On aliens learning to speak human.

When the first Cephilusk commandos made contact with humans after jumping through the Sol Gate, humanity was astonished to learn that the squid-like aliens were able to speak fluent Mushkaraq (The lingua franca creole language that formed over the centuries and adopted by almost all of humanity.)

It was assumed that the mechanical Cephilusk machines that formed the construction convoy and started the Discovery War had somehow learned the language and passed the knowledge on to their Cephilusk masters.

This was partly true. The method was significantly more complex. The construction convoy that arrived in humanity’s solar system, was traveling with conventional drives. Thousands of these convoys exist in the universe, traveling to stars with strategic value to construct large Jump Gates, linking these stars to the ever-growing, interstellar jump network.

The technology employed by these convoys is ancient. They have been traveling at sublight speeds for centuries, and in some instances millennia to reach their intended destinations, only returning to the homeworld to be decommissioned via the newly completed Jump Gate.

Once the convoy destined for humanity’s solar system was in range, their sensitive listening equipment started picking up radio signals originating from Earth and the other colonized planets in the solar system.

Any intelligent alien sentience would immediately realize that the inhabitants of humanity’s solar system were using radio transmissions to communicate. It’s very common and far from a unique form of communication in the galaxy. The primitive AI’s that controlled the convoy had decades to analyze and decipher humanity’s language.

The AI’s required enormous amounts of data to analyze, and humanity provided it unknowing that someone was listening. Billions of hours of holoflicks, vidcalls, secure comms, and other broadcasts were recorded and analyzed by the convoy during their approach vector.

The biggest challenge was to establish a foundation for interpreting humanity’s language. When two humans speaking different languages met in ancient times, they could communicate basic instructions by pointing and gesturing. When you don’t have that basic foundation in place, it becomes much harder. Even a simple phrase like “Me human” while pointing at oneself and then pointing at the alien and asking “you?” would not have the desired effect. For humans pointing is a natural, non-verbal form of communication. To an alien mind with a different physiology, seeing us point somewhere has utterly no meaning. To them, it conveys the same visual cues as seeing us breathe, or blow a kiss or make a fist with our hands. There is no common understanding to build from.

The primitive Cephilusk AI’s from the convoy did manage to decipher humanity’s language through analyzing the sheer volume of data they had access to. They started building a foundation of understanding through pattern analysis. It wasn’t too hard to figure out that when two humans met they would wave or say “ne’ho tahib” to each other (friendly greetings in Mushkaraq) By seeing this pattern over and over again when two humans started interacting, it was easy to deduce that this a form of salutations. Similarly, from analyzing a disproportionately large amount of romance holoflicks, they could deduce the meaning of the word “aihameem” (romantic love in Mushkaraq). There were thousands of other patterns that were identified and used to build an understanding of the language.

Once the Sol Gate was completed and the first non-robotic Cephilusks jumped through to escalate the Discovery War, they could speak fluent Mushkaraq. This gave them a significant strategic advantage during the war.

The Cephilusks themselves do speak their own, verbal language augmented by gestures from their facial tentacles. An interesting observation is that the Cephilusk also communicate with facial expressions, very similar to that of humans. It is unclear if this is something they considered part of the human language and imitate for humanity's benefit or if it is something native to their form of communication.

As a side note, the story of Infinite Stars is being told in English, even though English is a nearly extinct language in the Infinite Stars universe. It should be assumed that when two or more humans talk to each other in-game, they are doing so in Mushkaraq and not in English.

(If you want to check out the first episode of our hard science fiction visual novel, Infinite Stars, it's now available on Itch.io You can check out some of our other lore and world building posts like Drop-Drones, Sciency Spaceships or Uniform Designs)