Free the Dark Light Years by Brian W. Aldiss

Wittgen-bacher replied, not at all put out by the heated atmosphere about him.
    "We will have the linguistic report now," Pasztor said sharply, and Dr. Bodley Temple rose, rested his right leg on the chair in front of him, rested his right elbow on his knee, so that he leant forward with an appearance of eagerness, and did not budge from that position until he had finished talking. He was a small stocky man with a screw of grey hair rising from the middle of his forehead and a pugnacious expression. He had the reputation of being a sound and imaginative scholar, and offset it with some of the nattiest waistcoats in London University. His present one, negotiating a considerable stretch of abdomen, was of antique brocade with a pattern of Purple Emperor butterflies chasing themselves about the buttons.
    "You all know what the job of my team is," he said, in a voice that Arnold Bennett would have recognized a century back as having sprung from the Five Towns. "We're trying to learn the alien tongue without knowing if they have one, because that's the only way there is to find out. We have made some progress, as my colleague Wilfred Brebner here will demonstrate in a moment.
    "First, I'll make a few general remarks. Our visitors, these fat chaps from Clementina, don't understand what writing is. They have no script. That doesn't mean any-thing with regard to their language - many African negro languages were only reduced to writing by white missionaries . Efik and Yoruba were two such languages of the Sudanic language group; almost unused languages now, I'd say.
    " I tell you all this, my friends, because until I get a better idea, I'm treating these aliens as a couple of Africans. It may bring results. It's more positive than treating them as animals - you may recall that the first white explorers in Africa thought the negroes were gorillas - and it ensures that if we find they do have a language, then we won't make the mistake of expecting it to follow anything like a Romance pattern.
    "I am certain that our fat friends have a language - and you gents of the Press can quote me there, if you like. You've only got to listen to them snorting together. And it isn't all snorts. We've now analyzed it from tapes and have sorted out five hundred different sounds. Though it may be that many of these sounds are the same sound delivered at a different pitch. You may know that there are terrestrial linguistic systems such as - er. Siamese and Cantonese which employ six acoustic pitches. And we can expect many more pitches with these fellows, who obviously range very freely over the sound spectrum.
    "The human ear is deaf to vibrations of frequency greater than somewhere about 24,000 a second.
    We have found that these chaps can go twice that, just as a terrestrial bat or a Rungstedian cat can. So one problem is that if we are to converse with them, we must get them to stay within our wavelength. For all we know, that may mean they would have to invent a sort of pidgin language that we could understand.”
    "I protest," said the statistician, who until now had been content to do little but run his tongue round his teeth. "You are now inferring, surely, that we are inferior to them.”
    "I'm saying nothing of the kind. I'm saying that their range of sound is very much greater than ours.
    Now, Mr. Brebner here is going to give us a few of the phonemes that we have provisionally identified.”
    Mr. Brebner rose and stood swaying beside the stocky figure of Bodley Temple. He was in his mid-twenties, a slight figure with pale yellow hair, wearing a light grey suit with the hood down. His face was suffused a delicate flame color with the embarrassment of confronting his audience, but he spoke up well.  "The dissections on the dead aliens have told us quite a lot about their anatomy," he said. "If you have read the rather lengthy report, you will know that our friends have three distinct classes of apertures through which they pro-duce their