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From: Peter Stephenson <pws@ibmth.df.unipi.it> Subject: Re: (urth) Cursing in Old Solar Date: Sat, 31 Oct 1998 16:58:18 +0100 Dan Parmenter wrote: > Of course Star Trek handled this same concept rather well in the > "Darmok" episode, which for my money is probably one of the better > popular treatments of this sort of thing. The premise was of our > Captain Picard marooned on a planet with some humanoid alien who even > through the Universal Translator seemed to be spouting gibberish. It > turns out that all conversation among these people is expressed in > stock phrases from their "national epic". Picard figures it out, > hilarity ensues, I think there's probably some shooting at some point. > Good episode. I enjoyed it too, and it certainly seems relevant to the Ascians, but put in this context the idea struck me as utterly implausible. I can't understand how a space-faring culture could ever get off the ground if instead of `Captain, the dilithium crystals canna take it' they have to say something like `Laforge, crawling around in a flimsy studio tunnel again'. Well, all right, they do that every episode so it's completely transparent after all, but think of any mildly technical sentence you like and try to construct a parallel for it using only references to ancient epics. (`And Arjuna said: "How then shall I rig the transporter beam so that the army of the Pandavas arrives in the hold of the freighter without the phaselock undergoing quantum degradation, O Krishna?"...') Maybe it's another example of what I was talking about a couple of weeks ago with respect to Wolfe's science: the idea of the Ascian language works perfectly in the context Wolfe uses it, exactly because you're never shown an example where an Ascian is saying `You two go round the other side of the hill, wait till exactly 11:35 and take out the two sentries without making any noise'. Maybe, too, the trick in Star Trek is different, maybe if it works there it's because there is such a limited repertoire of things you can do: beam up, beam down, lock on tractor beam, set phasers to stun, pick up strange vibrations (Troy only), engage, ... -- Peter Stephenson <pws@ibmth.df.unipi.it> Tel: +39 050 844536 WWW: http://www.ifh.de/~pws/ Dipartimento di Fisica, Via Buonarotti 2, 56100 Pisa, Italy *More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/