The Book Of Night With Moon

A Note on Feline Linguistics

Ailurin is not a spoken language, or not simply spoken. Like all the human languages, it has a physical component, the cat version of “body language,” and a surprising amount of information is passed through the physical component before a need for vocalized words arises.

Even people who haven’t studied cats closely will recognize certain “words” in Ailurin: the rub against a friendly leg, the arched back and fluffed fur of a frightened cat, the crouch and stare of the hunter. All of these have strictly physical antecedents and uses, but they are also used by cats for straight forward communication of mood or intent. Many subtler signs can be seen by even a human student: the sideways flirt of the tail that says “I don’t care” or “I wonder if I can get away with this…” the elaborate yawn in another cat’s face, the stiff-legged, arch-backed bounce, which is the cat equivalent of making a face and jumping out at someone, shouting “Boo!” But where gestures run out, words are used—more involved than the growl of threat of purr of contentment, which are all most humans hear of intercat communication.

“Meowing” is not counted here, since cats rarely seem to meow at each other. That type of vocalization is usually a “pidgin” language used for getting humans’ attention: the cat equivalent of “Just talk to them clearly and loudly and they’ll get what you mean sooner or later.” Between each other, cats sub-vocalize using the same mechanism that operates what some authorities call “the purr box,” a physiological mechanism that is not well understood but seems to have something to do with the combined vibration of air in the feline larynx and blood in the veins and arteries of the throat. To someone with a powerful microphone, a cat speaking Ailurin seems to be making very soft meowing and purring sounds ranging up and down several octaves, all at a volume normally inaudible to humans.

This vocalized part of Ailurin is a “pitched” language, like Mandarin Chinese, more sung than spoken. It is mostly vowel-based—no surprise in a species that cannot pronounce most human-style consonants. Very few noncats have ever mastered it: not only does any human trying to speak it sound to a cat as if he were shouting every word, but the delicate intonations are filled with traps for the unwary or unpracticed. Auo hwaai hhioehhu uaeiiiaou, for example, may look straightforward: “I would like a drink of milk” is the Cat-Human Phrasebook definition. But the people writing the phrasebook for the human ear are laboring under a terrible handicap, trying to transliterate from a thirty-seven-vowel system to an alphabet with only five. A human misplacing or mispronouncing only one of the vowels in this phrase will find cats smiling gently at him and asking him why he wants to feed the litter-box to the taxicab? … this being only one of numerous nonsenses that can be made of the above example.

So communication from our side of things tends to fall back on body language (stroking, or throwing things, both of which cats understand perfectly well) and a certain amount of monologue—which human-partnered cats, with some resignation, accept as part of the deal. For their communications with most human beings, the cats, like so many of us, tend to fall back on shouting. For this book’s purposes, though, all cat-to-human speech, whether physical or vocal, is rendered as normal dialogue: that’s the way it seems to the cats, after all.[1]

One other note: two human-language terms, “queen” and “tom,” are routinely used to translate the Ailurin words sh’heih and sth’heih. “Female” and “male” don’t properly translate these words, being much too sexually neutral—which cats, in their dealings with one another, emphatically are not. The Ailurin word ffeih is used for both neutered males and spayed females.

—DD