I think only a hard-core Chinese language learner could write an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation like “Darmok.”

Or at least the writer would have had to know a lot about the Chinese language.

I probably would never have thought of this had I never read this fantastic article from the Atlantic that analyzes that episode in beautiful depth.

You should definitely read that article, but even if you do you might wonder what this has to do with Chinese.

So the article talks about how important allegory is in the Tamarian language, and though Chinese is not a copy of Tamarian, there are a lot more references to stories and concepts in shortened-title form than their are in English.

The chengyu (成语) are four-character phrases when translated often literally make no sense. Sadly for me, there are between 5,000 and 20,000 of them in the Chinese language.

The first one I learned was luan qi ba zao (乱七八糟). Let me break down every character’s meaning first:

乱–in disorder; in a mess

七–seven

八–eight

糟–distillers’ grains; be pickled with grains or in wine; rotten poor; in a wretched or terrible state

Now for the whole thing:

乱七八糟–in great disorder; in an awful mess (usually a literal, physical mess such as in “his bedroom is a total mess”)

That wasn’t too bad. There are a couple of numbers in the middle for reasons I still don’t understand, but not too bad.

Let’s do one more, my favorite one so far: Yegong hao long (叶公好龙）

叶公–Lord Ye

好–usually means good, but here means “loves” or “has a hobby of”

龙–dragon

This one, like many (probably most) chengyu has a story attached. If you don’t know the story, then the chengyu doesn’t make any sense.

This man Lord Ye loved dragons. He covered his walls and house with dragon images and memorabilia. One day he answers the door and there’s a real-live dragon there saying hi. And Lord Ye runs away frightened half to death.

This chengyu means “professed love of what one really fears.” Not only is there no way of getting that meaning from those four characters, but there is a proper noun in the chengyu! This isn’t a unique one, either.

There are many more interesting chengyu out there. And sometimes changing just one character can totally change the meaning of a chengyu.

There’s no way to guess that meaning from the chengyu alone, as is the case with virtually all the chengyu.

But these are used all the time in communication, even in newspaper articles I am told.

This is part of the reason Chinese is so hard and takes such a long time to learn. Just like with the Star Trek alien language, if you don’t have the context behind the words, then the words make no sense.

When I saw this episode for the first time, it was just a weird concept and a weird episode. But with each chengyu I am taught, I understand more and more that this episode wasn’t just some product of a trippy dream. It must have been a result of studying Chinese or other language with a lot of chengyu-like elements.

I thought this was interesting, so I hope you enjoyed it. 🙂