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Jan. 16th, 2024 03:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feotakahariI haven’t established much about how the aliens in Scrapyard Station communicate, because it’s such a broad question that it gives me decision paralysis. What kind of body language should I give a nonhuman? Do they speak with sound? Gestures? Other senses entirely? How would they struggle with human languages? It all seems like too much.
A few things I have pinned down:
Nomads live all over the place, so their languages are all over the place, too. Even Nomads can’t pronounce all Nomad languages, just as an English-speaking human may struggle with Hungarian. They use both gesture and vocal communication, but only the former is usable in hyperspace.
Scrappers are pretty good vocal mimics, but their consonants come off a little soft. Their native languages tend to sound like they’re speaking underwater.
Winnowers always sound like they have a mouthful of snot. It’s gross.
Riders breathe through their skin and don’t really have “lungs” per se. They can’t make a wide variety of sounds, but they can make a sound and then quickly repeat it. The same sound repeated a different number of times can mean very different things in their language.
Scholars can buzz their entire bodies to make intelligible speech sounds, but it’s a lot easier to use artificial voice synthesizers.
Stewards use their Maxwell’s Demon powers for their language, communicating in the transfer of heat through air or water. With other species, they have to rely on gesture language.
I have no idea what I’m doing for Builders. What speech quirks do you give a bipedal armadillo?
A few things I have pinned down:
Nomads live all over the place, so their languages are all over the place, too. Even Nomads can’t pronounce all Nomad languages, just as an English-speaking human may struggle with Hungarian. They use both gesture and vocal communication, but only the former is usable in hyperspace.
Scrappers are pretty good vocal mimics, but their consonants come off a little soft. Their native languages tend to sound like they’re speaking underwater.
Winnowers always sound like they have a mouthful of snot. It’s gross.
Riders breathe through their skin and don’t really have “lungs” per se. They can’t make a wide variety of sounds, but they can make a sound and then quickly repeat it. The same sound repeated a different number of times can mean very different things in their language.
Scholars can buzz their entire bodies to make intelligible speech sounds, but it’s a lot easier to use artificial voice synthesizers.
Stewards use their Maxwell’s Demon powers for their language, communicating in the transfer of heat through air or water. With other species, they have to rely on gesture language.
I have no idea what I’m doing for Builders. What speech quirks do you give a bipedal armadillo?
