Triband Common Language

The Triband Common Language (often shortened to TCL) is the lingua franca of the Triband, a non-humanoid alien species. While TCL's grammar is within the bounds of human language (using patterns and synctactic structures not unlike our own) the language results pretty exotic because of its medium, as it uses non-visible electromagnetic signals rather than the more familiar 'vocal-auditory channel'.

While some xenolangs (this is, conlangs for extraterrestial races) can be learnt and spoken by human beings (often resulting from the assumption that aliens would 'talk' by modulating air vibrations with human-like mouths, as it's the case for Klingon or Na'vi), Triband languages would result completely opaque to humans as it relies on sensory systems unlike our own. This perceptual barrier can be 'lifted' artificially by transcribing (or 'graphing') Triband signals to human-understandable formats. One specially interesting way of doing this involves mapping the three frequencies used by the Triband to the three colour components visible to human eyes. This method (known as RGB mapping) allows us to re-interpret Triband communication as a series of colour patterns (including colour graddients, flashes, etc), which makes for rather aesthetic graphics like the one in the image (which surely looks more interesting than the rather dull 'ASCII translation' below). By the way, the sequence represented in the image is one of the native names for TCL itself.

Setting

TCL is spoken by the Triband, a non-humanoid alien species from a planet called Nikotay (this is, of course, a human exonym) in a star system relatively close to ours in galactic scale. The Triband loosely resemble small flying manta-rays. Their size range from being less than 10 centimetres wide and long and about 5 centimetres tall when born (from external sacks or 'eggs', carried by their mothers) to up to 2.3 metres wide, 1.8 metres long for large adult individuals (though it's more typical for them to be about 1.0 metre wide and 1.1 metres long). They have bone-less leg-like limbs which they can use to stand in various positions, a tail various finns and two spurs at the edge of their 'wings'. While Tribands do not have discernible heads, they have a mouth which is surrounded by four appendages similar to the ones found in star-nosed moles but larger, which they use as their main organ to manipulate things (much like how humans use our hands). In their lower side (or 'chest') they have a distinctive pattern of three white bands (that being the in-history reason why they are known to humans as 'Tribands') while on their upper side (or 'back') they have large and somewhat protuberant eyespots much darker than their usually silver-grey skin.

Tribands experience the world in a vastly different way as we do. While they are able to see light wavelengths visible to us, they can only do so very poorly. Their analogue to our sense of hearing is divided in two senses (experienced distinctly by the species): one that recognizes deep, low frequency sounds while another recognizes higher ranges, including what humans would classify as ultrasound. However, the largest difference lies on Tribands' ability to 'hear' electromagnetic wavelengths that lie well below our visible spectrum. This sense is particularly sharp at three range of frequencies that the Triband are also able to produce and modulate, which is the basis for Triband linguistic communication. The use of this kind of 'radio signals' is widespread among Nikotay 'animal' species, though different species vary on the specifics of which ranges they use as well as how many.

Triband civilizations are in a industrial or post-industrial age; they are familiar with analogues to much of our age's technology. They never made much progress in space technologies, though, having been unable to launch satellites or venture into space before being discovered by the more technologically advanced mankind. Triband individuals tend to travel much more often than humans, that being one of the factors for the high degree of 'connection' between societies from around the planet which has helped shape Nikotay's linguistic scenario: whereas most regions have several local languages (which can go as far as clan-specific languages) nearly all Triband individuals are at least familiar (and more often than not fluent) in a lingua franca: the Triband Common Language (originated, in-history, as an auxlang).

Phonology and transcription

Triband languages are based on the species' capability to emit simultaneously signals in three frequency ranges or channels, varying the intensity of each independently. This constitutes the medium used by Triband communication, much like how humans use the sound of the modulated airflow of our respiratory system in human spoken languages.

In the same way no human language uses every possible vocalization allowed by the human vocal tract (hard as Ubykh and !Xóõ might try), Triband languages do not use all the signal combinations they'd be theoretically able to emit; they too have phonologies specific to each language. These phonologies vary as widely between a language an another as human language phonologies do though the Triband Common Language (TCL) is what most Tribands would consider pretty standard.

