Treecat Speech

cthia wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:A much more useful development would be to teach 'Cats to text.
From the couple example we have of the spelling things out they seem to have only a loose grasp of English spelling; so they'd fit in just fine with most texters

Why Jonathan, is that a thinly veiled prediction -- or lack of faith thereof -- of the inability of even Honorverse tech to solve the problems with auto spell check?

I'm pretty ambivalent about more auto correct than spell check. I mean I'm about the king of typos, but sometimes I deliberately misspell words, yup, yup, ah dew! Sometimes I toss in foreign phrases. and sometimes its weird what my phone does to text messaging.

I can just picture those intimate gatherings of Elizabeth: Ariel on her lap with his laptop, Monroe on Justin's Nimitz on Honor's Samantha on Hamish's and all those Havenites with theirs and in the back all the flag lieutenants with their personal comps. Or the scene on the bridge with Nimitz' laptop stuck in a backpack.

Sometimes there's just too much reliance on tech.

WeirdlyWired wrote:

Rawb wrote:Just build gloves the cats can wear that turn TSL(treecat sign language) into holographic subtitles in front of them.

Spinoff from "tech they ought to have" thread? I can see Stinker perched on HHs shoulder, iPhone in hand typing out messages that translate to speech. I think James Earl Jones' voice? Or Lurks from branches On Tourville's shoulder typing cough smilies.

I actually conceptualized the Tree Cat translator as something they would wear on their neck or head with a camera, the cat would make its signs in the visible radius of the devices camera and the device would vocalize the signs.

I can see the virtues of creating a cat language that is vocalized, but some sort of computerized translation technology is going to be even more important in that situation.

It does seem like going in search of a problem. The cats already have sign, and it is spreading among humans as well.

Rawb wrote:Just build gloves the cats can wear that turn TSL(treecat sign language) into holographic subtitles in front of them.

That would be an interesting technological challenge since TSL is based on ASL which in turn is based on Old French Sign Language and has a completely separate grammar from English.