04-06-2011, 12:33 PM
Being super lame, I am not familiar with past/current characters that are low-speech fluent, but no, they shouldn't have explicit written dialogue with low-speech-speaking companions. They will still be able to speak to them, obviously, but it should be more descriptive and less word-for-word translations of what they're saying. A further limitation would be that characters that have learned low-speech should now specify exactly which dialect of low-speech they're versed in -- a character that has learned the low-speech of horses would still probably have no clue what a bird is saying; indeed, they would probably still just hear a bunch of noise, rather than any kind of words.
For Speech Guide mentions that some low-speech-speaking species may be more flexible with language than others, making them somewhat more capable of learning high-speech. In general, species known modernly to be "more intelligent" would be more capable of learning high speech, including a lot of birds like ravens, crows, and parrots, and probably most lesser predators, like ferrets and badgers. Prey animals like horses and rabbits would have a much harder time. I would also note that for birds, ravens, crows, and parrots also have the advantage of having relatively versatile voices -- they have been known to mimic humans and it would follow that they would be able to mimic canine/mammalian sounds as well. Birds of prey like hawks and eagles are all very intelligent, so while they actually probably speak a version of high-speech instead of low-speech, the compatibility with canine/mammalian high-speech is likely low.
I hope... that makes sense. x_x We really wanted to avoid needing to write explicit lists of species capable of what and what, so I hope this logic is intuitive enough.
For Speech Guide mentions that some low-speech-speaking species may be more flexible with language than others, making them somewhat more capable of learning high-speech. In general, species known modernly to be "more intelligent" would be more capable of learning high speech, including a lot of birds like ravens, crows, and parrots, and probably most lesser predators, like ferrets and badgers. Prey animals like horses and rabbits would have a much harder time. I would also note that for birds, ravens, crows, and parrots also have the advantage of having relatively versatile voices -- they have been known to mimic humans and it would follow that they would be able to mimic canine/mammalian sounds as well. Birds of prey like hawks and eagles are all very intelligent, so while they actually probably speak a version of high-speech instead of low-speech, the compatibility with canine/mammalian high-speech is likely low.
I hope... that makes sense. x_x We really wanted to avoid needing to write explicit lists of species capable of what and what, so I hope this logic is intuitive enough.