It's important to notice that Tribands also have a concept that is analogous to our concept of phoneme (chromemes based on intensity patterns) though chromemes are usually 'articulated' with only one channel (which makes it possible to co-articulate up to three chromemes at a time which is by far the rule among Triband languages). Triband languages need not to use the same set of chromemes for each channel nor to 'synchronize' the channels starting to pronounce each phonemes at the same time in all channels though both of these are the case in TCL (which allows us to understand TCL speech as three simultaneous coordinated streams of chromemes).

TCL features four kinds of chromemes: plain, continous, abrupt and peaks.

Plain chromemes are characterised by manteining a continuous level of intensity in a given channel. TCL distinguishes five plain chromemes (or six if we include 'no intensity'). The levels of intensity are actually relative as they vary depending on the speaker and the circumstance (as Tribands are able to regulate their overall intensity so as to 'shout' or 'whisper'); this hardly ever becomes a source of confusion as Triband speech is usually puntuated with initial words which can be used to 'calibrate' the intensity levels. Humans may transcribe plain chromemes in the so-called ASCII encoding as numbers from 0 (no signal emitted in that channel) to 5 (highest).

Continuous chromemes are given by a gradual rise or fall of intensity. TCL has six continuous chromemes: three falls and three rises. The chromemes transcribed as + and - indicate a rise and a fall of one intensity level (respectively), R and L move the intensity two levels (R for rise, L for lower) whereas ^ and v represent a rise or a fall of three levels. The intensity usually starts at the level left by the previous chromeme but this needs not to be the case; intensity cannot rise beyond level 5 or fall below level 1, though.

Abrupt chromemes are marked by an abrupt rise or fall of intensity, such as switching from level 2 to level 4 as fast as possible. There are four abrupt chromemes in TCL: a, a rise of 1 to 2 levels, b, a rise of 3 or 4 levels, and c and d, the corresponding falls. Other than being abrupt other than gradual, they work very similarly to R, ^, L and v.

Finally, peak chromemes are marked by an overall low intensity (not higher than 1) with some rapid peaks or flashes of high intensity. TCL uses two such phonemes, Y which concist of one such peak and X which concists of a rapid succession of shorter peaks. In RGB mapping, which represents signal intensity over time as colours (mapping each channel to an RGB component) I'll often use smaller marks for Y and larger (or more numerous) marks for X.

TCL words concist of series of chromeme triplets (one for each channel). For instance, the word for shared (also used for TCL, "common") in the image in the introduction can be read as [24X][R-3][cYR], which means that the word starts with plain intensity levels in the first two channels (2 and 4) and and spikey signal in the third one, then raises the first signal, lowers the second one a bit and leaves a plain level-3 signal for the third one, and finally proceeds to lower abruptly the first signal, leave a Y-peak in the second one and the third one rises. In RGB mapping, the intensity of each channel is represented by the intensity of red, green and blue colour components which can be composed into a sequence of colours as seen in the following figure:

Notice these graphics represent Triband 'speech' over time (as read from left to right); it could be more appropriate to represent it as an animation with changing colours (first green with cyan flashes, then more turqouise, purple, etc.). Tribands speak very rapidly, at a more faster rate than humans, though; so it's probably better to have these static representations than rendering TCL as a series of seizure-inducing rapid flashes.

Native writing

Although different Triband societies developed distinct methods to write their languages using diverse media, tactile writing systems (using the tentacles near their mouths) were historically prevalent, often in tablets made of a material similar to clay. Modern TCL script (Common Triband Script or CTS) has its origin in one such system (though the clay like material has long been replaced by a synthetic compound).

CTS is a hybrid writing system as it is an alphabet 'enhanced' with logograms. Although TCL could, in principle, be written without any logograms (this is, in a purely alphabetic way) most Triband prefer to use at least a limited set of logograms much like how English speakers use acronyms (or, even more so, like how European medieval copyists used a myriad abbreviations and ligatures when transcribing Latin texts). The amount of logograms is often dependent on the topic of a text as well as its intended audience; scientific articles on a certain topic will often use logograms unknown to the laymen.

