The Universal Language

Language.  It is the cornerstone of a civilization.  It is the characteristic of sapient life.  Sometimes it is only written, sometimes it is only spoken, sometimes it can be communicated with movement alone.  When my species first crawled from the mud and fought through jungles, hills, rolling dunes, and sparse plains, we did so with nary a spoken word.  Soon, we learned to speak with one another, and soon after we thought it was a good idea to start writing things down in case we blew ourselves to pieces.

Luckily, we survived the Age of Self Destruction that nearly every species who ascends from predators is known to encounter.  When the Saurians fell from the heavens to great us, we thought them as gods from their entrance and the way they conveyed thoughts through a language that was alien to us, yet we could still understand.  As we entered the galactic community, the Saurians taught us what they called "The Universal Language": it was a carefully crafted language that incorporated the basics of predator language (as most sapient species had ascended from predators) so that predator and prey species alike could understand it.  A hunter has no need to learn the mannerisms of its prey, but the prey must know if the hunter is a threat and hungry.

Every species in the galactic community abandoned its native language for what we believed to be a superior, universal form of communication.  We all understood each other through the Universal Language.  That is, until the Terrans broke past their system.  When my species attempted to bring the Terrans into the galactic community, we did so with much difficulty.  Initially, we though the Terrans to simply be a slave race to a more intelligent species, as the Terrans did not understand our Universal Language.  We soon realized that Terrans were a rare case of evolution, an unprecedented example that we could not and did not account for.

You see, while most sapient species ascend from predators or prey, the Terran evolution takes an unexpected shift: the Terrans had originally been a prey species, long ago in their history.  They grew intelligence out of need to survive, as most species did, but Terrans took it a step further.  Rather than like the Twil, who ascended from a prey species, who eradicated their predators while retaining their prey mentality and way of life, Terrans became the predators themselves.  They climbed to the top of their food chain and declared themselves masters of their planet.  Over time, they merged their understanding of predator and prey communication.  As such, their minds processed our Universal Language from both perspectives and then tried to conjoin the results, which never worked.  As such, none of the galactic community were able to communicate with them.

We tried our best to tear down the language barriers to no avail.  Eventually, we gave up, and the Terrans mostly kept to themselves.  They became an exotic species because of their inability to communicate and their nearly total absence in the community because of this.  It was only years after their first contact that the Trelks announced they had communicated with Terrans.  Scholars, military leaders, and civilians alike all flocked to Trelk worlds to witness proof of this impossible occurrence.

It was there, on a Trelk world, sitting in a chair clearly designed for a smaller species, that I learned Terrans had their own path of communication.  While other species communicated with sounds, written word, or with simple movements of their bodies, the Terrans had communicated across their own language barriers for all of their history with a form of communication seemingly so advanced for such a young race.

Over the next few years, Terrans exploded into the galactic community.  Paintings of foods simply sitting neatly on a table entered our homes and brought feelings of tranquility and normality.  Pictures of fauna being placed within the barrels of weapons filled our hearts with a desire for peace and prosperity.  Terrans waltzed about stages and expelled vibrating sound from their lungs that, although we could not understand the exact words, shook our bodies with sadness and joy at the same time.  Entire concepts such as war, love, and death were made clear to us through what Terrans called "Art".  The language barriers had been brought down by a beautiful form of communication unseen across every species in the galactic community thus far.

With our new understanding of how Terrans communicated, there was only one logical course of action: the galactic community adopted a new Universal Language.