I gotta shorten it I think but here's my response for linguistics class on the Tamarian language from the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Darmok", this was really fun to make and i’m kinda proud of my analysis:
In the Star Trek, The Next Generation episode “Darmok”, the Tamarian species is introduced along with its very strange language. Their language is different to human language in that it is nonspecific, and has no words to refer to oneself. This is because of its other difference, which is that it uses metaphors instead of just saying what one means. Every phrase they have is a person or place in a certain location or time. For instance, “The river Temarc in winter” means something like “be quiet”, as the captain uses the phrase to tell someone to stop talking, alluding to the silence of a frozen river. They also use shortened versions of these, as he also says “The river Temarc” to mean the same thing, and while trying to offer peace to Picard, he uses “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” and “Darmok and Jalad” interchangeably as well. The first point of understood communication between a Tamarian and another species is when their captain gives Picard a burning stick from his campfire so he won’t be cold, saying “Temba, his arms wide”, where Picard deciphers that this refers to a person having his arms open in generosity, being a metaphor for giving him a gift. Picard then picks up the stick and says thank you, opening his arms to relate his words to the metaphor, and the captain smiles in relief and understanding. The captain also said “Shaka when the walls fell” when Picard failed to make a fire himself at first, and later repeats the phrase. Picard pieces that together with their failure to defeat an enemy, and asks “Is that a failure? An inability to do something?” The captain then says “Uzani, his army with fists open! His army with fists closed!” And Picard deciphers that the first part means to lure in the enemy by spreading out, and the second means to attack. From his experience trying to understand Tamarian phrases, he figures out that “That’s how [they] communicate, isn’t it, by citing example! By metaphor!” The captain then exclaims “Sokath, his eyes uncovered!”, which contextually, and since uncovering one’s eyes means they can see, must mean understanding. Later Picard asks the captain to explain the meaning behind the phrases, bringing up the ones he knows, figuring out that certain words are names or locations, and the captain repeats relevant phrases, from which Picard pieces together the story of “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra”, two Tamarians who came to an island and were brought together by fighting a common foe. This story contextualizes the language in that each phrase is like a sentence in a story book, connected to that part in the story. This particular story explains “Darmok on the ocean” as loneliness, as he started out his journey alone; “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” as cooperation, as they work together while on the island; and “Darmok and Jalad on the ocean” as people coming together through defeating a challenge, as they leave together. (same paragraph, character limit->)
Their high regard for these myths and stories is why Picard was beamed down with the captain in the first place, because the captain hoped they would come together in cooperation to defeat the creature on the planet, paralleling Darmok’s story. Troi, an empath, sensed at the beginning that the Tamarians had only good intentions, and she and Data listen back to a recording of their call with the Tamarians, searching databases for the words they hear: “Darmok” and “Tanagra” from “Darmok at Tanagra”. Later explaining their findings with the rest of the crew, Data says they use “narrative imagery” to communicate, and Troi compares their speech to if she said “Juliet on her balcony”, which Crusher says would mean “An image of romance.” This is where it does relate to human language, as Data says “The situation is analogous to understanding the grammar of a language but not the vocabulary”, and Crusher adds “If I didn’t know who Juliet was, or what she was doing on that balcony, the image alone wouldn’t have any meaning.” Troi brings up the particular phrase they’re trying to decipher, saying “For instance, we know that Darmok was a great hero, a hunter, and that Tanagra was an island, but that’s it. Without the details, there’s no understanding.” and Data says “It is necessary for us to learn the narrative from which the Tamarians draw their imagery.” Tamarian language is similar to human language, in that it has a definitive structure. Picard relates Darmok’s story to the epic of Gilgamesh, where people came together to defeat an enemy. Trying to bridge their language gap by comparison, and to help the captain understand his words, he says “Gilgamesh and Enkidu at Uruk”. He also later says “More familiarity with our own mythology might help us to relate to theirs.” He then comes back and calls the rest of the Tamarian crew to tell them he’s learned some of their language, desires peace, and that their captain died, and one of them says “Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel”, showing they do have names for present-day people, or at least nouns that can refer to them, and that when new events come up they refer to them by phrasing them like their current phrases. This shows their sentence structure to be names, optionally with other names, at places, or doing activities. This single sentence shows that they don’t just say events that happened because that’s what they were taught, but that there is also a structure to how they say it, and that they are capable of making new phrases and words as long as it fits this structure. This is like English, in that we have sets of words we already use, like Darmok can be replaced with Picard we can make new nouns and verbs. Their adherence to saying “at” or “with” is comparable to our closed class words, like determiners. English also uses metaphors, even, as at the end Picard is reading the Homeric Hymns and says it’s “…one of the root metaphors of our own culture.” All our words only have meaning because we’re told it, and like Picard deciphering “Temba, his arms wide”, we can figure out meaning through context clues, so we don’t have to know the etymology of every word.
The Tamarian’s language is a possible language for a species to have. I went back and forth on this a lot, because there are a lot of reasons to the contrary. The universal translator transfers another’s thoughts into one’s own language, so it should be able to do the same for this language and simplify out the metaphors into proper English. Its inability to do this is a sign their language is incomplete. Also, since it’s so nonspecific, certain important things would be unable to be communicated, like “Chris needs you to grab a wrench out of the blue toolbox”. Finally, you need a language to tell these stories and say the metaphors with, something with other words to give the full picture. Originally the first and last points were going to make my final answer be that their odd way of speaking may not be a language at all, but rather just an odd way of speaking while using another language. In the end, I changed my mind, because like I said before, human language has its own metaphors and etymologies. People don’t all know “mad as a hatter” refers to hat makers in the past getting poisoned from the mercury they used in their hats, yet we all know it means someone is very, very crazy. We also have words borrowed from other languages, like ballet is from French, and you could go further than that to find out the ways words were changed throughout the years to morph into that form. This means that there could at one point have been another Tamarian language, or even that they borrowed from another species’ language, and that its morphing into its current form is valid as its own separate language. Also, communicating complex ideas shouldn’t be hard for someone well-versed in the language, and we may not have even seen the most complex phrases as they were talking to foreigners, and we all try to simplify our words and sentences when speaking to those who don’t know our language at all. We actually communicate complex things all the time, with memes. There is a screenshot from Sonic where Eggman walks into a room with Rouge the Bat and Shadow the Hedgehog in it, and in a popular fan dub of the game the line said at that moment is “What are you two f*cking talking about?” This means someone can send a textless screenshot of this moment, and communicate that they either don’t understand what’s being said, or that even though they do understand they think the topic is absurd. Children could acquire such a language by being introduced to it by their elders, but would not come up with it themselves as they’d need the historical context explained to hold any value in the metaphors. Picard learned Darmok’s story through noting the context in and the tone with which the captain repeated the phrases, and then the captain put them in order and Picard drew out the tale with a rock and a stick in the sand.
