What languages can C-3PO not speak?

3PO can speak 6 Million different forms of communications. But which languages could he not understand at first or know at all? The only one I can think of is the Ssi-Ruuk language.

 

He could speak Yuuzhan Vong, despite the fact that their language developed in an entirely different galaxy. How's that for sense?

 

3PO's a walking computer for all intents and purposes; if a tizowyrm (or whatever the little translator bugs the Vong use were called) can descramble Basic to Vong, I don't see why 3PO couldn't.

Plus it's not the first time he's ran into a completely unfamiliar language-the Ewoks were the first time he did, as far as I know. He was able to understand and speak with them within minutes.

 

Yes, it's "six million forms of communication" not six million languages. I guess all the different languages on our planet would require something like five of those to decode, given enough raw data to work with.

 

Er... sort of, I suppose, if you work with the idea that all the languages in a single language family can be "decoded" from each other as soon as you know just one, which is iffy. It's true enough for languages that are closely related, like Spanish and Italian, say, but languages can technically be in the same family and be very, very different at first glance.

I mean, C-3PO is a magic future computer, so who knows what he can do. However, being able to synthesize the grammatical rules and word bank for a new language based on a relatively short conversation bumps him up a great deal from "glorified version of something we could do now" to "ridiculous impossible magic tech".

(Also, I always understood the canonical explanation of the Ewokese thing to be that the Ewoks *weren't* totally isolated from the galaxy through their entire history -- the Ewoks TV series seems to back me up on this -- and therefore C-3PO does indeed have some relative of their language in his databanks that he was speaking to them. I assumed that he was still talking in some kind of pidgin "broken Ewokese", which is why at times he had a hard time getting through to them and needed to play charades and use sound effects to tell his story, and why he needed to express concepts like "I will destroy this village" with an onomatopoeic "BOOM!" Note that from an Ewok perspective this might actually strengthen C-3PO's claim to be a god or divine being, just like you might find it easier to believe someone was Thor, the God of Thunder if he were speaking in heavily accented broken English than if he talked like a TV newscaster.)

Well, the tizowyrms make a little more sense because we're told the YV had been spying on the GFFA for quite some time before they made their invasion, which is more than enough time to learn Galactic Basic and other major languages. Tizowyrms are easiest to explain if all they are is "translators", i.e. they know a bunch of different languages and recognize them and can translate from one to the other.

If tizowyrms can actually do this for *any* spoken language whether the Shaper who made the tizowyrm knew it or not -- which is actually the implication we get -- then that's a little tougher. It's still somewhat easier to explain than C-3PO, though, thanks to the fact that we know that YV biotech is capable of telepathy and that the tizowyrms could therefore literally work like babel fish from Hitchhiker's Guide (i.e. they actually read your mind while you talk and tell the wearer what your mind intended to say).

This has a lot of troubling implications -- I mean, if they can do *that* why don't they just make a wyrm that reads *all* your thoughts *all the time*? -- but you can come up with explanations for that. (The Hitchhiker's explanation is actually hilariously convenient -- the fish sucks up all unconscious and unspoken thoughts in order to nourish itself and excretes all conscious, intentional communication as waste -- and the book itself acknowledges this when talking about the babel fish being proof of the existence of God.)

C-3PO, though, as far as we know is not psychic and can't read minds, so we're left with the implication that C-3PO can actually reconstruct an entire language from a few lines of text, which is a feat on par with deducing the existence of graduated income tax and rice pudding from "I think therefore I am".

 

The point I'm trying to make with the tyzowirms is that it's obvious that Basic and Vong are not all that far removed from eachother if they can easily understand what a Basic-speaker is saying.

 

Welsh.

 

...But that makes the least sense of all, given that they're two languages from two civilizations in completely separate galaxies that have had no contact with each other whatsoever. I'd sooner argue that C-3PO really is a sort of idiot savant who's superintelligent when it comes to languages but nothing else (well, maybe not *nothing* else -- he's pretty good at calculating "probabilities" for things off the top of his head, apparently) than just say "Hey, it's like Star Trek, everyone happens to speak English with an accent due to sheer coincidence."

And I'm pretty sure there are passages in NJO that say the tizowyrms do work the way I said they did -- that their job is to use telepathy to translate spoken language, not that they're biological "translation computers".

 

...So telepathic worms make sense to you, and so does 3PO being an ambulatory supercomputer? Then what are you arguing about? If it's the lack of common-sensicalness that's bothering you, then SW probably isn't going to work well for you at all.

 

It's that "dumb"/"not dumb" thing. It kind of undermines the *coolness* of having the Vong be this new, totally alien, never-before-seen threat to have us start being able to understand their language within a few minutes of meeting them.

Hell, even KotOR understood this, that in a universe where insta-translation is a fact of life, actually being unable to understand someone when they talk is a powerful way to communicate alienation and uncertainty, hence the whole Sand People plotline on Tatooine.

Certainly it undermines it a bit to have C-3PO claim to be able to understand Yuuzhan Vong because it's "similar" to another language he already knows, which is, IIRC, what actually happened -- yep, those aliens aren't that alien after all! (Same with having the YV be so human-looking, to be honest. We have a perfect situation for using horrifying Cthuloids and we don't? Shame on you, Star Wars writers.)

