I’ve thought about this way too much as well, and my belief is that they don’t actually understand the individual words. The entire idiom conveys the idea, and the individual parts are lost etymology. Like how “bye” conveys a departure but you don’t need to have a concept of God to understand it, even though it derives from “God be with you.”
Balls. Well, I guess we’ll have to assume they understand “and” and “at” at the very least. In that case, new idioms of (person) at (place) could be created, but “Shaka, when the walls fell” would be an idiom from the language spoken beforehand.
And this is just my tortured excuse, but the premise falls apart otherwise.
I’ve thought about this way too much as well, and my belief is that they don’t actually understand the individual words. The entire idiom conveys the idea, and the individual parts are lost etymology. Like how “bye” conveys a departure but you don’t need to have a concept of God to understand it, even though it derives from “God be with you.”
Ok, but then how to generate the new metaphor like they did to honor Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel?
Balls. Well, I guess we’ll have to assume they understand “and” and “at” at the very least. In that case, new idioms of (person) at (place) could be created, but “Shaka, when the walls fell” would be an idiom from the language spoken beforehand.
And this is just my tortured excuse, but the premise falls apart otherwise.
Yeah, a fun premise but pretty damn near impossible to pull off while preserving the ability for the language to evolve to accommodate new stuff.