layer could there be an issue, because the universal translator detects english and doesn't try translating.)
Well, the Tamarians seemed to be using metaphors within their own language, not as the language (though one has to wonder how a society can function if it communicates exclusively through metaphors... not to mention how they got there in the first place). The UT can easily figure out the syntactic and grammatical meaning of what has been said - but as was pointed out in the episode, things like 'Romeo and Juliet on a balcony', or in this case 'Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra', don't really have much meaning unless you are familiar with the underlying stories. It's a two-layer translation that the translators obviously can't tackle.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
4: given the nature of the weapons used it'd probably take more than one ship per planet to mount an effective defense anyways.
5: What would those ships be called away from to do this task? The Federation isn't known for keeping ships sitting around inactive...
I dunno, where'd they get the thousands-strong fleets the Federation marshaled for the Dominion war half a season later? By this point in the series Ron Moore's intent was that Starfleet had gone through a massive buildup after Wolf 359: where the loss of 39 starships was a crippling blow in 2366, by 2373 Starfleet has around 30,000 effectives. Just pull a few ships from less-critical core areas that aren't under threat, such as around Earth, Vulcan, and Andoria.
I still maintain it was an ideological and moral blow, not a resources one.
Considering there were originally supposed to only be twelve Galaxy-class ships and half of them were mothballed? I doubt it. Remember, this is the overconfident early TNG Federation we're talking about.
I still can't see how they would maintain the sheer scale of the Federation with such a small fleet. The Federation is spread amongst a huge area of space with colonies being formed all the time, plus all the space stuff to scan. Look at all the stuff the Ent D did in early TNG, I can't believe that was only one of up to 50 ships doing the same thing.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though. JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
Darmok was, IMO, the best attempt on Trek yet to show a truly alien viewpoint. Not entirely successful, of course, but at least the Children of Tama aren't just a thinly-disguised modern Earth culture with rubber foreheads. And I did appreciate the script pointing out that groups of sounds aren't necessarily unique ("Darmok" is a folk hero on this world, a frozen dessert on that one, etc). Reminiscent of the Gynnan Tonix in The Restaurant At the End of the Universe. (For those who didn't read that, for shame. And also, one of the odd facts of the galaxy is that every culture has invented a drink that sounds like "gin and tonic", or "gynnan tonnyx", or "jian anto'nicks". That's all they have in common - one is tepid tap water, another is a drink so potent it's been compared to a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster - but young students of evolutionary linguistics tend to get all excited about this, then become old and cynical students of evolutionary linguistics w0hen they learn that all of this is mere coincidence, and start drinking Ouisgian Zodahs.)
Excuse me, I am dumb. I confused a DS9 episode with some Bajoran creature attacking a village with the TNG episode. Go on, nothing to see here.
Darmok was in fact an excellent episode. (Though to be honest, its linguistic problem seems like a non-issue if the universal translators were a real thing. The difference between a metaphor in a foreign langue and a word in foreign language word is non-existent if you don't speak the language in the first place. Only if they started out speaking English and then added the metaphor layer could there be an issue, because the universal translator detects english and doesn't try translating.)
Well, the Tamarians seemed to be using metaphors within their own language, not as the language (though one has to wonder how a society can function if it communicates exclusively through metaphors... not to mention how they got there in the first place). The UT can easily figure out the syntactic and grammatical meaning of what has been said - but as was pointed out in the episode, things like 'Romeo and Juliet on a balcony', or in this case 'Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra', don't really have much meaning unless you are familiar with the underlying stories. It's a two-layer translation that the translators obviously can't tackle.
Translating into different languages is a transformation that is basically like encrypting something. Encrypting something twice generally does not make your encryption harder to crack.
If you replaced every instance of the word "romance" with "Romeo and Juliet on a balcony", someone translating from your Shakespearean-Metaphor-English into another language would never need to find out that "Romeo and Juliet on a balcony" means that "Romeo and Juliet" are two persons or what a balcony means. In the context you use it, this is your word for romance. (Of course, language translations is more than just learning individual word meaning).
If you hear me say "Düvel" a few times when I break something or I hurt myself, you will get the feeling that I am probably using some kind of curse word. You might translate it as "f*ck", and it would be sufficient for us understanding each other, even if the words we use have also other meanings that are notably different in our respective languages.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
4: given the nature of the weapons used it'd probably take more than one ship per planet to mount an effective defense anyways.