 

I hadn't actually thought about this until this thread came up.

And yeah...still doesn't bother me. The Vong are weird, as the combination of bizarro biotechnology and self-mutilation in devotion to the Gods they worship shows. No reason for their language to be completely undecipherable as well.

Speaking of their Gods-are they supposed be well, actual beings? Imaginary? What? I don't think any of the EU has even begun to touch on the inherently contradictory nature of the Force (no deities, no nothing after you die unless you're a Jedi) and the existence of the Vong Gods in the same reality.

 

The fact that they twist living Jedi characters into gods themselves in the Jeedai Heresy is evidence that their original gods weren't real gods either, just distorted legends of real beings who were once mere mortals. (Although the nature of the Force being what it is, the idea of the gods "existing" on some level of reality shouldn't be entirely dismissed -- belief determines everything at the end of the day, after all.)

It is kind of weird that something this significant in the storyline should be dismissable as a delusion, but I think that's part of the theme of NJO -- a lot of what the YV build themselves up to be falls apart under closer examination. The plot significance of the YV "gods" is directly tied to the YV being "outside of the Force", and the idea is kind of supposed to be that the YV religion is a delusion meant to console themselves for being stripped of the Force -- the *real* Yun-Yuuzhan was their original sentient planet, Yuuzhan'tar, and the story of Yun-Yuuzhan sending them on a quest to conquer and destroy was probably a distortion of the real story of the pain they suffered in the wake of their home planet's death.

 

Good point about Ganner becoming a demigod. Maybe Yuuzhan Vong Gods are just Jedi Force Ghosts.


But yeah, I think the Force would probably have space for Gods. After all, Hell is canon.

And then there's the Aing-Tii, who view the Force as a rainbow...whatever that means. Does that mean there's a pink side of the Force?

 

We saw a very detailed (and fascinating, to me at least) depiction of Threepio learning the Killik language from scratch in Dark Nest. If he can do that, I don't imagine Vong being any harder. How much he actually had to work with at the time, I can't remember.

 

wait ganner became a god? reminds me of arkantos from age of mythology he became the god of titan stopping after the death of gargerensis. i don't believe it the yv gods are a myth.

 

He doesn't literally become a god, at least not onscreen. His death scene is so impressive, though, that Vergere tells Jacen the Vong will carry it on in their cultural memory until "The Ganner" becomes a mythological figure who guards the gates of the underworld. Moreover, Vergere, in her gnomic way, states that this story is on some level "true" just as all myths are true, so who knows -- maybe myths and legends take on a greater meaning out there in the Netherworld of the Force.

 

Indeed.

"Let me tell you of a vision I have had. An image of the far future. It came to me through the Force some time ago, but only now have I come to understand it. In that vision, I saw a new figure in the mythology of the Yuuzhan Vong. Not a god, not a demon, but an invincible giant called 'the Ganner.' [?] They will come to believe that the Ganner, the Jedi Giant, is the Guardian who stands before the Gate to the Lands of the Dead. It is the Ganner?and his forever-blazing blade of light?who stands eternal guard to prevent the shades of the dead from passing back through the Gate, to trouble the living. The curious part of the vision?as if it could be any more curious than it is already?is the words engraved on the stone of the Gate, in an arc above the great head of the Ganner: they're in Basic. [?] In deep-carved block letters, it reads: NONE SHALL PASS."
?Vergere, to Jacen Solo

 

*cough*

 

Obviously there have to be a lot of languages he didn't speak, but I think we've established that any languages he doesn't already know he has the ability to learn very quickly, so the question is somewhat moot.

 

I had pretty much assumed that a biggish chunk of the "6 million forms of communication" would be ship and droid languages. And the rest would be the many beings' languages and the multiple dialects of these.

 

I think the question is an interesting one that we should actually look to address, rather than completely off-topicizing the thread.

DarthUr - this is a fascinating side-tangent; you might consider dropping it into a new thread, or perhaps into your existing one? I'd like to discuss it, but we're thoroughly derailing the conversation if we continue it here.

Off the top of my head, the only times I recall C-3P0 not knowing anything of a language was the Killik and Yuuzhan Vong situations, but I could be missing a lot. It is intriguing that he was able to decode both, and suggests that it might be a very rare case indeed to run into a civilization that he couldn't learn to understand. Does anyone know of other instances?

For example, do we know if he speaks Tusken? It was a rather notable thing that he-of-6000-forms-of-communication-and-mostly-humorousness (by which I mean HK-47) could, so while C-3P0 is obviously more advanced, it still might be outside his parameters.

 

Remember, 3PO was built on Tatooine. I'd say there's a strong chance he is familiar with the Tusken language.

Does Veila and Hett speak Tusken? If they can, I'd say it would be cake for 3PO.

 

C-3P0 didn't know Qella, either.

 

I think droids inherently have problems speaking select languages effectively. For instance, those that require non-verbal cues such as the Twi'lek language. Also, any language that includes telepathy would be impossible for Threepio.

 

3PO says it's similar to the language of a tribe that had been wiped out a few hundred years previous.

My fanon theory is that the tribe was descended from YV scouts that got stranded. Probably a group of warriors, which would explain why they lost their ability to create their biotech.