Brontologion
After 30,000 years the formal study of the linguistics of thunder has finally reached the first major checkpoint. One can imagine the enormous scope of such a project. Data collection alone....
Introduction
After 30,000 years the formal study of the linguistics of thunder has finally reached the first major checkpoint. One can imagine the enormous scope of such a project. Data collection alone has been an absolute nightmare, but that was precisely what yielded the first breakthrough.
More about that in a moment.
Due to the disquieting and frequently terrifying nature of thunder and lightning, it seems that every culture has at least briefly considered that a voice so loud should be heeded, and most have periodically dedicated someone to the task of interpreting any possible semantic payload in the phenomena. Historically speaking, a common approach has been shamanic ecstasy and interpretive visions, sometimes relying on other sources of divination or revelation as an adjunct, but sometimes interpreters have used a more rational approach akin to decoding the rhythms and prosodies of the talking drums used traditionally by numerous West African cultures. In the modern era, however, it is not impossible to enact a more rigorous strategy starting with phoneme analysis blended with a Bayesian data-sciences approach—a truly massive analysis of covariance with carefully documented and classified natural and anthropogenic events to see if clusters of brontological phonemes correlate well enough with such events or observable conditions to start to build a simple preliminary vocabulary.
After all, similar approaches have worked well for decoding the calls of prairie dogs, crows, cetaceans, and a number of species of primates, both large and small.
Concentrating on anthropocentric events would be suspect, of course. Assuming sentience, would a voice that creates thunder have any special awareness of hominids, as opposed to any other megafauna? Perhaps roving herds of aurochs or bison or reindeer would be more visible or relevant? These creatures, for instance, would be much more visible as aggregates, traveling (albeit slowly in comparison) in weather-like flows and currents, chemically altering the atmosphere above their ranges and migration paths with methane and carbon dioxide and water vapor and nitrogen-rich vapors, thus impacting the local weather.
Expanding this line of reasoning, humanity’s impact on the environment would be increasingly more visible than humanity itself, starting with the advent of herding and stationary agriculture and irrigation and city life. Prior to these cultural achievements, humanity wouldn’t be much of a subject for vocal weather phenomena to talk about. Or, arguably, to try to talk to.
One would expect the bulk of brontological utterances to be about the weather and things that impact it, after all.
Obtaining the Data
For the longest time the (presumably vocal) data to analyze was hard to obtain. There are many places on earth where thunderous chatter is frequent and predictably regular, but, understandably, permanent human habitation in such places is rare. Humans in such locations tend to stay highly mobile. The second problem is one of recording such utterances for analysis, either long-term or short term. The majority of human written languages are incapable of recording brontological utterances phonetically, especially given that pitch values and timings would also have to be recorded on the assumption that thunder is more closely akin to the songs of cetaceans or avians than the bulk of human speech, in which volume dynamics, pitch, and timing, while frequently extremely important to emotional and semantic content, is rarely recorded in known schemes of glyphs.
Our best luck for recording brontological vocalizations textually has been as a combination of paper-roll seismography and sheet music. Audio recordings work best, but special equipment is required to capture frequencies of vibrations below and above the normal ranges of human hearing—mostly below, as any higher frequency utterances tend to dissipate quickly into thermal noise with any amount of distance. Fortunately the grumblings below the range of human hearing, while potentially rich with semantic content, can be teased out of analog recordings. It is largely digital media that truncates this information, but some of it can be retrieved with Fourier analysis of the raw data and a bit of stochastic guesswork if no digital compression has been applied.
The methodological problems of recording are irrelevant, however, if you can’t place recording devices in appropriate locations. And maintain them. And routinely collect the data. But all of these concerns are later-era issues.
The “nightmare” breakthrough mentioned previously is that an enormous amount of ambient audio information filters into the minds of sleeping people and is audible to anyone eavesdropping on their dreams if they are in an appropriate part of the dreaming cycle. Those who study dreams understand that dreaming happens (or at least can happen) at any point in the sleep cycle, not just REM sleep, which means that audio data from a thunderstorm at night over even a small village can be analyzed using the same methodologies as a phased-array radio telescope once the real-world geographies of the individual sleepers have been mapped.
This still has the potential of creating a biased data set of thunderous utterances that occur solely near human settlements, as opposed to a truly global survey. This is increasingly less relevant with modern studies as human habitations spread to more and more remote locations. The adage that “lightning strikes the earth somewhere a hundred times per second” is true enough in spirit, after all. The actuality is roughly half that—44ish times a second, give or take five or so for seasonal variations and solar sunspot activity—and that means nearly 1.4 billion utterances per year to analyze, potentially. It’s no longer remotely difficult to get a relatively unbiased representative sample. It’s increasingly rare that thunder happens outside of human hearing.