5: What would those ships be called away from to do this task? The Federation isn't known for keeping ships sitting around inactive...
I dunno, where'd they get the thousands-strong fleets the Federation marshaled for the Dominion war half a season later? By this point in the series Ron Moore's intent was that Starfleet had gone through a massive buildup after Wolf 359: where the loss of 39 starships was a crippling blow in 2366, by 2373 Starfleet has around 30,000 effectives. Just pull a few ships from less-critical core areas that aren't under threat, such as around Earth, Vulcan, and Andoria.
I still maintain it was an ideological and moral blow, not a resources one.
Considering there were originally supposed to only be twelve Galaxy-class ships and half of them were mothballed? I doubt it. Remember, this is the overconfident early TNG Federation we're talking about.
I still can't see how they would maintain the sheer scale of the Federation with such a small fleet. The Federation is spread amongst a huge area of space with colonies being formed all the time, plus all the space stuff to scan. Look at all the stuff the Ent D did in early TNG, I can't believe that was only one of up to 50 ships doing the same thing.
Starfleet would have to have a large fleet. You figure that they have to patrol and protect the federation planets, explore space and do all the other stuff we've seen the shows and movies do. The other thing is there would be a lot of redundancies. Say if it took 10 ships to do the Starfleet's job...they'd have 20-30 ships so that if the Enterprise is in dry dock for maintenance it doesn't leave a massive hole in defenses or the mission. This would eliminate the tired troupe of the Enterprise being the only ship in range to respond to something...that may work when they are on deep space patrol but not when something is bearing down on the capitol of the Federation.
Currently the US Navy has 275 ships (yes I know Starfleet isn't the Navy) and they are never all gone at the same time.
Your pain runs deep.
Let us explore it... together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me... and gain strength from the sharing.
Translate any normal sentence into, say, Japanese via any translator of your choice. Then have a native speaker read that translation. Enjoy the looks they give you. And for extra fun, have your translator then take its own output and translate it back to English and marvel at how mucked up it is. Then try telling me how "easy" a translator would be able to handle metaphors again.
Translate any normal sentence into, say, Japanese via any translator of your choice. Then have a native speaker read that translation. Enjoy the looks they give you. And for extra fun, have your translator then take its own output and translate it back to English and marvel at how mucked up it is. Then try telling me how "easy" a translator would be able to handle metaphors again.
Heck, idioms sometimes don't translate even when both parties are speaking the same language. See number 2 on this list: the American author's Finnish in-laws misunderstood him when he did the American thing of telling them he'd love to meet up again. Over here it's just courtesy, but they thought he was actively trying to set up a date.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Translate any normal sentence into, say, Japanese via any translator of your choice. Then have a native speaker read that translation. Enjoy the looks they give you. And for extra fun, have your translator then take its own output and translate it back to English and marvel at how mucked up it is. Then try telling me how "easy" a translator would be able to handle metaphors again.
Universal Translators seem to be a lot better than what we have right now. A lot of the translation issues we have right now is that the same word used in different contexts has different meanings (plus that grammar is hard). You're comparing apples to... apple seeds.
A ruler can be a governor or a way to measure a length. This isn't a metaphor, however. It's just one word with two meanings.
The point to understand here is that to an English Speaker, "Romeo and Juliet on a Balcony" is a sequence of words. But if we invented a language this sequence of words for romance, for a translation tool "Romeo and Juliet on a Balcony" would appear only as a single word, since Romeo, Juliet, and, on, a, Balcony are just components of that word - basically, letters. Even if the words would be used in other words/metaphors, they'd still be no more than letters.
In some languages (At least some forms of Chinese Writing for example) the signs for a word consist of multiple smaller words that have their own meaning. If the Universal Translators would fail to translate Chinese Writing, then I am surprised they can translate any alien language on the fly at all, or that they almost never fail to translate something.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Translate any normal sentence into, say, Japanese via any translator of your choice. Then have a native speaker read that translation. Enjoy the looks they give you. And for extra fun, have your translator then take its own output and translate it back to English and marvel at how mucked up it is. Then try telling me how "easy" a translator would be able to handle metaphors again.
