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Topic: Arilou and the Orz: What's the Deal? *spoilers* (Read 98400 times)
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Sinister as they are the Orz don't seem to have immediate apocalyptic designs on the rest of the sector. The VUX are still around, after all, and they speak of *alliance parties* as though they were a common occurrence that they already knew all about (though if the Orz have a twisted time-sense, then who knows?)
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definite
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Don't you believe me? You question my word?
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Chinese doesn't have tensed verbs that change their form based on time. It does, however, have many ways to tell us the time frame a sentence takes place in. The Orz language as we have it presented to us contains no such indications; either their time-indicators are impossible for the translating computer to figure out, or the Orz don't use them.
Well, I will clarify something first. 1. In terms of Chinese, the characters doesn't change to reflect the tenses, but you can add certain terms to express the tenses. (I'm a native speaker, are you?)
2. The reason I mention Chinese here is that some of the guys weight the tenses too much. I would like to introduce the "tenseless" view. As I said before, we don't care the tenses most of the time unless we really need them.
And the Orz aren't learning English -- they aren't even speaking in English in the first place, they're being translated by a computer. There are two possibilities that I see: the Precursor computer is able to magically translate the Orz's language as they speak, but the weirdness of the Orz's thought processes makes the translation inaccurate, or the Precursor computer can translate Orzese because Orzese is based on a different language, and the weirdness of Orzese is *introduced* into that language by the Orz's mindset. The argument that Orzese is just a language that randomly happened to evolve with a certain structure that made it seem weird to us is least compelling to me, since the language thing is clearly meant to be part of an overall presentation of the Orz as more alien than all the other (very non-human) aliens we've met.
Like you said, it is just a game, so for players' convenience, the precursor translating unit is able to get the main idea, but lacks the knowledge. But for me, orzese is not that hard to understand. As long as you don't limit yourself in *tense*. You can understand them better.
The way they talk strangely might point to the fact that they have neighbors in the sense you mean, or that they don't deal with their neighbors in the way that we're used to. There is hard and fast evidence that the Orz are a single entity with many projections that can exist on a higher dimensional level than human beings -- this is both the obvious reading of many, many of their lines and also something that has been commented on and confirmed by the creators outside the game, so no matter what they will not -- *cannot* -- think of their sentient neighbors the way we do, any more than we could understand what it was like to be an ant, or a desktop PC.
In simple words, the creater might said that Orz is a single entity, but he didn't said that Orz doen't have sentient neighbors. And I quite doubt they will said so. For following versions may have the story about the Orz's neighbors.
Sure, but they don't reply to it so dismissively, either.
Orz is not very hostile to human, but that's exactly what they answer, isn't it?
So yes, the translator is screwy, but it's not randomly screwy -- as the translator tells you, it's trying to give English words that carry some set of connotations that roughly match what the Orz is saying ("best-fits").
Well, currently, this kind of problems is identified as "Word sense disambiguation (WSD)". You can search the citeseer or google for literatures.
That said, point 3, also, is disputable; we don't know much about the Orz's thought processes at all, obviously, but most of the time they really seem to be going along their merry way without much concern for understanding you, your motivations or your needs. If we take the "hello" exchange as meaning to give us real information rather than just saying "Orz don't understand the Earth custom of greeting", then it's an example; the Orz don't actually ever ask you why you say hello or what greetings are (they don't ever actually ask you *anything*), but they tell you hello because it makes you happy, and say it multiple times so that you will be happier.
Learning doen't not necessery contains asking. For example, Supox learns from copy. And a human infant is too young to have language to ask.
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Yes, Captain. I am a lying, boneless, toady dweeb but I am YOUR lying, boneless, toady dweeb!
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Pwnz Orz
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Orz ships have the *GO! GO!* Do you know?
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*Campers* think *fingers* mean many, is it so? Orz is not Orz, Orz is *people energy*, it is *no function*.
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Well, I will clarify something first. 1. In terms of Chinese, the characters doesn't change to reflect the tenses, but you can add certain terms to express the tenses. (I'm a native speaker, are you?) 2. The reason I mention Chinese here is that some of the guys weight the tenses too much. I would like to introduce the "tenseless" view. As I said before, we don't care the tenses most of the time unless we really need them.
Yes, I'm a native speaker, and I know that Chinese can get along by expressing time without the use of tensed verbs.