CTS characters are composed of three kinds of 'strokes': light strokes (relatively shallow wedges), dark strokes (noticeably deeper wedges) and dots (circle-ish, deeper than light strokes though often more shallow than dark strokes). Strokes other than dots can have 8 orientations (upwards, downwards, rightwards, leftwards, up-right, up-left, down-right and down-left); an upwards stroke and a downwards stroke are only distinguished by whether the 'pointy' side of the wedge is in its upper part or in the lower part. When representing CTS on paper or on a screen, it's conventional for humans to fill-in dark strokes while only the contour of the wedge is drawn for light strokes. The following are the CTS representation of the 18 chromemes presented above (all other glyphs found in a text can be safely assumed to be logograms):

The CTS equivalent of a 'line' is formed by three columns which correspond to Tribands' three channels. When writing alphabetically, the glyphs for the simultaneous chromemes are aligned on a 'row'; logograms (which always include at least one non-alphabetic glyph) may include symbols in all the three columns or may leave a 'blank' in some of the columns (when only one column is used in a logogram it's usually the one in the middle though this is not always the case; the difference being contrastive). The following picture shows the CTS alphabetic transcription for the glottonym [24X][R-3][cYR] as well as a commonly used logogram for it:

Grammar

Compared to it's phonology, TCL grammar may result too human-like (though, as far as we know, alien languages could resemble ours). Nontheless, it has a few interesting quirks.

Much like human speech, a TCL discourse is composed of gramatically linked units (sentences) which in turn are composed of words following a set of synctactic rules.

Delimiters

TCL sentences (or, even more generally, TCL utterances) are invariably delimited by words belonging to a closed class: an initial word (which, more often than not, serves as an evidentiality marker) and a final word (which classify the sentence according to its polarity or mood: whether the statement is affirmative, negative, a question, an order, etc.). TCL 'initials' include:

• [2XY] : Indicates that the speaker in continuing a previous statement (e.g. after being interrupted).
• [3X^][404] : 'Primary' evidential, the speaker makes a claim based on something they experienced on their own. This is also used for logical conclusions based on sensory input (e.g. something the speaker deduces from a thing after hearing a certain sound) as long as the speaker is reasonably certain about it.
• [4L5][4+v] : 'Secondary' evidential, the speaker makes a claim based on something someone else told them.
• [1R2][15a] : 'Null' evidential, the speaker affirms something on their own, internal evidence (for instance: making a claim about something they thought). Also used for questions and orders.
• [XY4][33+] : 'Dubitative' evidential, the speaker makes a claim they are not completely sure about.
• [Y3R][^X4] : 'Advice marker', the speaker suggest something (rather than only mentioning it as a possibility, as it was the case for the 'Dubitative' evidential). Some speakers may use this marker for orders (though this is rather rare). Also used for irrealis.
• [L3Y] : Quotation, the speaker is quoting someone else verbatim. Usually followed by another initial (the one use by the quoted speaker) or by a mention to the other speaker and then the corresponding inital.

TCL 'finals' include:

• [100][0+0][+11] : Affirmative statement.
• [4+5][0-a][003] : Negative statement (this marker may also be used if a component other than the main verb is negated!).
• [+00][XY0][4c1] : Question.
• [+++][YaY][1^3] : Imperative, order.

In addition to marking evidentiality and polarity / sentence type, initials and finals play an important role in identifying signal intensity levels: TCL speakers will recognize a plain signal in the first channel along with a continuous rising signal in the second channel and a plain signal in the third channel with somewhat higher intensity than the first one (though not as much as the second one is rises) as [1R2] (to be followed by [15a] in the 'null' evidential) regardless of the actual intensity levels involved, allowing them to 'calibrate' the expected intensity levels. Finals also help establishing when a sentence end or when someone is done speaking (some speakers may repeat the final more than once to indicate that they finished speaking; we could think of this as something similar to human radio users saying over or over and out).

Syntax

Most TCL sentences follow the familiar 'verb plus arguments' structure found in Earthly languages. In TCL grammatical roles (subject, direct object, indirect object) are closely related to [semantical roles] roles such as theme, patient, agent, experiencer, etc. When there is a theme or patient (playing an absolutive synctactic role) it must be the first element in the sentence (after the initial delimiter), followed by the verb and then other components; if neither a theme nor a a patient is included in a sentence the verb becomes its first element (there is a way to bypass those restrictions in order to make emphasis on some other ). Since human transitive verbs tend to assigne the agent role to their subjects and the patient or theme role to their objects TCL could be said to loosely have OVS alignment. The language lacks passive or antipassive constructions per se though any role may be omitted resulting in similar effects.

