Star Wars Bookworms Book Club discussion
July 2014 Book Discussion
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If Droids and Drives
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And obviously this thread's subject was supposed to be "Of Droids and Drives". Silly autocorrect.
Travis wrote: "I have two Star Wars questions for people.1) Is "droid" a language? Both Zeerid and Aryn (and many other characters in other books) understand nonverbal droids like T7 and R2-D2.
I believe it is, yes. It's why R2 would say something in the movies and it would translate onto Luke's X-wing readout, allowing them to have conversations in Empire and Jedi.
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1) Is "droid" a language? Both Zeerid and Aryn (and many other characters in other books) understand nonverbal droids like T7 and R2-D2.
I would assume that it is its own separate language of sorts. Either that or the people have worked with them their whole lives that they are just used to the things they say.
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I think of it as the limitations of an older or less sophisticated ship. Sure some ships have a built in disengage feature, but a guy like Zeerid can't afford a ship like that. Same goes for a ship like the Falcon.
Or maybe he prefers to have more control. Kind of like how people who are really into driving prefer to drive stick shift even though automatic makes much more sense.
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Is "droid" a language? Both Zeerid and Aryn (and many other characters in other books) understand nonverbal droids like T7 and R2-D2.
I like to think that the droids serve as sounding boards for their human/alien partners, using the droids to think things through their travels and experiences. In turn, I think the characters learn to distinguish what the droid is trying to convey, figuring out the nuances in the droid's chirps and whistles.
C-3PO is also very specific when he translates R2 ("Mindless philosopher", "The City Central Computer, told you?!", etc.), so I think it's clearly a language all its own, at least by the OT era. That's a good point about Hyperdrive, though. We appear to see them pulling a lever to engage and disengage it. I wonder if you can set it to be automatic and guys like Han and Zeerid just choose not to.
I see no problem in engaging it manually, disengaging it seems indeed weird, I'd imagine disengaging the drive now or 1 second later would mean a great difference in the location where you come out of hyperspace, it seems illogical to do that by hand.
Binary load lifters have their own language, right?
Regarding the droid language, I just finished reading Honor Among Thieves and near the end Han asks another character if she understands what an R3 droid said and her response is "No, but I guess well." So that might be the likely answer as Hector said.
I always assumed "droid speak" is a sort of language, it's sounds representing data, much like the dial up modem sounds, those weren't there because it sounded cool, those noises were data being transferred over the phone line. The same reason pressing buttons on a pone makes noise, those beeps represent data, the other end hears them and translates them back to the pressed numbers.I'm sure the droid beeps and whistles represent words and data, sent out in audio form so it can be transferred to other systems that are not directly connected to the droid. 3PO would be more than capable of translating the beeps to "words".
And who knows, maybe humans can learn to pick a few things out, but completely understanding it would be near impossible I guess.
In the OT we see Luke reading a lot of R2's messages on he display of his X-wing, so there he's not listening. Maybe the rest is just guessing, with maybe a few recognized sounds in there.
1) Is "droid" a language? Both Zeerid and Aryn (and many other characters in other books) understand nonverbal droids like T7 and R2-D2.
2) Why does the pilot have to manually disengage hyperdrive? Zeerid does this and I'm pretty sure I recall this happening in other books and even the movies. Seems like a bad idea to put a person into that equation where a wrong move can put you in the middle of a planet.