Free The Whale Song Translation: A Voyage of Discovery To Neptune and Beyond by Howard Steven Pines

language and the basis of the Speakeasy system.”
    “It’s ingenious,” said Dmitri. “The Speakeasy word grams also provide the visual insight as to how our brains recognize the words of language. Every spoken word corresponds to a particular shape, or word gram, resulting from connecting the dots of the different phonemes in frequency space.”
    “The language region in our brains processes the continuous sequence of phoneme frequencies,” said Greg, “searching for a match to the sequences of phoneme frequencies corresponding to each word we’ve stored in our learned database.”
    “By George, you’ve got it!” Melanie laughed. “I tell my students to imagine they’ve entered a magical soundscape where they can exchange their thoughts by shape writing and shape matching.”
    “Now you’re the poetic one,” said Dmitri.
    “When you mentioned shape writing, I thought of something cool,” said Greg. “Speakeasy’s shape-matching concept is similar to the Swype texting app on my Android phone. It’s also based on a shape-matching algorithm literally called shape writing. Instead of typing in the text, you can drag your finger over the touch screen keypad, from letter to letter, to spell each word. The shape of the path your finger traces is compared, word for word, to a dictionary of stored shapes.”
    “Spoken language is shape writing by sound,” said Dmitri, “and the keyboard is the map of phonemes stored in the frequency processing region of our brains.”
    “And it’s all based upon a universal principle of communications engineering called the Shannon Theorem.” Melanie nodded rhythmically as she spoke.
    “Better be careful,” said Dmitri. “You’re talking like an engineer.”
    “Resistance is futile.” Greg’s voice sounded robotic. “Welcome to the Borg.”
    As the trio shared a laugh, Melanie led the men back to Javier’s workstation where Erika still tutored the boy. “Thanks for helping me out, Erika. One more favor. Please set up the Speakeasy to display the word ‘sky.’”
    “Sure enough.” Erika sat down next to Javier, sliding the keyboard over to her side of the desk. Her garden tattoos fluttered in an imaginary breeze when she started typing a series of commands. Greg appeared spellbound.
    Melanie faced the boy, her fingers dancing. “Javier, let’s do another demo for our guests. Let’s pronounce the word ‘sky.’”
    When Javier nodded, the bright red target word gram for the word “sky” appeared on the Speakeasy display. To Dmitri, its shape resembled a puffy crimson cloud.
    “‘Sky’ is a sequence of four phonemes.” Melanie placed a finger upon the display. “The word gram for ‘sky’ is formed by connecting the tone-pair points for the frictional consonant ‘s’ followed by the plosive consonant ‘k’ followed by the vowel ‘ah’ followed by the vowel ‘ee.’” She traced her finger from point to point. “In addition to hitting the four target points, Javier must also stay on the correct frequency path that connects the points. Otherwise, it’ll sound like a mispronunciation. Did you realize a foreign accent is a consistent mispronunciation, a bias induced when the word gram targets of the native language are overlaid on top of the phonemes of the learned language?”
    “ Oui, cheri .” Dmitri delivered his brutish Bronx accent with a smirk.
    Melanie grimaced. Her “Oy vey!” sounded as if she’d pinched her nose shut. “Go ahead, Javier.”
    When Melanie double-tapped Javier’s shoulder, he grasped the edge of the desk, took a deep breath, stiffened his spine, and mumbled a first attempt. Just as Dmitri expected, the plot of the boy’s word gram was a far cry from the target shape. Nonetheless, a new idea, as yet elusive, lurked at the periphery of his awareness.
    Javier’s next attempt sounded much better. During the span of three more iterations, as the boy’s pronunciation improved and the shapes traced onto the display