They may have tried that in the past to no avail. The episode specifically mentions there was several failed attempts at first contact.
A guide only works if you understand the guide. Think of it like this, if I sent you all 1679 ones and zeros from the arecibo message to you, but you didn’t understand the concept of zero, you’d have a hard time understanding what the message meant, even if the message itself was self explanatory.
Their language isn’t just grammatically different, it is uses a fundamentally different structure, and the Tamarian brain might be structurally different as well, able to easily account for language when young. So there may not be much of a “base language” that the metaphors are built on so to speak.
They’ve also run things like the pioneer plaques (or maybe it was arecibo) past other scientists, who often have difficulty discerning the meaning behind them. If human scientists have difficulty discerning the meaning, I can only imagine what kind of difficulty aliens who speak in metaphor would have, let alone if they weren’t linguists/scientists, which appear to be the case in the episode.
We evolved to hunt, and so it is suspected that as a result of that, we understand arrows to indicate direction. A species that hasn’t evolved in such a way might not understand the meaning of arrows. Apply that same principle to language and you potentially have your problem.
I think half of the episode is the Tamarians genuinely struggling with human language. If the federations translation software wasn’t up to the task, it isn’t surprising that the Tamarian’s software wasn’t up for it either.
Based on the episode, it was posibly the first time Tamarians ever had friendly and successful first contact. Because if they had it previously, they might have asked for help translating when meeting new races such as with the Federation. The episode would have went a lot different if they had an Adorian ambassador with them saying “Yeah these guys talk in metaphor and only metaphor”.
This fundamentally and thoroughly explains what this Christmas has been like for me. Trying to move from one room to another has been a constant battle of stepping over things and pushing past clutter.
Sleeping on the couch of dog fur hasn’t been pleasant.
And the cherry on top has been my girlfriend having to go home because of her dog allergies. Hopefully next year will be better.
It’s only going to be a matter of time before they start requiring contracts, forcing you to stick with a service for long periods or face fees for dropping them.
They are capitalists, and so they must always profit more and more, never ending, for all of time. One of the things they will eventually do to hit that unsustainable proift motive is contracts. It’s what the cable companies did, and it’s only a matter of time.
I did as close to that as I could, going to community then transferring to a 4 year. The problem is deeper than people wanting extra stuff, part of the problem is that nobody respects community college degrees, and they’re usually 2 year programs.