TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

Yeah, linguistics is always an absolute abomination in Trek. i'm just getting through Enterprise now and despite the idea of the development of the universal translator being done by a hot korean linguist of my dreams, you'd think this show would culminate in everything i love in the world, and yet it's tacky, poorly thought out, and leaves so much unexplained. yeah, okay, she can communicate in a brand new language if she just believes in herself. right, that's how it works. they just can't handle linguistics in Trek. i wish they just overlooked it altogether and attributed it to narrative limitations.

BUT that said, the Darmok people communicate via allegory. you're right that allegory would need something to be based on, which indicates that the proto-language for the Allegorical Language was something that did have more familiar semantics. but over time it evolved to only use the allegories as signifiers themselves, thus words like "welcome" fell into antiquity while "his arms wide" came into common usage. honestly this episode was one of the rare times when linguistic questions were handled with somewhat appropriate depth and care! there's a lot of cool questions we could look at from the idea of an allegorical language.

also props to Enterprise for at least suggesting something cool in the Risa episode of S1: "i can't say it any slower; it'd change the meaning". i have never heard of an Earth language with this property. do you know if there is one? what other Trek episodes do linguistics well?