Shaka, when the walls fell.

[colonel_green]

Four scans from Avengers: The Initiative #34.  I usually wait until someone else posts before posting again, but it's been a while.

 

This being a Siege tie-in, it's one of at least four books (the others being New Avengers, Thor, and Thunderbolts) coming out this week that all have basically the same climax:  Asgard gets brought down on top of everybody.  This issue begins with the Hood and co. bugging out of Camp HAMMER to join the fight at Asgard, pissing off Tigra, who wanted to finish him off (it's almost meta-commentary).

Also building off an incident from #3, Steve fights Taskmaster briefly, but has bigger fish to fry, so he asks Bucky to take him on, since Taskmaster's never fought him.  They duke it out for a bit.



Elsewhere, Diamondback and her beau Constrictor watch as the military intervenes against HAMMER (which Rachel observes could only happen on the President's orders), and Steve and Tony engage Norman.  Obviously, the good guys are going to carry the day.





Final page:  Asgard falls.

Tune in next month.
 



char: diamondback/rachel leighton, char: captain america/bucky barnes, char: taskmaster, char: sentry/bob reynolds, char: green goblin/norman osborn, char: constrictor/frank payne, title: avengers the initiative, publisher: marvel comics, creator: christos gage, creator: jorge molina

Comments

[shadowpsykie]

Shamefully it took me a second look to recognize that.

I am an english major, so an episode dedicated to a people who used stories to communicate made me squee :)

[icon_uk]

It bugged the hell out of me, because it seems to suffer from the problem that such a language would on the path to self destruction.

A language based entirely on inference and metaphor can't work, because how could they have developed the initial story to reference, since it would have had to be defined by earlier metaphors and so on.

If it's a more recent development of an earlier, more common language form, then it's disappearing up it's own backside, limiting itself to earlier references.

[shadowpsykie]

Well the way I saw it, the Llanguage," could have been based on actions, they gave terms to the actions (actions take place before words for them) and used the "phrases" based on previous actions. So "Tom Throws the ball," would be used instead of, "Let's play catch," see the words exist, but the "language," structure is not based on stringing words together, instead its based on usuing phrases from an oral tradition of stories and stringing those together.

Hmmm you see how we string words together, "lets-go-out," they would say, "janet and brad, at the soda shop," that phrase would mean "Let's go out on a date,"

Arg I'm making it more complicated than need be. The words they use exist, but they don't use them the same, they use phrases from oral tradition the way we use words or letters. Think of the way some words in a phrase switch order when you translate them into or from another language. Look at the phrases as individual words as opposed to actual phrases

[icon_uk]

Except I don't think an oral tradition can exist in a language where every reference harks back to an earlier one. Well, maybe it could, but it couldn't be adapted to a present tense.

For example, "janet and brad, at the soda shop" can't be referenced, because when brad and janet did go to the soda shop, they would have had to describe it as "bob and carol at the tea shoppe", since the concept of a direct reference doesn't exist in their language.

[shadowpsykie]

I would agree with you if the words themself mattered, the words only matter in that the words describe an action. Ot could be the soda shop, the tea shoppe, or the oxygen bar, what matters is that it describes two people going out together.

Brad and janet at the night club
Is one word,
Brad and janet with the stars out
Is another word
Brad and janet joined together
Is yet another word.

The phrases together create the sentence. The actual words don't matter so much as the meaning of the words

[icon_uk]

That must mean that there are TWO languages existing in parallel, the one which defines what words mean, and the other which defines how words are used.

The former is translatable (otherwise words like "when the walls fell" would be untranslatable), the latter is not. "Shaka, when the walls fell" is meaningless without a contextual knowledge of a legend which must have been taught to their children. So how did the children learn the legend of Shaka in the first place, in a language which can't express a concept without having an earlier, pre-existing reference to refer to?

After writing this, I googled Darmok to see if I could get a handle on this issue, and mercifully, found this which handily shares my problem with the language as shown in the episode, even down to the double language problem.

[colonel_green]

I agree it's doubtful as a real language. But it's a neat concept for an episode.

[shadowpsykie]

Hmmm one can argue that they had a language in the begining in which objects and such could be made, let's call these words letters.

From those words they created the phrases, let's call these phrases words.

From those phrases stories evolved, let's call these phrases sentences.

Now they uses these sentences or phrases like we use words.

We can argue that maybe as their language evolved in this way, they chose to communicate using these phrases sentences instead of word sentences. To us a letter means nothing other than that letter until more are added "a" is only "a" until we add "N," "D" in which case it means "and." To them a word means nothing unless accompanied by other words. "Dance," means little more than "A" until "Brad and Janet," is added.

The universal translator has had trouble translating certain words before. So an "untranslatable word," has happened before

[icon_uk]

Oh indeed it has, and in fact one of the better, if underused, plot points in "Enterprise" was the fact they DID specifically have an exolinguist in the team whose speciality was developing the Universal Translator.

As seen though, the Children of Tama's language was not untranslateable though, it was just nonsensical without the cultural context.

It tired to have it both ways; a language made up of translatable components (So the plot could be advanced) but the meaning of which could not be translated (To add the layer of bafflement we ended up with). (And Picard having to rely on reading alien body langauge as an emotional cue to infer the underlying meaning of the terms made just as little sense, given that shaking ones head doesn't mean the same thing even between various human cultures on Earth, never mind what aliens might make of it)

As noted, it's an interesting idea, but as presented I don't think it worked as a plot, and I certainly can't see it ever working as a living language.

[lamashtar]

Friend of mine said Apache is kind of like that.

[ulf_boehnke]

My theory is that they have two languages.

They use the "plain language" to teach the children about the "metaphor language" of the grown-ups. Similar to the Japanese system of hiragana for children and kanji for grown-ups.

In other words, they think the other races use baby-speak.

[icon_uk]

Which would be fine, because you can communicate via hiragana to a decent extent, the Children of Tama would be capable of communicating most of what they needed in that way. They don't appear to be able to do that.