Skip to main content
Worldbuilding

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

8
  • 4
    $\begingroup$ Your first paragraph is from the perspective of someone who uses a more complex vocalization who is unwilling to believe that a society could develop around just two sounds and work out a perfectly viable language. Please don't fall into the trap of believing that since humanity developed this way, there must be no other way. $\endgroup$ Commented Apr 4, 2023 at 14:41
  • 4
    $\begingroup$ A person talking slowly or quickly is NOT in itself a problem. What you are looking for is calibration. So long as the culture as a handful of appropriate greetings, then when you meet someone and greet them, they can pick up the speed at which you modulate your sounds from the greeting. Also, from a story perspective, unusually slow/quick speakers, or speakers who vary the pace as they speak, are just the equivalent of people with funny/non-understandable accents in our own world. It's normal not to perfectly understand a foreigner at first. $\endgroup$ Commented Apr 4, 2023 at 14:57
  • 2
    $\begingroup$ This is exactly why Morse code is self-referential with regard to timing. A dash is the length of three dots. Letter separation is one dot-time of silence. Word separation is one dash-time of silence. The consistency of those timings is important for understanding it. The actual speed is limited only by what the practitioners can keep up with. Morse also uses special encodings for line signals ("prosigns"). AR, AS, CP,CQ, SOS, etc. When sending these signals the usual letter break is elided and the whole sequence is sent at once. This makes it distinctive to avoid confusion. $\endgroup$ Commented Apr 5, 2023 at 0:33
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ Two points there. First, something that we are good at is comparing time intervals and signal coincidence hence deriving what electronic engineers would call a clock from a signal stream: without that music wouldn't work. Second, I believe that beginners are far better at sending well-paced Morse code than they are at understanding a message sent at the same speed by somebody else. So I'd suggest that the fundamental requirement is that there's sufficient information in the message stream to be able to quantise the encoding: a Morse code message comprising a single dot or dash is meaningless. $\endgroup$ Commented Apr 5, 2023 at 19:31
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ If someone can guess the sender of a Morse code message from hearing it, I don't see why emotion or sarcasm would be impossible for the medium. Extremely difficult to detect, perhaps, but not impossible. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystroke_dynamics $\endgroup$ Commented Apr 5, 2023 at 20:58