Of all the sapient species currently living on Earth, only a small group communicate using language, and of these only one is currently living: the Tungra.
But their language is not anything like our own and would be quite difficult for us to even distinguish as language let alone speak it ourselves. For starters, our ears are simply not designed to pick out the fine sounds (phonemes) that make up their words. And to make this even worse, their words are spoken so fast as to slip over our heads. Taken altogether, their words would sound like any old bird song, impossible to pick out individual words.
And to further complicate things, nuance is given to their words in a way completely alien to us. For added meaning, grammar if you will, is given to their words through tones and even speed changes between individual phonemes and words. And it is these subtle difference to individual words that we would most often miss and cause us to hear two completely different sentences as sounding the same.
And if by some miracle, humans were able to replicate the subtle sounds and nuances of their language, they would see us as extraordinarily dumb (for English speakers at least). For while our language relies on syntax to convey meaning, they find syntax unbearably restrictive.
For when the Tungra speak, the order of words is often shuffled around from sentence to sentence. In some Tungra languages, syntax varies from individual to individual and can function as an added way to recognize specific individuals just by the way they speak. And in other languages (the majority), syntax is used to give emphasis to specific words. And so for a creatively linguistic species as the Tungra, a human's propensity for specific syntaxes would seem odd and certainly give them the impression of humans being dumb and decidedly uncreative. And since most of the animals taught to speak Tungra language (albeit simply) also confine themselves to a single syntax, this would give them the impression of us being a simple and rather inferior species.
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A New Perspective of the Far Off Future
Short StoryA collection of short stories all of which take place in the far future, close to 200 million years in the future. Humans have long been gone and life has long since moved on, with a myriad of new fantastic forms having evolved. This new era of life...