The most famous (although, sadly, probably apocryphal) version was an early translation program intended to translate idiomatic speech from English to Russian and back again. The first phrase tried was, "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." According to legend, when translated to Russian and back to English again, the output was, "The vodka is strong, but the meat has gone bad."
Universal Translators seem to be a lot better than what we have right now. A lot of the translation issues we have right now is that the same word used in different contexts has different meanings (plus that grammar is hard). You're comparing apples to... apple seeds.
My point was to highlight that translating ANYTHING isnt easy, translating a language AND a metaphor is a royal beeotch!
Darmok was, IMO, the best attempt on Trek yet to show a truly alien viewpoint. Not entirely successful, of course, but at least the Children of Tama aren't just a thinly-disguised modern Earth culture with rubber foreheads. And I did appreciate the script pointing out that groups of sounds aren't necessarily unique ("Darmok" is a folk hero on this world, a frozen dessert on that one, etc). Reminiscent of the Gynnan Tonix in The Restaurant At the End of the Universe. (For those who didn't read that, for shame. And also, one of the odd facts of the galaxy is that every culture has invented a drink that sounds like "gin and tonic", or "gynnan tonnyx", or "jian anto'nicks". That's all they have in common - one is tepid tap water, another is a drink so potent it's been compared to a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster - but young students of evolutionary linguistics tend to get all excited about this, then become old and cynical students of evolutionary linguistics w0hen they learn that all of this is mere coincidence, and start drinking Ouisgian Zodahs.)
Excuse me, I am dumb. I confused a DS9 episode with some Bajoran creature attacking a village with the TNG episode. Go on, nothing to see here.
Darmok was in fact an excellent episode. (Though to be honest, its linguistic problem seems like a non-issue if the universal translators were a real thing. The difference between a metaphor in a foreign langue and a word in foreign language word is non-existent if you don't speak the language in the first place. Only if they started out speaking English and then added the metaphor layer could there be an issue, because the universal translator detects english and doesn't try translating.)
Well, the Tamarians seemed to be using metaphors within their own language, not as the language (though one has to wonder how a society can function if it communicates exclusively through metaphors... not to mention how they got there in the first place). The UT can easily figure out the syntactic and grammatical meaning of what has been said - but as was pointed out in the episode, things like 'Romeo and Juliet on a balcony', or in this case 'Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra', don't really have much meaning unless you are familiar with the underlying stories. It's a two-layer translation that the translators obviously can't tackle.
Translating into different languages is a transformation that is basically like encrypting something. Encrypting something twice generally does not make your encryption harder to crack.
If you replaced every instance of the word "romance" with "Romeo and Juliet on a balcony", someone translating from your Shakespearean-Metaphor-English into another language would never need to find out that "Romeo and Juliet on a balcony" means that "Romeo and Juliet" are two persons or what a balcony means. In the context you use it, this is your word for romance. (Of course, language translations is more than just learning individual word meaning).
If you hear me say "Düvel" a few times when I break something or I hurt myself, you will get the feeling that I am probably using some kind of curse word. You might translate it as "f*ck", and it would be sufficient for us understanding each other, even if the words we use have also other meanings that are notably different in our respective languages.
For an only slightly less alien example: in French "please" is the phrase si vous plait. why? No idea...
I thought the Tamarian language was a clever idea at first, but the more I think about it the less I like it. Why? how does a child learn? How do you tell the story of Darmok and Jalad via metaphor?
Darmok was, IMO, the best attempt on Trek yet to show a truly alien viewpoint. Not entirely successful, of course, but at least the Children of Tama aren't just a thinly-disguised modern Earth culture with rubber foreheads. And I did appreciate the script pointing out that groups of sounds aren't necessarily unique ("Darmok" is a folk hero on this world, a frozen dessert on that one, etc). Reminiscent of the Gynnan Tonix in The Restaurant At the End of the Universe. (For those who didn't read that, for shame. And also, one of the odd facts of the galaxy is that every culture has invented a drink that sounds like "gin and tonic", or "gynnan tonnyx", or "jian anto'nicks". That's all they have in common - one is tepid tap water, another is a drink so potent it's been compared to a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster - but young students of evolutionary linguistics tend to get all excited about this, then become old and cynical students of evolutionary linguistics w0hen they learn that all of this is mere coincidence, and start drinking Ouisgian Zodahs.)
