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Starfish Language: Difference between revisions
It isn't a stealth pun if you lampshade it by linking it to "Stealth Pun", so removed the link to that trope
(It isn't a stealth pun if you lampshade it by linking it to "Stealth Pun", so removed the link to that trope) |
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[[First Contact Math]] is one method of ascertaining the intelligence of Starfish Language speakers.
{{noreallife|the whole point of the trope is that the language does not resemble anything that we humans use to communicate. Also, it's more than a little
{{examples}}
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* The Graycaps in Jeff VanderMeer's ''[[Ambergris]]''-books speak mostly in rapid clicks and whistles that sounds vaguely insectoid to human listeners, who have mostly concluded that their language must be too degenerate to properly deserve the title - as it turns out, it's in fact far more complex than any human language and utterly impossible to translate accurately. They understand human speech perfectly, but only begin to use themselves it in the third book, ''Finch''. They are also implied to communicate by breathing spores of their symbiotic fungi on each other.
* The aliens in the [[Isaac Asimov]] short story ''Playboy and the Slime God'' (a.k.a. ''[[What Is This Thing You Call Love?|What is This Thing Called Love?]]'') communicate by changing their color.
* In ''[[Stranger in
* In ''[[Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell]]'', two dead soldiers who are reanimated can communicate only in hideous screams, which are identified by their animator as ''the language of Hell''.
* Inverted in ''[[Terry Pratchett|The Bromeliad Trilogy]]'', in which the tiny nomes can't understand humans because our speech is too slow and deep for these fast-living creatures' miniscule inner ears to make out. They refer to the sounds made by humans as "mooing".
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{{reflist}}
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[[Category:Otherness Tropes]]
[[Category:Language Tropes]]
[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]
[[Category:Fantastic Sapient Species Tropes]]
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