TCL leans strongly towards being head-initial: modifiers tend to follow the 'heads' they modify. Most TCL constructions are analytic.

Verbs

TCL verbs are fairly simple; the only mandatory marking has to deal with whether it takes a [theme or a patient] (which may nontheless be omitted on the sentence). This distinction is mostly semantic; a verb is considered to have a theme if it refers without affecting its nature ('what is seen' would then be the theme of 'to see') whereas it is considered to have a patient if it has an 'object' which it affects ('what is eaten' would be the theme of 'to eat'). This can be seen as a stative vs dynamic distinction (it's up to another linguists whether it should be treated that way). Pertinent or not, STV and DYN are conveniently short labels for me to use. This distinction is indicated by a particle after the verb (which, by the lack of a better term, I'm calling category particle). No TCL verb may take both a patient and a theme at the same time or neither of them (there are some TCL verbs which can be either stative or dynamic depending on the context, however).

Other than 'category', there are other features that may be indicated for a verb, though all of them are optional. With the exception of polarity (to indicate negation), these other features are indicated as particles after the category particle.

Negation is indicated by a particle between the verb and the category marker (STV or DYN) as it can be seen as a derivation of the verb rather than an inflection (other derivational elements which may be suffixed to verbal stems include a frequentative mark and suffixes related to the speed of an action: 'slowly' or 'rapidly', 'pausedly', etc.). Since negative sentences are also indicated by final delimiters the negative particle may be left out by some speakers though this may be confusing as other speakers also use the negative final delimiter if an element other than the verb is negated.

There are three main aspect marks (whose use is entirely optional): gnomic (for general truths), perfective and imperfective. Similarly, there are three tenses which are also optional and which can be used independently of aspects: past, present (which always referes to the immediate present) and future. Whether a Triband will use or not these features mostly depends on their linguistic background (other languages they speak, habits of their peers or of the individuals they are interacting with, etc).

TCL doesn't have a clear distinction between adjectives and verbs, treating the former as identicala to the latter (the only difference being that what an English speaker would likely consider an adjective will often appear in relative clauses rather than on main clauses).

Nouns

As it happened with verbs, most distinctions in TCL nouns are optional, including number. The basic structure of a nominal group is noun (modifiers) case_mark where modifiers includes non-mandatory elements such as particles (singular and plural markers are very common though this also depends on the linguistic background of the speaker), possessives and relative clauses. TCL lacks articles and demonstratives (such as English this, that); similar distinctions may be expressed by indicating the location (often an absolute location, featuring cardinal directions as it happens in [Guugu Yimithirr] with a relative clause. The so called 'case marks' indicate the semantic relationship of the noun to the main verb. These roles are verb-dependant and can't always be predidcted. They include:

• Theme and Patient: TCL grammar deals with these two roles in a special way. Rather than being indicated by a postposition as it's the case for all other roles, theme and patient take no postpositions. They always preceed the main verb (whereas other components must come thereafter).
• Agent and Force: The one that performed the action associated to the verb. The agent particle is used if the action was performed willingly (thus being limited to animate beings) while forces indicate that the action was performed unwillingly (like 'tripping' for an animate being or 'falling' for an inanimate object).
• Instigator and Cause: Similar to agent and force though instigators and causes need not to have been the ones to perform the action, they may have made the agent/force to make it. This roles are used in the TCL equivalent to causative constructions. The difference between instigators and causes is also willingless (the former causing the agent/force to perform the action deliberately).
• Experiencer/Beneficiary: The same particle is used to indicate one who experiences something (specially a sensory input) or one for whom an action is done.
• Others such as location, source and origin, instruments, etc.

Sometimes an element can be identified as playing several roles at once. While some speakers will just choose one particle to use in those cases, others may use more than one case mark on the same nominal group (or, if one of the roles is patient/theme, add a case mark to them). Using agent or force marks (or, less frequently, instigator, cause or beneficiary marks) on a patient/theme is TCL's standard way to deal with 'reflexive' constructions.

