Ubantu:Contents:Peoples:Tsharg
The !Tsharg[edit]
"!Tsharg//hauim/goab" is a Tsan phrase meaning "the people who sit on their hands". On Earth, the San peoples have always accredited baboons with full intelligence, and thus those transferred to Ubantu were not suprised by the indigenous race they found, which strongly resembles a baboon in form. !Tsharg faces, in particular, are mandrill-like, including the bright colors. !Tsharg noses extend out to a muzzle. The median of the nose and the flaring nostrils are red, the sides of the nose a ridged hairless portion of the cheeks polychromic, changing rapidly and vibrantly. Males have a mane. Despite appearances. they are not actually especially closely related to baboon, being in fact a member of a line of primates that gave rise to several species unique to Ubantu, including the Aigamuxa and the Ikimizi.
In terms of social organization, !Tsharg bear a close resemblence to Bonobo chimpanzees, a species not found on Ubantu. !Tsharg dietary preferences often disgust humans. In particular, the like freshly killed small rodents, which are eaten as is. Disgusting as it may be, !Tsharg rat-traps have basically spared the Uchomba cities from plague, and their ships are always rodent-free. Other rats they are not fond of meat, especially cooked meat. They love eggs.
Natural !Tsharg languages are very different from human languages. The first barrier is phonemics - !Tsharg languages have several sounds humans can't reproduce and vice versa. The !Tsharg vocal apparatus doesn't do /b/, /p/, /v/, /m/, or /f/. Silibants (s,z,sh,etc), nasals (n,ng) and dentals (d,t) are shared, but there is an entire class of consonants in !Tsharg languages not found in human speech. !Tsharg languages usually have very few vowels - one dialect has only two, but may have up to four vowel lengths. !Tsharg also uses a wide variety of clicks, up to 10 in some dialects. Humans can approximate these, but only Bushmen can do it well. !Tsharg languages also use tones suited to their acute hearing, up to twenty-four different tones, and in addition use volume accents, meaning the relative difference in volume from one syllable to the next. The latter concept is alien to Bantu and Bushmen alike. In the "high" version of a typical !Tsharg language, speakers are face to face and there is an additional level of body language that goes far beyond the kind used by humans. When speaking in high form, the !Tsharg's face is intensely animated with twitches and subtle movements, along with head movements and body posturings. The upside of this is speed: !Tsharg language convey large amounts of information is a very short amount of time. The downside is that it is difficult or impossible to encode in written language. Zimbanje scholars in Uchomba have developed a few preliminary versions of the !Tsharg languaged used there, but there is no standard, and few !Tsharg ever master any form of literacy.
The !Tsharg living in the Uchomba Confederacy have developed a new language, shared by humans but enriched with !Tsharg concepts. Originating in the Kikitwana slave language, which is a simplified version of Kikoka stripped of all conjugations and agglutinations, the Uchomba !Tsharg have added some of the features that come naturally to them, but in a way humans can share. The resulting pidgin, Ki!shang, uses three tones, two clicks, simple volume-accents, vowel lengths and very basic body language. Ki!shang is faddishly popular throughout the Confederacy, even spoken from one human to another. It has a uniqueness that appeals to the Wachomba, along with a sense of cultural identity, and, as a bonus, it annoys the uppity Imperial citizens.
ST+1, DX+2, manual dex -2, IQ-1, HT+2
Easy to read -10, Gregarious -10, Social status, slave -20, social stigma, valuable property -10, Primitive TL0 -20,
