Possibly even Leonardo DiCaprio in “Titanic.”

We learn only a little about the aliens in this episode, so there’s lots of room for speculation — that’s where the fun is! I always wondered how metaphor alone would express the complex scientific and technological concepts required to build starships. Most likely, metaphor is only one part of how they communicate. But you can see how they would consider it important in diplomacy.

The equation 2 + 2 = 4 might communicate to an alien that you possess a mind capable of understanding mathermatics and a certain kind of logic. If the alien responds with 3 + 3 = 6, you know that it has similar capabilities. But there’s a lot more to First Contact situations than basic math. The alien captain in the TNG episode wanted to know if humans understood the concepts of cooperation, loyalty and friendship represented by the story of Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. But perhaps there’s another component (telepathy?) to their communication that humans can’t pick up. This would explain their captain’s frustration at Picard’s failure to understand his verbal communication alone. It would also explain why the alien captain would expect humans to understand his metaphors, even when he knew that they had no experience with or knowledge of his culture. Clearly he was sending other information that the Picard and the rest of the crew weren’t picking up.

For more on the difficulties of communicating with aliens, see Stanley G. Weinbaum’s 1934 classic short story, ‘A Martian Odyssey’.

Maybe they “bootstrap” it in some way, by building bigger metaphors on smaller metaphors. Perhaps the alien commander should have tried their version of baby-talk, but I can believe he didn’t think of it.

It’s quite possible they talk a lot less in daily life than humans do - e.g. they order coffee by pointing at a picture of it. Think of a monastery where the monks have taken a vow of silence.

Years later I saw the episode again and came to the same conclusion Fnord did: that this was a matter of protocol and even if the alien commander could understand Picard, he could only acknowledge him if he expressed himself according to local tradition.