Possessives and links

Possessives form a subset of constructions which link two nouns. These constructions always have the form NP link where NP is a nominal group without a case particle and link indicates the link to the word which the 'possessive' applies. Links may include possession, temporary possession (ie borrowing), bodypart, origin, creator, etc. While all of those kinds of links have their own particles some speakers may conflate some or all of them to a the 'regular' possession marker (this too depends heavily on the speaker's linguistic background).

Relative clauses

Relative clauses follow pretty much the same structure as outter clauses, the main difference being that rather than being surrounded by initial and final delimiters they are surrounded by a relativizer circumflex after which there may be a suffix which indicates which semantic role in the relative clause corresponds to the noun the relative clause modifies (the head noun, usually omitted from the relative clause itself). For instance, while "an animal drinks water from the lake (I've saw it)" would have the following structure as an independent sentence:

PRIMARY_EVIDENTIAL water ingest DYN animal EXP lake SOURCE AFFIRMATIVE (note: the subject of ingest can be regarded either as a experiencer/benificiary or an agent)

the relative form "that the animal drank from a lake" (if 'the water', the theme in the relative, is the head noun) would become:

RELATIVE ingest DYN animal EXP lake SOURCE RELATIVE

while "that/where the animal drank water from" (where 'the lake', a component other than the theme/patient, is the head noun) becomes:

RELATIVE water ingest DYN animal EXP lake RELATIVE SOURCE_REL

Short relatives

TCL also includes an special form of a relative which is often used for words which are adjectives in English (but which can nontheless be used for any TCL verb): the short relatives. This can only be used if the head noun is the theme/patient of the verb and if there are no other components:

SHORT_REL ingest SHORT_REL

(water, possibly some othe food) that is/was ingested

SHORT_REL be_large SHORT_REL

that is large, large

The short relative may only contain a verbal stem (without the category particle or any arguments; a negative suffix may be included as it is thought as belonging to the verb stem).

No nested relatives

One important limitation of TCL is that it does not allow nested relative clauses. In other words, sentences which have a relative sub-clause cannot be used as sub-clauses themselves. A sentence like English The dog (that chased the cat (that chased the mouse)) moved his tail cannot be constructed in TCL because it embeds a relative clause (that chased the mouse) inside another (that chased the cat (that chased the mouse)). A Triband would solve this issue by paraphrasing the concept as several 'linked' sentences: the cat chased the mouse, the dog (that chased the cat) moved his tail. Short relatives are allowed, however, thus allowing the cat chased the mouse, the dog (that chased the chasing cat) moved his tail, though this solution is less frequent that the previous one.

(this is, obviously, omitting the issue that mouses, cats and dogs are exotic 'alien' animals the Tribands wouldn't typically talk about)

This limitation is widespread among Triband languages and, in fact, most of them don't allow any kind of nested relatives (which leads to its speakers to avoid embeding short relatives either). Some languages don't allow relatives at all, always using 'chained' structures like the cat chased the mouse, the dog chased the cat, the dog moves his tail. Among the languages that do allow nested relatives (thought to account for less than 1% of the Triband languages) most only allow it up to two or at most three levels.

In TCL the restriction does not apply if the relative clauses are not nested, the dog (that chased the white cat) and (that chased black cat) moved his tail" would indeed be valid (other than using the concepts of 'white' and 'black' which would result far more foreign to the Triband than terrestrial animals).

Personal pronouns

In theory, TCL has 5 personal pronouns, for first and second person (third person pronouns are short of unheard of in Triband languages). In practice, however, many of those pronouns see limited usage:

• The singular first person pronoun (I, [LYX]) is, by far, the most commonly used pronoun and the only one whose usage can be said to be 'widespread' all across Nikotay. Some people may prefer to address themselves by their own names, however.
• The singular second person pronoun (singular you, [5Y-]) is far less common; the Triband would rather address their fellow speakers by their names (if they know it) or with nouns (including the really generic 'person').
• TCL has two plural first person pronouns: inclusive and exclusive we. Both are fairly rare in usage.
• Finally, there is a plural second person pronoun which hardly anyone uses. Even those who are more prone to use pronouns due to local language bias will generally use the singular first person pronoun instead.

TCL names, by the way, are rather convenient because they are often reasonably short (they are always mononyms adopted by Tribands for 'external use' while they'd often have more complex name in their local languages).

