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Things I did not expect to do today:
Learn that English is my second language
Hear someone else use my first language for the first time in over a decade
Learn that my first language could be useful for interstellar communications -
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1
"So, to be clear, this is a me thing, not a human thing." I paused. How do you explain this? I've never successfully explained this. "When I was a kid, I had trouble talking sometimes. Not like, I didn't know the words. I knew the words. I just couldn't… get them out. The whole system just went offline."Rocky hummed and made the gesture for me to continue.
"So my parents needed a workaround. And I'd already been making noises - I didn't really decide to, it just happened - so we kind of… reverse-engineered them. My parents would guess what a noise meant, and if they were right, that's what it meant from then on. Sometimes I didn’t know what the noise meant until they guessed it. Some of them I made up on purpose later, when we needed them. It's like..." I grasped around for an analogy. "You know how I taught you English? We pointed at things and assigned sounds?"
"Yes. Same process, question?"
"Kinda, but way messier and nobody was doing it on purpose at first. Some adults thought the solution was to just make me talk anyway."
"They were unkind and stupid," Rocky stated. “So it was language making, question? To deal with trouble speaking other language?”
I winced. “It’s not exactly a language, buddy. It doesn’t have real words, and I don’t think it has grammar either. It’s not really useful to anyone.”
“Was useful to you,” Rocky pointed out. “You are still using it.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “I’ll try to stop that, sorry.”
Rocky whistled in frustration. “No, I don’t want you to stop! I want to learn it!”
I blinked. “Uh, same problem there. No words and no grammar make it hard to do that.”
Rocky shuffled around. /I’m not sure, let me think about it?/
“Can do,” I responded automatically.
“What I say?” He demanded.
I opened my mouth, then closed it. I’d responded. Not like it was nonsense, or like it was an emotional noise. Like he’d said something in English or Eridian.
Oh god, were my tones a language?
If they were, they were my first language. I’d been making them as long as I could remember. They came so much more easily than English, flowing smoothly from my brain to my airways without any thought needed.
“You said,” I balked a little internally, and pushed past it. “Um, translated into English, it would be ‘I’m not sure, let me think about it?’ And said with that… I think speed is the right word, it kind of implies that you’ll need a while to figure out what you want to say.”
Rocky hopped from side to side. “Useful, very useful. You always want time. Will remember. Now. This one?” He toned out /hold on just a moment/.
“Wait,” I provided. “Specifically, asking you to wait for a little . The longer one would be…” I hesitated. Rocky waited. If he’d shown any sign of thinking that this was silly, I would have stopped. Instead, I toned out /wait a while/.
“Like this?” He repeated the tone back to me perfectly. Exactly as I’d toned it, with all of the right inflections and overtones. Melissa had tried a few times to imitate my tones, but she’d always messed up on the details, and eventually gave up, declaring that she couldn’t hear what I was trying to tell her.
Intellectually, it made sense that with hearing as his primary sense, he’d be able to hear everything. From there, reproducing it was fairly straightforward. Of course he was able to do it.
I wished that my parents could hear him.
I swallowed hard. “Yeah. That’s exactly right. Good job.”
He studied me for a moment. “Last one I know you said.” /Fine, tired/.
“Fine and tired,” I explained. “The first tone means fine, the second means tired. You can also hear it as fine but tired if you want.” I tacked on.
Oh no. That was a modifier phrase. It did have grammar.
“I want to learn all of it,” Rocky stated.
I squinted at him. “Why? It’s only useful in some pretty limited ways.”
Rocky vented deeply. “Grace being stupid again. We can both make the sounds. Want to be able to talk to you and have you talk back the same.” While I was reeling from that, he went on. “Plus, will be good for future, if Eridians and humans have a language in common.”
“Most humans can’t tell what I’m saying,” I pointed out weakly.
He waved a dismissive claw. “Read about human language acquisition. Was trying to make Eridian easier for you. Humans only lose ability to tell apart sounds that you don’t use in your language. Teach a young human and they will be able to hear you.”
I stared at the table in front of me, blankly. "Rocky, it's- you're trying to make an interstellar language out of the weird noises I make when I can't talk."