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thehippietortoise replied to your post “So I need more worldbuilding refinement for this solarpunk mammoth…”
Not sure if your still struggling with this or not but i have an idea, most elephants comunicate through their trunks, what if there was a flexible tech that went over the tip of the trunkn flexible and with holes to breath and drink, making it also water proof, the tech is a translator that works when the mammoth makes a certain call that turns the translator on, it would then translate all sounds for a short period if time.
What I’ve started going with for the draft is something along those lines. The idea is that it is something the mammoth has to be trained to use, and will utilize deliberately; it’s perfectly likely that it wouldn’t translate most of their utterances directly, and would only actually translate deliberately-formed things that they said straight into it, because elephant communication is so complex and involves so many aspects. Vocalizations are a large part, but even those, many of them are below the range of human hearing. So none of the seismic or body-language communications would translate.
And conversely, I’d initially thought of making them bi-directional translators, but am at a total loss for what on earth a translator could possibly make of human speech into elephant. It’s far more likely that the mammoths would just understand human speech.
So part of the plot could entail our Heroine being exceptionally fluent in Mammoth for a human, having paid more attention than most as a child, and the Mammoth that’s a character in the story being better at communication without the translators than most, so that she can still get her point across much of the time.
But, anyway, yes– I think having it be something they manipulate with their trunk to utilize deliberately is the key. I don’t think it could stay fitted onto their trunks much of the time; I figure it would be on a collar, and then they could curl their trunks around to use it. Because they do so much with their trunks that they’d be handicapped by any permanent encumbrance. But they can probably take their collars off themselves if necessary. And maybe there could be a component that’s carried around on the collar and can be detached for use as necessary.
(Your picture was not posted)
thehippietortoise replied to your post “So I need more worldbuilding refinement for this solarpunk mammoth…”
Not sure if your still struggling with this or not but i have an idea, most elephants comunicate through their trunks, what if there was a flexible tech that went over the tip of the trunkn flexible and with holes to breath and drink, making it also water proof, the tech is a translator that works when the mammoth makes a certain call that turns the translator on, it would then translate all sounds for a short period if time.
What I’ve started going with for the draft is something along those lines. The idea is that it is something the mammoth has to be trained to use, and will utilize deliberately; it’s perfectly likely that it wouldn’t translate most of their utterances directly, and would only actually translate deliberately-formed things that they said straight into it, because elephant communication is so complex and involves so many aspects. Vocalizations are a large part, but even those, many of them are below the range of human hearing. So none of the seismic or body-language communications would translate.
And conversely, I’d initially thought of making them bi-directional translators, but am at a total loss for what on earth a translator could possibly make of human speech into elephant. It’s far more likely that the mammoths would just understand human speech.
So part of the plot could entail our Heroine being exceptionally fluent in Mammoth for a human, having paid more attention than most as a child, and the Mammoth that’s a character in the story being better at communication without the translators than most, so that she can still get her point across much of the time.
But, anyway, yes– I think having it be something they manipulate with their trunk to utilize deliberately is the key. I don’t think it could stay fitted onto their trunks much of the time; I figure it would be on a collar, and then they could curl their trunks around to use it. Because they do so much with their trunks that they’d be handicapped by any permanent encumbrance. But they can probably take their collars off themselves if necessary. And maybe there could be a component that’s carried around on the collar and can be detached for use as necessary.
(Your picture was not posted)