Interrogative sentences

Polar questions (that is, yes/no questions) use the same structure as affirmative sentences, only differing in the mandatory use of the 'null' evidential and the question final delimiter ([+00][XY0][4c1]). If the speaker wants to introduce a bias towards a negative answer they may negate the main verb. Polar questions are answered with 'echo answers' (with the appropriate initial and final delimiters and often omitting most verbal arguments although it's not uncommon to leave the patient/theme):

NULL_EVIDENTIAL water ingest DYN animal EXP lake SOURCE QUESTION?

Did an animal drink water from the lake?

PRIMARY_EVIDENTIAL water ingest DYN AFFIRMATIVE

Yes ([An animal] drank water [from the lake], I saw it myself).

SECONDARY_EVIDENTIAL ingest NOT DYN NEGATIVE

No (as far as I've been told).

Open questions take the same delimiters (null and QUESTION?) but use what could be seen as an interrogative pronoun in the same place as the expected answer would be found. Answers also follow an echo reply format:

NULL_EVIDENTIAL INTERROGATIVE ingest DYN animal EXP lake SOURCE QUESTION?

What did the the animal ingest from a lake?

PRIMARY_EVIDENTIAL water ingest DYN AFFIRMATIVE

[The animal] drunk water [from a lake].

NULL_EVIDENTIAL water ingest DYN animal EXP INTERROGATIVE SOURCE QUESTION?

Where did the animal drink water from?

PRIMARY_EVIDENTIAL ingest DYN lake SOURCE AFFIRMATIVE

[The animal] drank [water] from a lake.

Direct quotation

Among the Triband, it's far more common to use direct quotation than other strategies like reported speech. In TCL, a verbatim quote is usually treated in the same way as a noun phrase. Quotes being with the quotation evidential ([L3Y]) which is immediatly followed by the quoted text, including its own delimiters. After the quote, the phrase continues with the interrupted phrase initial delimiter [2XY]. Although not universal, many TCL speakers may lower their signal intensity when quoting; the usage of pairs of delimiters around the quote help establishing what signal intensity levels are being used for each portion of the text.

PRIMARY_EVIDENTIAL water ingest DYN PFTV animal EXP lake SOURCE AFFIRMATIVE

An animal has drunk water from the lake.

NULL_EVIDENTIAL QUOTE ( PRIMARY_EVIDENTIAL water ingest DYN PFTV animal EXP lake SOURCE AFFIRMATIVE ) CONTINUE say STV PRESENT elder BEN kid AGG ORDER!

Kid, tell the elder right now that an animal has drunk water from the lake!

Emphasis

The CONTINUE initial delimiter can also be used to place emphasis on an element other than the theme or patient of a verb. This is achieved by moving the element forward, leaving it alone in a pseudo-sentence before the rest of the main sentence which continues after a CONTINUE:

PRIMARY_EVIDENTIAL water ingest DYN PFTV animal EXP lake SOURCE AFFIRMATIVE

An animal has drunk water from the lake.

PRIMARY_EVIDENTIAL lake SOURCE CONTINUE water ingest DYN PFTV animal EXP AFFIRMATIVE

~ From the lake it was that an animal drank water.

Numeration

In human languages there is a clear preference for decimal (or base-10) number systems (this is, higher numerals are formed by mentioning how many units (1 = 10^0), tens (10 = 10^1), hundreds (100 = 10^2), thousands (1000 = 10^3) and other powers of ten are needed to form it). This numeration (which follows from the fact that humans may count up to 10 with their fingers) [is not universal among our species but it is decidedly the norm] (base-20, which is probably based on humans counting with fingers and toes, is the next most common base).

Triband languages are far more heterogeneous in this aspect, with base-4, base-8 and base-12 being nearly tied as the most common numeration systems (w other number systems such as base-5, base-10 and base-16 are the next most common). Each number base has one (or, more often than not, several) ways of counting:

• Base 4 relates to the four tentacles near a Triband's mouth.
• Base 8, 12 and 16 (multiples of 4) relates to Tribands making different signs with their tentacles.
• Base 10 is usually related to counting with each of their 4 tentacles and then with each of the 6 combinations of two-tentacles. Some Base-16 Triband languages use every tentacle combination.
• Base 5 is the most prominent example of Triband numeration which is not related to tentacles but to the three bands on Triband chests and the two dark areas inbetween. Some Triband languages extend this to base-7 numeration, including the outer black areas.

