Re: Non-humanoid langs

On Monday 25 April 2005 01:57 am, Geoff Horswood wrote:
> I was wondering the other day, so I thought I'd ask:
>
> How many conlangs (including sketches) do we have that are spoken by non-
> humanoids?
>
> There's my alien elephant conlang sketch (currently shelved), and someone
> mentioned one spoken by crocodiles a while back, and you _might_ class
> Entish in this category if you wanted, though I was really thinking of
> totally non-humanoids.  What else do we have that speaks?
>
> Then there are all of the humanoid alien langs, from Klingon to Quenya via
> Silindion and Noygwexaal, and then all the human langs (including those
> that sort-of-aren't-human-but-might-as-well-be: "humans" from parallel
> earths/Ferochromon/other strange universes)
>
> So what has everyone made to speak?
>
> Geoff
>
Imperial and Jouevyaix (Tradespeech) are both spoken by non-humans.

The Imperials are, more or less, giant free-range chickens with arms instead
of wings. Their vocal mechanisms work like those of parrots.

The Shayanans who developed Tradespeech are ... a little hard to describe
succinctly. (See the web-site mentioned in my sig.) Tradespeech has at least
one sound that gets pronounced by humans as a nasal, which is an interesting
trick since the Shayanans don't have noses. Really complicated mouths,
though.

One feature of the interaction of the two cultures was that the Imperials have
a lot of sounds that humans hear and pronounce as bilabials, while the mouth
structure of the Shayanans is such that most of the subspecies have problems
producing bilabial stops.

Puthu Duthemikuch, which I created about 30 years ago when I was in college,
was also spoken by non-humans, but their vocal mechanisms weren't
particularly strange by human standards. (I now officially feel old...)

The Old Japanese derived language that I am currently working on is mostly
spoken by humans and human shaped beings and those who can shape-change into
human shapes...

--
Elyse Grasso

The World of Cherani Station
www.data-raptors.com/cherani/index.html
Cherani Tradespeech
www.data-raptors.com/cherani/tradespeech.html