this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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Risa
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Come on'n get your jamaharon on! There are no real rules—just don't break the weather control network.
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They may have tried that in the past to no avail. The episode specifically mentions there was several failed attempts at first contact.
A guide only works if you understand the guide. Think of it like this, if I sent you all 1679 ones and zeros from the arecibo message to you, but you didn't understand the concept of zero, you'd have a hard time understanding what the message meant, even if the message itself was self explanatory.
Their language isn't just grammatically different, it is uses a fundamentally different structure, and the Tamarian brain might be structurally different as well, able to easily account for language when young. So there may not be much of a "base language" that the metaphors are built on so to speak.
Take a look at the Pioneer spacecrafts' plaques. NASA scientists have broken down our abstract expression of distance to language-agnostic universal constants. I refuse to believe that a space-faring civilization with friendly intentions wouldn't do everything in its power to find a common language, no matter how far removed from their spoken language.
They've also run things like the pioneer plaques (or maybe it was arecibo) past other scientists, who often have difficulty discerning the meaning behind them. If human scientists have difficulty discerning the meaning, I can only imagine what kind of difficulty aliens who speak in metaphor would have, let alone if they weren't linguists/scientists, which appear to be the case in the episode.
We evolved to hunt, and so it is suspected that as a result of that, we understand arrows to indicate direction. A species that hasn't evolved in such a way might not understand the meaning of arrows. Apply that same principle to language and you potentially have your problem.