The Nature of the Origin
Before potential semantic content can be studied in the appropriate environmental contexts, we need to determine a number of things about the nature of the speaker or speakers. First, how many speakers are there? What is the distribution of the population? Are there tribes? Are they stationary or do they migrate? Are there multiple languages involved or regional dialects? How does the physiology of the speaker determine the range of phonemes involved? What senses do they have to hear and understand their own communication? What are the lifespans of the entities involved? Is their language innate or learned? Does vocabulary and richness of expression change as a function of their life cycles?
That is the wish list, of course. Not all of the answers have been obtainable to date.
There are living resources in the Library that are old enough to remember some of these details from the First Knowledge—or, more accurately, have parts that are from that age—but memories fade, become contaminated, lose critical pieces of context that flesh out important concepts. Sometimes the memories take place in sensory contexts for senses that have evolved away. It’s always best to re-research and reconfirm when there is any question. It only qualifies as knowledge if it can be repeatedly confirmed, after all.
In no particular order, then:
There appear to be regional dialects, after a fashion. As acoustic phenomena, brontological utterings are shaped by the local landscape the way that the sounds from musical instruments are shaped by the materials and spaces and natural resonances of the venues in which they are played. One could make the argument that the voice itself could be the same regardless of the location, but when we’re talking about the messages themselves, some messages can be delivered only in certain locations. Think of it in terms of how some instruments can be inaudible in certain venues, or due to resonances can overwhelm other instruments in the hypothetical orchestra. This means that if you want to deliver the same semantic content as elsewhere, it might need to be worded or pronounced differently.
If it helps to keep the role of the speaker(s) undetermined at this point, keep in mind that a single speaker could conceivably communicate in a number of different languages and dialects, assuming there would be a reason to do so.
The physics of how lightning works changes the nature how the phonemes can be generated regionally as well, especially with respect to how thunder sounds at ground level. One endpoint of a lightning strike is nearly always in a layer of atmosphere that’s below the freezing temperature of water, and the higher in altitude that boundary layer tends to be, the more often lightning phenomena remains intra- or inter-cloud and never reaches the ground. At ground level, this means that the overall voice of the thunder is more lengthy bass rumbles and less brief, crisp consonants and sibilants. Geographically, this means around one of ten lightning strokes is cloud-to-ground in low-lying tropical areas, as opposed to roughly half in arctic latitudes, leaving out (for now) any consideration of the effects of geomagnetic storms.
Altitude of ground-level can have considerable impact, of course. The top of any reasonably tall mountain can give thunder its full range of phonemes.
Tougher is the question of just how many voices there might be. The question becomes one of how many storms there are, or storm systems, or perhaps weather patterns that generate storm systems, assuming that the entities involved have continuous occasionally quiescent existences that continue between outbreaks of thunderous behavior. Do these entities split and merge? Are there a handful of entities that have discrete territorial or migratory ranges? Or is there a single global entity that is no more integrated in its own body than is a human, made of trillions of cells that come and go, with its thousands of mental voices vying for an ever-shifting balance of internal political power?
The consensus of brontologists is that the situation is much closer to the latter, only possibly less integrated even than that. The community has determined that the best term to refer to the voices of the thunder is “host”—as derived from the Latin term hostis, meaning stranger or enemy and frequently used to refer to an army, as opposed to the term derived from hospes, referring to hospitality.
Sometimes the host speaks as a single voice. Sometimes there is a confusion of thundering from multiple voices and overlapping utterances.
Many of the remaining questions are much harder to answer than these.
Getting Inside the Message
So what about semantic content? How does one attempt to understand what the thunder says?
The data analysis approach involves detailing the environment where the utterances occur as much as possible, complete with events dating back to just after any previous thunderstorm and forward just up to the next one, with more weight given to events and occurrences that are closer to the time and place of the utterances. These items are characterized and categorized as thoroughly and consistently as possible, and then the model is analyzed against the shape and the timeline of the recorded waveforms—with a separate analysis against the best attempt to record the three-dimensional shapes of the lightning strikes themselves, just in case the lightning bolts themselves can be better decoded as visible glyphs than audible crashes and rumbles.
If there is a ground strike, the target at the lower end is documented for analysis as well. To this end, researchers have compiled an extensive collection of fulgurites and burnt scraps of wood.
As much as possible similar utterances are compared, both in total length and piecemeal. All available data is retained for multiple attempts to break the waveforms into potential phoneme groups, and best match math is applied against all attempts in order to determine which sets are the most promising and could potentially be refined further.
As mentioned in the introductory paragraph, the first checkpoint has been reached. It is still a work in progress, certainly, but a preliminary vocabulary is available of dozens utterances that correlate highly with a number of concepts, both concrete and abstract.
