I am surprised you brave a linguistic study of the Tlenetese, when most words are a slur of some sort and native speakers flee wincefully. But you’re very fluent. It will not be painful to talk to you. And of course I am more tolerant.
Short sounds are reserved for basic concepts. Children beginning to babble are safe. But when they concatenate sounds in mimicry of adults, they are swooped on and hushed. Hame means to terminate a thought, but hamame refers to one of the bad reproductive modes that produce hundreds of tadpoles rather than the proper, non-competitive one or two.
So we spend adolescence sicking to child-babble (feeling increasingly embarrassed), learning from adults, and practicing furtively on our own. At some point we transition straight to full sentences. A few revert – slipping up too often to be accepted in speaking society.
It sounds cruel? But your species has something similar with misspellings. Even if the meaning is obvious, someone’s inability to spell (any of your fifty thousand basic words) means there’s something a little wrong with their minds. They don’t care to learn the standards of society, or they can’t. Alarming either way. Not someone you want around…
I agree we have many more words. And the burden of correctness is rigider, due to “subconscious collapse”. We’ve had many near-extinctions since the great augmentation, and cannot abort to be careless. Each of us wields great power, enough to destroy a continent of your world if we err. As our ancestors grew in power and self-knowledge, they named all the things they must not do, and set about destroying their inclination to act on those bad things.
A great psycholinguistic hunt began as our minds found subtler and subtler ways to represent these concepts in seemingly perineal connections. We brought these concepts out of hiding and into dictionaries, until the space of short words was full.
Now everythink was thingable, but most things were unsayable.
You are not offended by anything I’ve said? Good. I know foreigners must be more forgiving, but it is still frightening to vocalize at all. So I speak simply. That’s why you wanted me – for a child-language account.
My sibling will mark my misspeakings in the recording, for your research.
Thank you for backing me up that she should leave the room. It is almost impossible for me to talk around my people. For me, language is a plank slung over great abcysses of misdoing…
No, I don’t think poorly of my culture. You must know what it’s like to avoid tlen – things harmless in themselves that all good people agree not to do, so that we may identify evildoers without having to see evil doings. Each civilization has many tlen, finely gradated. We know how much a person has departed from their tlenet – carefulness for the rest of the world – by how many rules they still follow.
The more powerful we are, the more we need these tripwires. If some are too clumsy to navigate them and must remain frozen as if the wires are a cage, so be it.