TCL uses base-8 (octal numeration) as a compromise between the three most common bases (4, 8 and 12). This means than rather than having dedicated terms for 10, 100, 1000 and so on it uses powers of 8 (units, eights, 64's, 512's) as its building blocks.

Numbers up to 7 ('digits') have numeral words of their own. 8 can be expressed either by its numeral alone, [5^Y], or as "eight one" (~ an eight, [5^Y] [RYY][d21]). Higher numbers are constructed by mentioning each power of 8 in decreasing order and how many of them are required. To exemplify, let's take the number 2015. In an octal numeration like TCL's, 2015 becomes "3737" (because 3×8³+7×8²+3×8+7 = 2015), so the numeral is constructed as:

five_hundred_and_twelve three sixty_four seven eight three units three

512 × 3 + 64 × 7 + 8 × 3 + 1 × 7 = 2015

8³ × 3 + 8² × 7 + 8 × 3 + 7 = 2015

Samples

The Arrogant Human

A human being travelled to Nikotay in his spaceship. When he arrived, he saw some Tribands. The human said "I feel pitty for a species which cannot build spaceships, a species unable to fly to the stars". The Tribands said: "Listen to us, human! We feel pitty for a species that cannot fly through the sky". Then the Tribands flew away into the sky.

(any similarities to Schleicher's fable may or may not be coincidential)

In CTS (Common Triband Script, TCL's native writing system), the fable reads as follows:

Notice that this CTS text uses logograms extensively (as it will become apparent in the line-by-line gloss below).

Line by line analysis

The following is a line by line analysis. Due to TCL's peculiarities it's difficult to use traditional Leipzig-style glosses so I'll be using an ad hoc glossing style instead (based on English transcriptions for Triband words).

In addition to glossing each sentence in its native script (CTS) I'll be including an RGB mapping transcription for the first sentence (creating those graphs is rather time consuming so I'll abstain from transcribing other lines this time).

Line 1:

RGB-mapping transcription

SECONDARY_EVIDENTIAL human_being travel DYN PFTV Nikotay DESTINATION spaceship human_being POS INST AFFIRMATIVE A human being had travelled to Nikotay using his spaceship

SECONDARY_EVIDENTIAL

As any other TCL sentence, this line begins with an initial delimiter which here is the 'secondary evidential' (indicating second-hand information). Secondary evidentials are customary used for stories since the narrator has 'heard' it from the author.

human_being travel DYN PFTV

The Triband verb for 'travel' is considered to be dynamic and it takes a patient which, in this case, is a 'human being' (a familiar alien species for the Triband). This sentence includes an optional marker for perfective aspect, making it clear that the story is about a finished [past] event.

Nikotay DESTINATION

Nikotay is a proper noun, the name of the planet where the Triband live. The DESTINATION case suffix here indicates a physical destination but, for some verbs, it needn't do so.

spaceship ( human_being POS ) INST

This noun phrase include the most common 'linker word', POS (for possession). It translates to using (or with) spaceship of the human.

AFFIRMATIVE

All TCL sentences end with a final delimiter; AFFIRMATIVE is the most common such particle and it indicates that the sentence is an affirmative sentence.

Line 2

SECONDARY_EVIDENTIAL triband some perceive STV arrival human_being ABOUT TIME AFFIRMATIVE He saw some tribands upon his arrival.

triband some perceive STV

The verb used in this line means 'to perceive' without further indicating what sense was used. Since humans and Tribands experience rather different sensory experiences it best approximates the concept of a human 'seeing' something (though it may also refer to a human perceiving something by any other means). It's theme (as perceive is considered a stative verb) is triband some, that is, 'some Tribands' (the particle some is optional but helps indicating there was more than one Triband individual). The agent of the verb (the human introduced in the previous phrase) is not mentioned but can be inferred from the context.

arrival ( human_being ABOUT ) TIME

This construction is analogous to spaceship ( human_being POS ) INST in the previous sentence, the action took place "at the time of an arrival" that had to with (was 'about') a human being (the one that came in the spaceship). Notice that the human is referred again as human_being rather than 'he/she' since TCL lacks third person pronouns.

