On Thursday (4/8) we watched “Darmok,” an episode of Star Trek that illustrates the difficulties of communicating with an alien species that has a language structured completely differently from human languages. This brought up the question “what is communication?”
Even the Starfleet universal translator failed to interpret the Darmok language because it used references to Darmok legends in order to communicate abstractions or emotions. As a consequence, the only way to understand the Darmok would be to spend time learning their myths and stories, as well as the syntactical methods of interpreting their meanings.
This lesson of understanding might be useful in some of the other novels we read. In order to make Picard understand, the Darmok force him to engage in a Darmok bonding ritual. Many of our novels involve attempts at understanding species whose languages are known. As Sandoz says in The Sparrow, “The ability to speak a language perfectly does not necessarily convey any understanding of it.” (p232) In a way, the Stella Maris crew understands as little about Rakhati culture as the Enterprise crew does about Darmok. Even after living with the Runa, the humans don’t know anything of Jana’ata-Runa relations, and they attempt to involve themselves in them before having a complete understanding. This strikes me as a failure to communicate.
No comments:
Post a Comment