Re: NonVerbal Conlang?

On 24 June, Chris Peters wrote:

> David Weber's "Honor Harrington" series features a (minor player) alien
> race, called the Medusans, that does just that.  In one of the later
> books, a human character is describing the difficult process of learning
> to communicating with them.
>
> Their language is actually comprised of three components:  sound, gesture,
> and scent emissions.  The sound portion was rather difficult to deal with,
> since these aliens could speak and hear in frequencies outside of the
> normal human range.  Gesture was even more problematic, because that race
> happened to have three arms ...  then of course smell couldn't really be
> dealt with at all for any human speakers, but the aliens used it for
> emphasis only.
    Reminds me of the "insectoid" race described by Charles Sheffield
in "Summertide":

    " They did it [communicated] chemically, "speaking" to each other via
the transmission of pheromones, chemical messengers whose varying
composition permitted them a full and rich language. A Cecropian not only
knew what her fellows were saying; the pheromones also allowed her
to _feel_ it, to know their emotions directly ... And to a Cecropian, any
being that did not give off the right pheromones did not exist
as a communicating being.
They could "see" them all right, but they could not feel them.
Those nonentities included all humans."


Dan Sulani
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likehsna    rtem  zuv  tikuhnuh  auag  inuvuz  vaka'a.

A word is an awesome thing.

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