Line 3

SECONDARY_EVIDENTIAL QUOTE ( NULL_EVIDENTIAL feel_sorrow STV 1s BEN species RELATIVE ( spaceship build-can NOT DYN ) RELATIVE AGENT_REL CAUSE NEGATIVE ) CONTINUE say STV triband BEN AFFIRMATIVE He told the Tribands that he felt sorrow for a species that couldn't build spaceships.

This line includes two 'advanced' aspects of TCL: quotes and relatives. TCL relies on quotation rather than indirect speech so the phrase is literally the human told the Tribands "I feel sorrow for a species that can't build spaceships".

While the 'outer phrase' (the complete sentence) uses the same delimiters we've seen so far, the inner (quoted) phrase uses the null evidential (since he's stating an opinion of his) and the negative final (since the sentence contains a negative element (can't), even though it's main verb (feel_sorrow) isn't).

NULL_EVIDENTIAL feel_sorrow STV 1s BEN species RELATIVE ( spaceship build-can NOT DYN ) RELATIVE AGENT_REL CAUSE NEGATIVE (the quoted phrase)

The verb feel_sorrow takes a 'benificiary' as it's subject (though it's categorised as an stative verb) and it may take an instigator or cause (that which causes the sorrow) which, in this case, is an species that cannot build spaceships (this is a reference to the Triband which had made virtually no developments in space technology by the time they were discovered by human beings). The species would be the agent of the verb build (or, rather, 'not being able to build') inside the relative so it's marked as such with the particle AGENT_REL (otherwise the relative would refer to the patient of the verb, the sentence would read a species that is a spaceship that cannot be built).

Line 4

SECONDARY_EVIDENTIAL QUOTE ( NULL_EVIDENTIAL feel_sorrow STV 1s BEN species RELATIVE ( people species FROM fly-can NOT DYN star many DESTINATION ) RELATIVE CAUSE NEGATIVE ) CONTINUE say STV triband BEN AFFIRMATIVE (And) he told the Tribands that he felt sorrow for a species that couldn't fly to the stars.

This sentence is a near-repetition of the previous one. This kind of repetitions are common in TCL usage.

Line 5

SECONDARY_EVIDENTIAL triband AGENT CONTINUE QUOTE ( NULL_EVIDENTIAL people listen STV human_being BEN ORDER! ) CONTINUE say STV AFFIRMATIVE The Tribands said: "Listen to us, Human!"

This sentence introduces a third final delimiter (inside the quoted part): ORDER! for imperatives. It's also an example of a non-theme/patient argument being moved to the front of the sentence (in a pseudo-sentence of its own) for emphasis (otherwise a listener could have thought the human was still the speaker). Notices that the Tribands are referred to as triband (obviating that they are plural, as established before with the particle some) and that they refer to themselves as people (where the Triband concept of 'people' may indicate 'more than one individual of a sapient species' but, more often than not, refers to those of their kind) rather than using the fairly deprecated 'inclusive we' personal pronoun.

Line 6

SECONDARY_EVIDENTIAL QUOTE ( NULL_EVIDENTIAL feel_sorrow STV people BEN species RELATIVE ( people species FROM fly-can NOT DYN sky LOC ) RELATIVE CAUSE NEGATIVE ) CONTINUE say STV human_being BEN AFFIRMATIVE They told the human being that they felt sorrow for a species that couldn't fly in the sky.

This sentence purposefully parallels the one in line 4 (though this time it is the Tribands who are telling the human a disadvantage of his species).

Line 7

SECONDARY_EVIDENTIAL human_being fly_away_from STV people AGENT sky DESTINATION AFFIRMATIVE AFFIRMATIVE The triband [then] flown away from the human, into the sky.

This sentence use a Triband concept that doesn't translate well to human languages: flying away from someone in a rather disrespectful manner. The focus is on the the person (usually another Triband but, in this case, the human being), that being the reason for it to be the action's 'theme'.

This final sentence ends with a doubled final delimiter (AFFIRMATIVE AFFIRMATIVE), a common means to indicate that the speaker has finished speaking (comparable to a human saying 'over and out').