Felaryan languages

There is still while giants don't shatter humans' eardrums, let alone elves and nekos which I'm pretty sure have more sensitive hearing.

Sean Okotami wrote:

There is still while giants don't shatter humans' eardrums, let alone elves and nekos which I'm pretty sure have more sensitive hearing.

Hearing damage depends on just how loud something is, and I'm not sure that people's normal talking voices would injure tiny people's ears. Consider this: a mouse is about a tinie's size, and they have big ears to boot, but if you pick one up and talk to it in a normal voice they do not get damage hearing. This probably has something to do with the fact that hearing is a logarithmic based sense; that is to say that a sound with 10 times the energy in it only sounds twice as loud.

So if a giant who is 12x as tall as a person speaks, and their voice has 12x as much energy in it as a normal person's, then they would only sound a little more than twice as loud as a regular person's speaking voice.

I don't know how voice power scales with height though; this might be unknown because in the real world we suffer under the square-cube law and thus our larger creatures have a vastly different body layout (and thus voice power) than our smaller creatures.

Malahite wrote:

One of the things I always found interesting about Felarya is that - seemingly - there's no "speak in different language" privacy. You couldn't secretly pass the message "Kill them" to your guards in one language whilst telling the people that they're about to guide you to your new quarters, the guards told in a different language because "They don't speak English / Dutch / Negavian / whatever". The one way I thought to get around this, sort of form a private language (as written text, like rcs stated, is seemingly untranslated), is to make references within your dialogue to distinct people, places, or events that have secret meanings.

For example, "Deryll, the rose blossoms in Cypress' grove!" This is multiple levels of security, as: 1) It relies on people understanding you are speaking something other than gibberish. 2) It could be made context sensitive. "in Cypress' grove late summer eve!" could mean something completely different than "in Cypress' grove in the dawning light!" 3) Someone not familiar with Cypress, a Rose, and so on would have no clue what the hell was just said.

Of course, the above was just gibberish, but its point stands: Private languages that could either be on a large scale (to differentiate the new fish from the old fish, for instance dividing who has or hasn't actually passed by the Giant Tree) or a small one (related to intra-group events, such as "Remember Walter's fishing trip?" being a way to alert a party that they're about to be ambushed without letting the ambushers know the jig is up). These wouldn't be fixed through magical language comprehension (You are understanding the language, it's just coming out like gibberish), would be difficult to infiltrate from an outsider, and so on.

Mhh I hadn't thought about that but it's a great point. Felarya would clearly be the land of secret codes and double meanings in some societies or situations

In short, can we presume that magic energies or "force fields" which ominipresent in Felarya (air, water, soil) affect on the speech, and automatically translate between different languages like the "Star Trek's universal translator", it's right?

Telemachus wrote:

In short, can we presume that magic energies or "force fields" which ominipresent in Felarya (air, water, soil) affect on the speech, and automatically translate between different languages like the "Star Trek's universal translator", it's right?

The exact source and reason is unknown.

General rule of thumb is that audible language such as speech and recorded voices are translated. Written language is not translated at all though.

This situation is very similar at the SF romance "Sea Horse in the Sky" (by Edmund Cooper). However, in "Worldriver" series (by Philip Jose Farmer), the persons from different ages and peoples of the History (and some aliens) needed to communicate speaking in Esperanto!