Breathing Sky

I dreamed ( Read more... )

So we came out in an open space, one of those urban places that's six of one and half a dozen of the other, and after all the building up around it happens is not good for any of it. It was patchily concrete and sort of scrubby, full of nodding flowers and tall grasses. And then I realised, they were all nodding in time. Every blade of grass, every flower, moving together, up and down. We're standing in a courtyard, on a day that had been perfectly still, and yet... "The sky is breathing." I said it looking around, feeling it, air on my skin, gentle puffs at first but then huffs and shortly buffets. And in the glass around me I saw the light go shadowed, and bright, and shadowed, and bright. And slowly, I looked up.

And cast my hand up, grabbing air and holding on hard, while above me dived down the most enormous creature, the most beautiful, impossible, bright green and barbed around the edges, scales shining, fangs flashing, and gaping wide onto a FURNACE inside as the dragon let out it's breath!
... and around us turned into swirling smoke and fog, as the two conditions met, the fire and my little dome of air, and made soot and water fall out around us.
But I held.

And when the fire cleared I was standing there with my guide beside me, the bricks around us glazed and the glass slagged, and we were the only things left moving.

And with that dome held so tight I hadn't even heard the screams.

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I kind of wish I could screencap my dream, because that dragon was spectacular. It looked like it was CGI, but not in the blocky pixelated way, just because it was more vivid, saturated, spectacular than anything in the world around it. It looked like it had dropped in from another reality, and made our reality look rather shabbily designed.

The view from the breathing end though was not something I'd want to repeat though. Certainly not in my sleep, when I felt and believed it. Yowch.

Difficult languages

I was looking for languages that might be difficult to learn without a babelfish.
There's lists of difficult languages, and they all have like Cantonese and Finnish and Icelandic on them.
But http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taa is spoken by about six thousand people and has all the sounds. All.

Taa has at least 58 consonants, 31 vowels, and four tones (Traill 1985, 1994 on East ǃXoon), or at least 87 consonants, 20 vowels, and two tones (DoBeS 2008 on West ǃXoon), by many counts the most of any known language. These include 20 (Traill) or 43 (DoBeS) click consonants and several vowel phonations, though opinions vary as to which of the 130 (Traill) or 164 (DoBeS) consonant sounds are single segments and which are consonant clusters.

I have been listening to sound files and *blink* a lot. Difficult!
Heh, now I want to throw Daniel Jackson at it. It would take a bit more than an episode methinks...

Using anyone's language to mean aliens gets creepy. So, no stealings someone's language to be secretly from another planet. But something with clicks and tones and all the vowels ever would be very hard to figure out for an English speaker. If they could hear the differences at all.

I was thinking, if there's people who make their living by putting a language into a babelfish and passing it on, they might want to have some particular difficult language to make sure they stay in business. Like, a trade language would usually be one made of simple parts all the people can understand, but if you're doing some kind of special initiation pay us a bundle course you want complicated parts only the special people will ever learn. But that don't seem likely to work for more than one generation. Kids learn everything.

I was also thinking if the whole language sounds like Ak Ak Ak to the British guys then the actors can fake it easy and there's some movie jokes in it.
... my fic no has actors. But then everyone has to read it in their heads.

Five out of six aliens

I have names for bunches of people now. My aliens are UVWXYZ which is a bit ridiculous, but at least narrows down what I'm looking at.

Uakari
Whin
Yorath
Xanthe
Zizel

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