[TeMPOraL]

So you're effectively saying that Chinese is compressed Tamarian? Like, instead of writing "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" you'd put their initials together, so you're saying the Chinese-equivalent of "DJT" and the listener instantly knows the story, and therefore the message, it refers to?

[lucubratory]

Chengyu are very common in Chinese, more common than analogous English phrases, but the entirety of Chinese isn't composed of chengyu. I haven't seen much Star Trek so I read the wiki description and watched a couple of clips + explainer YouTube videos to understand what you're talking about. From what I understand, Tamarian seems to be a language that is entirely chengyu/成语.

[dejj]

You recognized it. Tamarian does exactly that.

There's a subclass of 成语 the sense of which you can't even guess at unless you know the story:

- 塞翁失马 (Sai Weng Shi Ma) - Old man loses horse; a 5-fold story of riches-to-rags-to-riches-to-rags-to-riches = life is unpredictable

- 自相矛盾 (Zi Xiang Mao Dun) - Resemble spear and shield = unstoppable force meets indestructible object

The latter is so common that 矛盾 (Mao Dun) is the dictionary entry for "contradiction" in Chinese and Japanese.

Because 矛盾 is so common, the story 自相矛盾 (=etymology) gets taught only later to native speakers. Similarly, consider the surprising etymology of word "rob", deriving from "robe" [1].

Consider also: - "Seven at One Blow" [2] = bamboozle

This proverb everyone knows, yet nobody uses it. It only cumbersomely embeds in a sentence; "bamboozle" is briefer. But 成语 do easily embed in Chinese or any phrase does in Tamarian.

1: https://www.etymonline.com/word/robe 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brave_Little_Tailor

[creamyhorror]

"Seven at One Blow" is certainly not a proverb that everyone knows in English; it's the name of the fairytale in English, but not something that people use to mean "bamboozle".

It's simply the case that Chinese relies far more on literary/historical allusions (chengyu) than English does. We might talk about someone's "Achilles heel" or a "Trojan horse", but these literary/historical allusions are simply nowhere near as common as chengyu in Chinese.

[082349872349872]

Cap Gets The Reference. (talking about Steve Rogers, but trying to stay in the 4 word format, like "Big Hat No Cattle")

in a different vein, "Tony and Manny, at the pool" might refer to:

  这个国家：
  先拿到钱，
  得到力量，
  然后淫乐。

[at least in "Antonio Montana's Journey to the West" (1983)]