Chime

Chime is the engineered language spoken by blanks in Oxo, the Substrate and Unallocated Space. In addition to serving as a langauge for communication, Chime also grants a proficient speaker with the right knowledge access to the power of The Word and verses.
Chime is generally only spoken among blanks who are aware of their non-embodied state (i.e. not instance blanks). However, it may also be used among the Substrate's agents in the Manifold Sky as a way of conveying information in secret, especially as a sound-based steganographic code intermixed with music or the static found in RadNet communiques.

Writing System

Special symbols are used to indicate the breaks between words or sentences. As a subset of the Matrioshka Multiverse, Chime is written as a featural syllabary. Specifically, the number of branches found on each symbol is an indication, in binary, of how high each individual tone should be, with higher binary numbers indicating higher tones:

1. (0001) Do (low)
2. (0010) Re
3. (0011) Mi
4. (0100) Fa
5. (0101) So
6. (0110) La
7. (0111) Ti
8. (1000) Do (high)

Chime is generally written right-to-left, top-to-bottom. Because the smallest unit of meaning in chime is actually two tones made in rapid succession, two of the aforementioned binary elements are fused together, with tones progressing in the same direction as the writing.
In non-Chime languages and in contexts were binary is not preferred, Chime is often transliterated in a numerical format, with the numbers 1-8 representing each tone on the Chime phonemic register. A space, representing a pause in the sound indicates word breaks, while a period indicates sentence breaks.

Phonology

The 'phonemic' index of Chime consists of the first eight tones found on a solfège (do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do). These tones can be articulated in various ways, whether vocally (i.e. tone-shifted vowel sounds) or with a musical instruments capable of producing this scale (i.e. a tin whistle).
Unembodied blanks are capable of vocalizing various tones that, to the uninitiated listener, sound like chimes or tubular bells depending on the size and sex of the blank. Indeed, this is the origin of the language's name. When an unembodied blank speaks Chime, embodied blanks (i.e. the sentient life forms found in an instance like the Manifold Sky) often percieve it as 'celestial' music. Curved Time legendry surrounding the 'music of the cosmos' or the 'celestial chorus' may be referring to this particular vocal quality of blanks involved with the exile into the Manifold.

Vocabulary

Chime is decidedly non-naturalistic, being more akin to a computer data structure than an organically-developed language. One place where this artificiality is made obvious is the way in which words are constructed.
Each 'short word' contains four tonemes which can be divided into two duotonemic sylables. The first syllable represents one of 64 sets of words, while the second syllable represents one of 64 specific words within each set. While this would, in theory, mean that there are a maximum of 4,096 root words in the Chime language, several of these words are actually used as gramatical modifiers and not words per se.
If the first syllable is of a specific kind - generally indicated by the 'Do (high)' tone at the beginning) - then a 'long word' consisting of six more syllables is what follows. A long word consists of four syllables (eight tones) which are taken together to indicate various shades of meaning connected to the root 'short word' at the end. This extended inventory of words is vast and encompasses concepts which are seldom or never used, but they are there for purposes ranging from the mundane (i.e. explaining exactly how you like your eggs for breakfast) to the artistic (i.e. serenading a loved one with poetic euphemisms relating to the weather) to the actually supernatural (i.e. calling upon the power of The Word to sculpt a landscape in Unallocated Space to precisely-engineered specifications). The additional content foud in long words can sometimes encapsulate word modifiers (i.e. possessiveness) normally reserved for separate words (see Sentence Structure).
Similarly to other long words, numbers and math operators are also indicated by a starting tone - in this case, generally the 'Do (low)' tone. Each number is a long word for which the three tones after the first encode any preceeding math operators, with all operations starting at zero. For example, a number that starts with the 'subtract' operator is considered a negative number, as is the case with languages like written English. Mathematical operations more complex than simple arithmetic, however, require additional clauses or specialized long words to accomplish. Math in Chime is base 16 with sub-bases 8 and 2 (binary). While the written form (see Writing System) allows for numbers up to 15 to be written, these symbols buck the trend and will be interpreted as the appropriate number word instead of a higher tone than those permitted by the tonemic index (see Phonology).
Words are broken up with brief pauses, and sentences are broken up by longer pauses. A perfectly even rate of intonation is not required, though, as the context of a statement may make the divisions between words and sentences manifest in the absence of regularized pauses.

Sentence Structure

Chime uses an Object-Verb-Subject sentence structure. Adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, possessives, and other modifiers follow the parts of a sentence they modify, but are not as commonly used as long words (see Vocabulary) in shaping the meaning of elements of a sentence unless additional specificity is required. In this sense, Chime is a semi-synthetic language.

Spoken by

• Choir Blank
• Construct Blank
• Descendant Blank
• Elder Blank
• Hybrid Blank