Excuse me, I am dumb. I confused a DS9 episode with some Bajoran creature attacking a village with the TNG episode. Go on, nothing to see here.
Darmok was in fact an excellent episode. (Though to be honest, its linguistic problem seems like a non-issue if the universal translators were a real thing. The difference between a metaphor in a foreign langue and a word in foreign language word is non-existent if you don't speak the language in the first place. Only if they started out speaking English and then added the metaphor layer could there be an issue, because the universal translator detects english and doesn't try translating.)
Well, the Tamarians seemed to be using metaphors within their own language, not as the language (though one has to wonder how a society can function if it communicates exclusively through metaphors... not to mention how they got there in the first place). The UT can easily figure out the syntactic and grammatical meaning of what has been said - but as was pointed out in the episode, things like 'Romeo and Juliet on a balcony', or in this case 'Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra', don't really have much meaning unless you are familiar with the underlying stories. It's a two-layer translation that the translators obviously can't tackle.
Translating into different languages is a transformation that is basically like encrypting something. Encrypting something twice generally does not make your encryption harder to crack.
If you replaced every instance of the word "romance" with "Romeo and Juliet on a balcony", someone translating from your Shakespearean-Metaphor-English into another language would never need to find out that "Romeo and Juliet on a balcony" means that "Romeo and Juliet" are two persons or what a balcony means. In the context you use it, this is your word for romance. (Of course, language translations is more than just learning individual word meaning).
If you hear me say "Düvel" a few times when I break something or I hurt myself, you will get the feeling that I am probably using some kind of curse word. You might translate it as "f*ck", and it would be sufficient for us understanding each other, even if the words we use have also other meanings that are notably different in our respective languages.
For an only slightly less alien example: in French "please" is the phrase si vous plait. why? No idea...
I thought the Tamarian language was a clever idea at first, but the more I think about it the less I like it. Why? how does a child learn? How do you tell the story of Darmok and Jalad via metaphor?
Well, children partly pick up language by osmosis from their parents anyway: not just through being actively taught but simply by imitating them. (Which is why you don't cuss around the baby...)
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch." "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Passion and Serenity are one.
I gain power by understanding both.
In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
The Force is united within me.
Hehe, there are a lot of confusing things about French.
Anyways, learning words through osmosis is over rated. Sure it works, I learned a fair bit of Japanese simply by watching anime with the original dialog and subtitles. But you don't really understand it. It's more guesswork than anything.
Universal Translators seem to be a lot better than what we have right now. A lot of the translation issues we have right now is that the same word used in different contexts has different meanings (plus that grammar is hard). You're comparing apples to... apple seeds.
My point was to highlight that translating ANYTHING isnt easy, translating a language AND a metaphor is a royal beeotch!
It seems I really fail at communicating my point.
You don't need to translate a language and a metaphor. You just translate a language. It happens to be that the words in these languages were also originally metaphors. But you don't need to know that. You don't actually need to know who Darmok and Jalad were, or that Tanagra was a place. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra is the Tamarian word for cooperation.
Imagine for a moment the english language was actually made from metaphors. cooperation is actaully a metaphor, it refers to cooand per on the island of ation. persistance is also a metaphor. The same per from cooperation broke through the iron wall of sistance by bringing it down millimeter by millimeter over months - real persistance.
Would you actually need to know this to understand these details to understand the english language?
The above examles are obviously a bit silly, but a lot of the words we use in any language have roots where they tended to have a different or more specific meaning then we use now, possibly leaned from another language - but you don't need to know these roots to use or translate the words.
---
Anyway... more news about the new Star Trek show? If they want to start next year, when will they start casting actors?
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Well, children partly pick up language by osmosis from their parents anyway: not just through being actively taught but simply by imitating them. (Which is why you don't cuss around the baby...)
If your aunt comes by repeatedly and says, something like "I brought you Temba, his arms wide", the kid will learn that "Temba, his arms wide" must mean a gift. It will never that Temba is a person from the context. Just like a British kid doesn't know about g, i, f or t, really, until the parents or teachers teach it about the alphabet and writing.
And that's the same for someone trying to translate the language. Later, some Tamarian professor might educate him about the roots of the word.
Hehe, there are a lot of confusing things about French.
Anyways, learning words through osmosis is over rated. Sure it works, I learned a fair bit of Japanese simply by watching anime with the original dialog and subtitles. But you don't really understand it. It's more guesswork than anything.
