Primal darkspeech glossary
Deep-sea merfolk
Deep-sea merfolk
Merfolk
Mermaid-class
Status:
Extant
Sightings
Characteristics
Sexes: {$sex}
Height:
♀&∅
♒︎
Weight:
{$weight}
{$weight2}
{$weight3}
{$weight4}
Ecology
Lifespan:
{$life}
{$max}
{$habitat}
Diet: {$food}
Abilities
{$ability}
Magic affinity: {$magic}
Psionic power: {$psionic}
Notes: {$except}

!!!UNDER CONSTRUCTION!!!

When I began developing Arkhea's merfolk for Starfish Out Of Water, I soon had to figure out how to show the difference and alien-ness of Star's psychic language, especially primal darkspeech, a version meant for instinctive, primitive flashes of empathic connection. I was limited to text, and I didn't want to simply state Star's moods and feelings objectively; Jōtarō was meant to slowly learn how to interpret Star's telepathy, and I wanted the readers to also experience that intuition-based discovery.

I thought about emoticons and emojis, and about how many emotes in Animal Crossing are somehow universal, and I began pouring over the Unicode characters available for my use, at least on most systems and browsers. I started building up a small compilation of "mood-glyphs" for Star to use when he was communicating with primal darkspeech, basing it off of Animal Crossing's emotes, common emojis, and the resemblance between a character and the meaning it's meant to convey.

~Neo Qwerty

Death, destroying (with a scorched earth/salt-the-earth result), ruining, poison.
Happiness, joy, amusement, laughter.
Hunting, killing, food, prey, hunger, eat.
Romantic love, romantic affection.
Lust, arousal.
The act of mating, between mermen.
~
Playful tone (as a suffix), playful whine.
A Queen, a King, a Queendom, a Kingdom.
?
A question, confusion, requesting (as a suffix).
A permanent romantic psychic bond, a soulmate.
♒︎
The surface of water, surface waves, a merine.
!
Surprise, startlement, amplifying (as a suffix).
Talking, speech, vocalization sounds.
Victory, triumph.