PHM ONESHOT! GRACE & ROCKY.

on the Hail Mary.

tried my best to add actual music-theory talk into it, but it's blink and you'll miss it.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/87620481#main

What I know of it currently is: it uses chords; it's supposedly denser than English (not too hard, there are some human languages that are denser than English IIRC); it's similar to whale song; pitch changing indicates emotions; "A-below-middle-C major fifth, followed by an E-flat octave, and then a G-minor seventh" is a given name in that language; the chords mentioned above can be made from up to five notes at once, though most csn be spoken with two or three; "one" and "two" are what Grace thinks of as mono-syllabic words (made of one chord each — one of two notes, and the other of four, respectively) while "three" is two: one chord of two notes and another of four.

(I'm not going to go over every detail, like the obvious ones of them not having names for colors, or more esoteric ones such as the amount of note symbols in the place of each word.)

From here, I have a couple of questions. Firstly, given the whale-song comparison, do you think that Eridianese can be spoken over long distances? Around the entire planet? If distances are less of a concern due to the Eridian sensitivity to sound, how would that influence the development of languages? Also, Eridians are long lived. How does that influence their language(s)?

The easier questions to answer may be what consists of a morpheme and what consists of a phoneme in their language. Sure, all we can do is guesswork based on a tiny sample, but I think we can speculate in order to build a fuller language, or basic understanding.

To be perfectly clear, I'm a first year linguistics major. I by no means am an expert. But naturally this is of interest to me.