Amiram Hayardeny's My China Experience

Difficult Communication

As I said numerous times, I am a Star Trek fan.  My friend Dave Stewart, in a comment to a previous entry wrote about a book : "All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Watching Star Trek." (http://www.amazon.com/Really-Need-Know-Learned-Watching/dp/0517883864).  And although it may sound fantastic, I tend to think that there's something to it.  Recommended.

The Tamarians are considered to be a "shy" race.  Various attempts were made to make contact with them, and they all failed.  Nobody, for hundreds of years, could figure out how to communicate with them.  As it turns out, in this episode titled "Darmok", Captain Picard finally succeeds in making contact.  The end is tragic, as the Tamarian counterpart dies at the hands of a local beast, but Picard finally figures out the language.  The language, as it turns out is completely metaphorical (http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Tamarian_language).  When they, for example, want to express failure, they use "Shaka, when the walls fell", referring to some mythological defeat in a battle.  Seeing the efforts that the enterprise crew is making in order to make the contact is almost painful.  And then it hit me.  It simply can't be true.

People who successfully accomplished Warp Drive, space travel, phaser fire power, and successfully outsmarted the Enterprise crew multiple times, must have a more complex language.  Indeed, I agree that the more abstract a language is, the more advanced its speakers are.  A completely abstract language makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to provide detailed instructions for say, engineering projects.  I didn't buy that.  The other thing I didn't buy was that the Tamarians, being as intelligent as they are portrayed, should have been smart enough to know that their completely metaphoric language, based on their own mythology, is too much of a stretch for anyone foreign to understand.  And while Captain Picard is getting blue in the face trying to bridge the gap, the Tamarian captain is repeating his metaphors over and over again ad nausea.

Let me tell a short story and then connect.  When I first came to Beijing, much to my embarrassment, I realized that in order to get myself to work, I needed the address written in Chinese.  I would show it to the taxi driver, and get there.  Same thing going home.  A few weeks after arrival I started feeling really bad about it, so prior to presenting the note, I would try to recite the address.  Believe me, I learned it, recited it, I taped it.  I thought I had it.  But no.  I could say "DongFeng Bei Qiao" until I was blue in the face, and the driver wouldn't even put the car in first gear.  Many times, to my complete surprise, the driver would look at the note, and say: "aha", "DongFeng Bei Qiao", and get going.  And I would sit there, embarrassed, thinking to myself: this is precisely what I just said.  Precisely.

So the truth is, not precisely.  close, but not quite.  I may have missed a tone.

Silly me.  Obviously, in Chinese, there are four (possibly five) tones.  Many words have the same pronunciation, but the tone, or the emphasis, or the "singing" of the word is different.  The famous example is Mama Ma Ma, which means mother buys a horse.  Indeed, the English spelling and the words are the same, but the intonation makes the word.  I was even warned, that if I say a word incorrectly, it may be offensive...

Imagine a similar situation: you walk down the street in Manhattan, when someone asks you for the time.  You say eight, and the guy is ready to beat the crap out of you.  You really don't understand why, but one of New York's finest who happened to have been in the neighborhood tells you that the guy thought you hate him.  Or that you ate.  You see the similarity: eight, hate, ate...  But that doesn't happen, does it?  Could it be because we interpret words by sound AND context?  When you ask a taxi driver to go to DongFeng Bei Qiao, even in a completely wrong intonation, in context of driving a taxi at the end of a work day, how many possible interpretations are there really?

China is a place with thousands of years of history.  It belongs to the Nuclear and the Space Clubs.  It is almost 100% literate, it has excellent engineers, doctors, poets and writers.  I am sure it is fully capable of extending a helping ear to the tone-deaf foreigners and help them be understood.  It will happen, I'm sure.  In due time.

Posted at 07:48AM Sep 05, 2007 by Amiram Hayardeny in Personal  |  Comments[1]