You were not a baby when you started watchnig animé. And watching animé is still not the same as interacting with real people.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Comments
Your own sense of scale needs a bit of tweaking. A minimum population could be in the low hundreds, and, if memory serves, was in the low hundreds in some colonies portrayed throughout the franchise's history.
Anyway, since you don't seem to be crying foul over the 'women and children' bit itself, I should probably take this moment to point out that only the children on the colony can be reasonably assumed to be completely innocent in the matter.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
EDIT:
Interesting. I was just thinking further about how Year of Hell was both great and a missed opportunity - one of the beauties of showing characters in extreme situations is that we and they learn something about them. Resetting things means the learnings are lost.
Distant Voices was also an attempt to look closer into Bashir's character. (I am not convinced it was a good one, though).
^this
Aw... weren't you just calling me a hipster for pointing out that exact thing?
Considering there were originally supposed to only be twelve Galaxy-class ships and half of them were mothballed? I doubt it. Remember, this is the overconfident early TNG Federation we're talking about.
I'm reminded of a funny bit in one of the Stardoc novels (Shockball, I think) where Cherijo and Duncan are arguing over baby names for their daughter. Cherijo keeps choosing Anglosphere names, Duncan keeps shooting them down after noting what nasty thing they mean in the bajillion alien languages he speaks. She shoots down his suggestions because she has trouble pronouncing them ("It has to have vowels.").
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
As for the comments about colony sizes... I've always found it sad how most colonies in the shows are treated like they are just small little rural towns on other planets. Even the ones that are said to be really old typically only have populations of a few hundred people. Most of them seem to have populations so low that they couldn't possibly be viable in the long term. I realize it is a budgetary thing, with them not having the resources to portray the colonies as being full planetary nations, but it still bugs me.
This
In my opinion this is one of the most common misconceptions about Trek. Earth and only Earth evolved to a point that poverty and scarcity of livelihoods doesn't exist any more. This is mostly not true for any other world and building starships is still a resource straining process which is also the TM reason for just a couple of Galaxy capital ships being build.
I also don't think Starfleet only having twenty ships total makes a lot of sense. This comes up often but neither can it be proven nor sufficiently convincing be extrapolated. It makes more sense to assume the loss of 39 ships is a huge blow because big fleets are something generally rare in Trek, engagements rarely had more than a hooffull of ships and attempted invasions were made with three transporters. The Dominion and DS9s visual attempt to get closer to other franchises changed that, but by far and large it seems to be a rule in this universe that there just aren't hundreds of ships at a time in a fleet. The sheer size of the UFP and Starfeet's mission however makes a crippling blow in sheer numbers after Wolf 359 unlikely.
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
Whereas I WELCOME any choice of eras where the setting hadn't yet gone post-singularity, blowing it narrative brains out with casual, targeted time travel in the hands of Starfleet...
Excuse me, I am dumb. I confused a DS9 episode with some Bajoran creature attacking a village with the TNG episode. Go on, nothing to see here.
Darmok was in fact an excellent episode. (Though to be honest, its linguistic problem seems like a non-issue if the universal translators were a real thing. The difference between a metaphor in a foreign langue and a word in foreign language word is non-existent if you don't speak the language in the first place. Only if they started out speaking English and then added the metaphor layer could there be an issue, because the universal translator detects english and doesn't try translating.)
If it was me, I'd retcon the sh*t out of casual time travel in Star Trek. There will certainly never be an "era" where time travel is standard operating procedure in my headcanon.
If you can't find strong limits for your time travel, you can't really have a meaningful story. Unless you kinda go all crazy like Doctor Who perhaps. (And Doctor Who is awesome, no doubts about that, but it's also totally different from Star Trek.)
youtube.