Unsurprisingly much of what the thunder talks about seems weather-related. Air temperature, humidity, barometric pressure—and rates and directions of change for such phenomena. Inversion layer mixing. Other weather systems that came before or that are on their way. The condition of the terrain below, changes in texture, in humidity generation and the ability to absorb precipitation. Speed and direction of winds in different layers. The presence of concentrations of unusual gases.
More surprisingly analysis has discovered messages, or perhaps songs or snippets of songs, that are repeated now and then verbatim—within the bounds of dialect variations, in any case—with no real regard to geographical or temporal separation, with truly global distribution, and time differences of hours, sometimes days or weeks, and in at least one documented occurrence, around eleven years. Our trove of high-fidelity recordings is largely of recent utterances, so matches with older archived records and transcriptions will depend on converting (or perhaps playing) ancient paper and clay tablet transcriptions and comparing them to modern audio recordings.
Also researchers have discovered something of the nature of those repeated utterances that is worthy of discussion and analysis.
Mechanics of the Voice
As one may be aware, the generation of lightning happens in part from the buildup of static charges as layers of air with different temperature and humidity characteristics move past each other and past the surface of the earth. Electrons are wiped from the outer shells of certain states of atoms and molecular formations and, while repelling one another in general, end up trapped together in an atmospheric formation until the potential difference is enough to overwhelm the insulating properties of hundreds (or thousands, in some cases) of meters of air. A cascade ionizes quickly branching trees of candidate pathways until a suitable path is formed that will allow the transfer of surplus electrons to a location (aloft or on the ground) with a relative deficit. The superheating of the path of ionized air to incandescent charge-conducting plasma causes the twisting linear explosions that are the thunderous utterances.
However, not all lightning is locally generated.
The sun continually blows a wind of charged particles that are the vehicle for its massive magnetic field. Periodically surface eruptions and snapping magnetic force lines induce a coronal mass ejection that is sent hurtling into the solar system. The coronal mass is largely hydrogen plasma, which is to say free protons bearing a positive electrical charge. The earth’s own magnetic field is usually up to the task of repelling and redirecting direct onslaughts, but streams of accelerated free protons are allowed entry to the earth’s ionosphere at the poles, triggering the visible aurora phenomena. But these charges also gather in the rarified ionosphere in pursuit of oppositely-charged electrical storms and frequently take advantage of any ionized pathways that are developing to balance their truly massive excess charges with areas of relative deficit. This “positive” proton-powered lighting is massively stronger than the typical locally generated kind.
These gargantuan strokes are typically the ones that generate the thunderous utterances that get repeated.
One Mythological Model
One mythological perspective associates the major flows and systems of flows on earth with the classes of entities referred to as timm—specifically large-scale flows of fluid matter, from currents in the earth’s molten mantle to circulating currents and eddies in the hydrosphere to jet-stream currents and weather systems in the atmosphere. In this schema, the timm are the larger-scale kin of the rimm that are considered to handle smaller flows like the chemotropic and osmotic flows of cytoplasm and the charge currents in Bose-Einstein condensates and electrical materials, and, more controversially, some larger-scale organic flows like ichor, lymph, blood, and thought.
On the scales larger than the timm would be the binn, manifesting at planetary scale as dancing and snapping magnetic force lines extending far out into space, largely defending us from the wrath of the hinn, specifically the nineteen zabaniyah anchored to the substance of the sun, charged (so the legends go) with keeping us confined to our current sub-lunar sphere while also defending us from the vast bulk of sources of cosmic wrath.
In this mythological model, certain thunderous communications could be messages originating with the zabaniyah, either individually or as a group, transmitted earthward via coronal mass ejections, caught and translated by the binn of the magnetosphere (similarly anchored in the magnetic iron core of our planet of residence) and retransmitted downward via massive positive lightning stroke, then echoed around the globe by the host of atmospheric timm as locally generated lightning and thunder.
This possible schema of message transmission is hardly coherent enough to constitute a hypothesis, but that hasn’t prevented the development of a side project to see if any brontological utterances might contain semantic payloads of relevance to our zabaniyah guardians/jailers.
To date, the only semantic components that we have decoded from brontological utterances associated with positive-stroke mega-lightning (and its lesser repetitions and echoes) has been a cluster of phonemes statistically correlated with phenomena that are either approaching or increasing in intensity—if there is a difference between these interpretations, researchers have not yet reached a consensus on how to distinguish between them—and an additional element of either warning or spiteful celebration, depending on which of the two opposing schools of interpretation you favor.
What’s Next?
The next checkpoint will be to build a working grammar and decode the library of recorded utterances. The one to follow that will be to construct and test an apparatus to enable attempts to establish two-way communication.