Nonetheless, I doubt that Paul and Fred, when they were writing the Orz dialogue, thought that they would just make the Orz language slightly different from ours and have a tenseless structure similar to Chinese. The reason we *see* the unusual characterstics of Orz language and have all the other alien languages translated perfectly (or have the other aliens speak to us in English) is because Orz are meant to be seen as different. As an in-game explanation, the translator program can't deal with the Orz language because contextual clues point to the Orz actively disregarding the idea of tense and time, not just not having tenses in verbs. Notice that they don't ever include time-words when such time-words might be very necessary to our understanding, such as letting us know when the Taalo escaped to *Pretty Space* and whether or not they still exist or are extinct, something that's entirely unclear in the translation.
For whatever reason, the translating program you're using isn't putting in proper tenses in its English translation when doing so would be necessary for full understanding.
Like you said, it is just a game, so for players' convenience, the precursor translating unit is able to get the main idea, but lacks the knowledge. But for me, orzese is not that hard to understand. As long as you don't limit yourself in *tense*. You can understand them better.
Yeah, but the reason the translation is messed up is not just because Paul and Fred thought it'd be cool to have a half-translated language at some point -- the Orz *are* supposed to be weird and supposed to think differently from humans, and their language reflects that. We're not meant to imagine that they have the same concept of time as we do and just have a langauge that can't express it; we're meant to see the problems with their language as indicative of their thought processes.
In simple words, the creater might said that Orz is a single entity, but he didn't said that Orz doen't have sentient neighbors. And I quite doubt they will said so. For following versions may have the story about the Orz's neighbors. Orz is not very hostile to human, but that's exactly what they answer, isn't it?
It's not quite certain what intentions the Orz have towards humans; it seems like they aren't what we'd call "hostile", but just because they don't feel hostile to us doesn't mean their plans for us are something we'd enjoy.
And like I said, I agree the Orz may have *cousins*; I do think, nonetheless, that the original points about the Orz being poor at grasping social concepts stand. They and their *cousins* aren't part of any society, as we understand it.
Learning doen't not necessery contains asking. For example, Supox learns from copy. And a human infant is too young to have language to ask.
Yes, learning would have to start from imitation and detective work before asking for help could take place, since you need a common language to be able to communicate at all.
However, I think my point still stands; the Orz not only don't ask us about our custom of greeting, they don't seem to be trying to learn it from imitation either; they take no notice of our confused or dismayed reactions to their non sequiturs. Obviously my impression is subjective, but it's not really true that the Orz are "trying to learn"; most of the signs point to their not giving much of a damn.
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1) My thought on this is that the ariloulaleelay (did I get that right) were originaly inhabitants of normal or *heavy* space and they moved to quasispace to avoid a feeding, unless of course you get rid of SC3 TOTALY at which time I have no clue. I am sure some aspects of sc3's overarching plot are valid but mostly not.
What do you mean by "valid"? Paul and Fred have said before that absolutely none of SC3's overarching plot had anything to do with them. So if you consider the canon Star Control universe to be stuff that comes from the original creators, none of SC3 has any validity at all. Everything -- the Eternal Ones, the green Deep Children, the collapse of Hyperspace, and so on -- came out of the minds of the folks at Legend Entertainment with zero blessing from anyone involved in SC2.
Also, most SC2 fans seem to think that the SC3 creators were so careless and unthinking in the way they diverged from SC2's ideas that there's not much reason to give them any more respect than any other fans' ideas, and I would tend to agree. My preference would be, when talking about SC2 itself, to leave out SC3 entirely, and only give SC3 explanations as one possible answer out of many for SC2's questions. If you think the Eternal Ones are a cool idea and an interesting possibility, you're free to speculate on them, but in my experience most SC2 fans won't feel that explanations involving the Eternal Ones have any greater weight than explanations that assume there's no such thing.
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Sigh. I hope you've read more on your own by now, but just to clarify some things for your benefit:
We've mostly reached a consensus that *dancing* refers to death, or more specifically to ship-to-ship combat. (The general concept of death is probably better expressed by a different word, like *dissolving*.)
We've also reached a sort of consensus that Orz are probably not from QuasiSpace; the Arilou are from QS, and the Orz say that Arilou are from *above* and Orz are from *below*; in general we come upon a lot of references to Arilou and Orz being from different, opposite places.
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