Today we'll devote ourselves to Hylami, the language of the Hylamis and Anura, and learn a few things about life under water. However, there will have to be more articles before you will be able to understand the complex Hylami.
The waters of Elior are home to many creatures. The two largest cultures in the area surrounding the Thelia Peninsula are the Hylamis and the Anura. The Anura resemble upright walking tadpoles. They are simple creatures who mostly work for the Hylamis. They organize themselves into strict castes and are strict believers in Hykruss, the god of water. The Hylamis, on the other hand, have a serpentine body with legs and arms.
The Hylami language is very different from the languages we are used to. This is mainly due to the very different habitat. First of all, sound travels much faster under water and especially the low tones travel further than in the air. Therefore Hylamis sound very deep and some sounds are not even audible with human ears. To be able to classify the direction of origin and distance of a sound, human brains use the different times at which the sound reaches the two ears. Due to the high speed of sound underwater, this localization is virtually impossible for a human, but hylamis have a much more powerful brain for processing sounds. In addition, they can hear in many places on their bodies.
The grammar also has a few peculiarities, in particular many declensions and conjugations are omitted, since one would not understand them well anyway. Instead, whole words are inserted rather to present the facts correctly. For example, the Hylami does not distinguish between genders and there are no tenses. These are replaced by so-called tempies, such as "yesterday" or "three years ago for a year". The sentence "I ate blue eel yesterday" could be translated as "I eat blue eel yesterday for a short time".
In the same way, the vocabulary is adapted to the underwater world. Thus, there are 31 different words for water, depending on depth, current and various foreign substances such as salt, plankton, dirt in the water. The lack of words for colors is due to the fundamentally different color perception of the Hylamis. Thus a Hylami talks about a "medium fish" and means a purple scaled fish. Also cardinal points follow a system that is strange for us.
Another big point besides the spoken Hylami is the written. In water, it is difficult to make permanent records. Nevertheless, two types of writing have evolved, coral writing and pox writing. Pox writing is similar to our idea of writing: Several characters are painted one after the other to make words and whole sentences. What is special about this script is that barnacles are used as color. These have proven to be durable and easy to write with. Barnacles are small crabs that hatch from their eggs and then grow firmly in one place. The setter, or writer, places the eggs in the desired shape on the stone to be inscribed. A great advantage is that the eggs initially adhere only weakly, so that setting errors can be easily corrected. After two weeks at the latest, the crabs have hatched and build their shells in exactly the place where they were placed. After a short time, the typeface is then clearly legible. To prevent the area from becoming overgrown, the Hylamis periodically spread scents in the area, which prevent the barnacles from reproducing. A permanent alternative is to kill off the barnacles, leaving only the little houses. This form of writing requires a lot of work, takes several weeks, and only works on solid rock on the seafloor or rocks in the water.
The alternative to make at least short messages transportable is the coral writing. Here a flat coral is taken, which branches strongly. Afterwards many of the arms are broken off. The remaining form of the coral then forms the message to be transmitted. In contrast to the smallpox writing, here no symbols are to be recognized, but the kind and number of the branches are decisive for reading. It is difficult to preserve such a writing, which is why this type of writing is only suitable for short texts.
Because of these different ways of presenting both scripts, most Hylami can only read one of the two variants at a time.
This was a short introduction to the basics of Hylami language and writing. At some point in the future, we will look at the remaining open concepts such as color and direction indication and, of course, learn how to translate Hylami.