Well, the Tamarians seemed to be using metaphors within their own language, not as the language (though one has to wonder how a society can function if it communicates exclusively through metaphors... not to mention how they got there in the first place). The UT can easily figure out the syntactic and grammatical meaning of what has been said - but as was pointed out in the episode, things like 'Romeo and Juliet on a balcony', or in this case 'Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra', don't really have much meaning unless you are familiar with the underlying stories. It's a two-layer translation that the translators obviously can't tackle.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
I still can't see how they would maintain the sheer scale of the Federation with such a small fleet. The Federation is spread amongst a huge area of space with colonies being formed all the time, plus all the space stuff to scan. Look at all the stuff the Ent D did in early TNG, I can't believe that was only one of up to 50 ships doing the same thing.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
If you replaced every instance of the word "romance" with "Romeo and Juliet on a balcony", someone translating from your Shakespearean-Metaphor-English into another language would never need to find out that "Romeo and Juliet on a balcony" means that "Romeo and Juliet" are two persons or what a balcony means. In the context you use it, this is your word for romance. (Of course, language translations is more than just learning individual word meaning).
If you hear me say "Düvel" a few times when I break something or I hurt myself, you will get the feeling that I am probably using some kind of curse word. You might translate it as "f*ck", and it would be sufficient for us understanding each other, even if the words we use have also other meanings that are notably different in our respective languages.
"Because the guy is really clumsy..."
Starfleet would have to have a large fleet. You figure that they have to patrol and protect the federation planets, explore space and do all the other stuff we've seen the shows and movies do. The other thing is there would be a lot of redundancies. Say if it took 10 ships to do the Starfleet's job...they'd have 20-30 ships so that if the Enterprise is in dry dock for maintenance it doesn't leave a massive hole in defenses or the mission. This would eliminate the tired troupe of the Enterprise being the only ship in range to respond to something...that may work when they are on deep space patrol but not when something is bearing down on the capitol of the Federation.
Currently the US Navy has 275 ships (yes I know Starfleet isn't the Navy) and they are never all gone at the same time.
Let us explore it... together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me... and gain strength from the sharing.
Heck, idioms sometimes don't translate even when both parties are speaking the same language. See number 2 on this list: the American author's Finnish in-laws misunderstood him when he did the American thing of telling them he'd love to meet up again. Over here it's just courtesy, but they thought he was actively trying to set up a date.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
A ruler can be a governor or a way to measure a length. This isn't a metaphor, however. It's just one word with two meanings.
The point to understand here is that to an English Speaker, "Romeo and Juliet on a Balcony" is a sequence of words. But if we invented a language this sequence of words for romance, for a translation tool "Romeo and Juliet on a Balcony" would appear only as a single word, since Romeo, Juliet, and, on, a, Balcony are just components of that word - basically, letters. Even if the words would be used in other words/metaphors, they'd still be no more than letters.
In some languages (At least some forms of Chinese Writing for example) the signs for a word consist of multiple smaller words that have their own meaning. If the Universal Translators would fail to translate Chinese Writing, then I am surprised they can translate any alien language on the fly at all, or that they almost never fail to translate something.
My point was to highlight that translating ANYTHING isnt easy, translating a language AND a metaphor is a royal beeotch!
I thought the Tamarian language was a clever idea at first, but the more I think about it the less I like it. Why? how does a child learn? How do you tell the story of Darmok and Jalad via metaphor?
My character Tsin'xing
Well, children partly pick up language by osmosis from their parents anyway: not just through being actively taught but simply by imitating them. (Which is why you don't cuss around the baby...)
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Anyways, learning words through osmosis is over rated. Sure it works, I learned a fair bit of Japanese simply by watching anime with the original dialog and subtitles. But you don't really understand it. It's more guesswork than anything.
My character Tsin'xing
You don't need to translate a language and a metaphor. You just translate a language. It happens to be that the words in these languages were also originally metaphors. But you don't need to know that. You don't actually need to know who Darmok and Jalad were, or that Tanagra was a place. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra is the Tamarian word for cooperation.
Imagine for a moment the english language was actually made from metaphors.
cooperation is actaully a metaphor, it refers to cooand per on the island of ation.
persistance is also a metaphor. The same per from cooperation broke through the iron wall of sistance by bringing it down millimeter by millimeter over months - real persistance.
Would you actually need to know this to understand these details to understand the english language?
The above examles are obviously a bit silly, but a lot of the words we use in any language have roots where they tended to have a different or more specific meaning then we use now, possibly leaned from another language - but you don't need to know these roots to use or translate the words.
---
Anyway... more news about the new Star Trek show? If they want to start next year, when will they start casting actors?
And that's the same for someone trying to translate the language. Later, some Tamarian professor might educate him about the roots of the word.
You were not a baby when you started watchnig animé. And watching animé is still not the same as interacting with real people.