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The planet looks like an ideal spot for colonization from a distance. Covered with a range of biomes, from lush forest to long coastlines to roaring rivers. However, when the Amentans arrive they quickly notice anomalies on their scans.
A population of humanoids lives on the planet, scattered - sometimes individuals are spotted alone and other times they appear in groups of up to a few thousand. They appear similar to child Amentans, except for a general lack of bright hair colors. Civilization appears primitive - in some cases so primitive that it's confusing how they survive at all, with small groups managing to survive in environments as harsh arctic tundra huddled around campfires, in sandy villages in a desert with a single well. A small number of cities exist, most without obvious sources of sufficient food to support them.
As the Amentans investigate further they notice more anomalies of a far less consistent nature. There's an aurora in the northern hemisphere that shines continuously, day and night. One of the cities appear to change subtly in composition and position constantly, with no obvious construction visible. A group of the humanoids appear to live underwater, alongside a gigantic manta ray, hundreds of feet in breadth. A giant skeleton statue of green crystal seems to be moving. A blur of feathers and wings zooms across the planet like a missile at one point. Except for the humanoid species, none of the anomalies repeat.
These are just the anomalies they notice easily from orbit, more may be found on closer inspection.
What if they take the initial data and have a linguist who just woke up analyze it on PAPER.
The linguist finds the language bizarrely easy to learn. They quickly realize that the language has fewer nervous question words then the computer reported, but a bunch more words and idioms for greeting new people.
This is so freaky! In a cool way but freaky!
Can they hello back to the aurora?? With light flashes or something?
The aurora hellos back! The linguist who learned the language notices suddenly that it has a bunch of ways to say "I also say hello!" and similar additive greetings for group conversations.
Is the aurora the language, or a viral vector for the language, or a different entity or controlled by one that happens to speak the language...
The linguist notices that the language contains very short words for "sentient language" and "an additional friend who is an aurora".
SENTIENT LANGUAGE??? amazing. do you just communicate with a sentient languages by noticing that there are words in it for things. what.
The grammar certainly seems to have been optimized for that, with easy branching constructions of syllables and grammar!
Possibly it only became like that after the linguist started thinking about it.
They're going to... quarantine these researchers actually, just in case, but... study the heck out of the language and tell it that they are here to explore this planet.
The language has lots of excited greetings, a few loan words from an isolated dialect about being afraid of separation, and a bunch of elaborate poetic terminology for landscapes and exploration that sound rather elegant when spoken aloud.
Meanwhile, two Amaliens set off to a nearby beach from the village that the aurora visisted in the arctic tundra. From there they ride underwater on the back of a creature that looks like a hyrbid of a rino, a walrus, and seal. One of the Amaliens is dropped off on a nearby continent soon after.
The dropped off Amalien has a wooden play sword and a mouse mounted on her shoulder who she talks to as she walks towards a campsite (the mouse is not obviously responding). At the campsite she finds a group of three Amaliens napping, cuddled with each other and what looks like a giant fluffy sheep or llama torso. No head or legs are visible under the fluff.
She wakes the group and together they mount the creature, which rises to reveal many extremely long legs, more then it seems like it could fit. It moves fast, legs seeming to dissapear into the fluff as they are pulled back from each stride and new ones emerging.
The group stops at a cliff, where the girl with the wooden sword and mouse dismounts, climbing partially down the cliff and into the nest of a gigantic elderly looking pelican with three pairs of wings. She climbs into its gullet sac and it flies, streaking across the globe in a flurry of feathers. It darts from place to place - the girl emerging each time to visit strange creatures and talk to people, some of whom join her in the gullet of the monster or set off on journeys of their own.
The Amentans are largely unaware of this, except for the occasional sighting of the incredibly fast bird.
Yeah, they don't have nearly that kind of satellite coverage and are mostly attending to the beach and the aurora-situtaion. Since they're quarantined anyway that team will all try to learn the language though.
It's easy for them to do so! They figure out that the language is the same for all of them - features noticed in response to one of the researchers are easily noticed by the rest. The language contains a lot of excited words for getting attention and happy replies that are spoken in a way designed to be heard well in crowded environments.
Descriptions of the features stay the same, but anything recorded in the language itself (either through audio or phonetic transcription - no written form is obvious) seems obviously to be part of the language as it currently is when re-examined later, though the translation of the content doesn't actually change.
That's so weird. They will do so much notetaking in both The Sapient Language and also in Tapap. Does the sapient language have a name or anything?
Cryptophasia! It's apparent that the natural idiomatic reply to a name is your own name.
The idiomatic greeting then ends with the person who originally shared their name expressing happiness to meet the second speaker. The Amentans also notice that their names transliterate into the language as various shades of "new potential friend".
That's so cute?? What a friendly sapient language. They aren't really communicating with the project leads because of the quarantine so they all go their own directions here - one of them starts trying to write poems in Cryptophasia and one of them starts trying to translate the information packet of things that they might want to know about aliens and vice-versa into it and one gets to work on a dictionary and one decides to try seeing if it'll adapt to sign language.
A bunch of prefixes and suffixes and compound words can be used to deal with multiple things at once, though the Amentans are noticing a bit of a lag on discovering replies within the language as so many different projects are started at once. Still, a connotation of joy to be doing so much accompanies the more complicated and clever constructions of words they discover.
Back on the beach, the Amalien girl has gotten distracted from charades for now and is jumping over waves and trying to get some of the Amentans to join her.
She's really excited about that! She'll try to get him to hold hands with her so they can jump over waves together (she indicates this by saying it and also by grabbing his hand if he's okay with that).
Sure, there is nothing aversive about leaping around in the water with (what looks like) an alien child. (They don't seem to have... adults... so possibly she's not a child but she's still cute.)