This vocalized part of Ailurin is a “pitched” language, like Mandarin Chinese, more sung than spoken. It is mostly vowel-based—no surprise in a species that cannot pronounce most human-style consonants. Very few noncats have ever mastered it: not only does any human trying to speak it sound to a cat as if he were shouting every word, but the delicate intonations are filled with traps for the unwary or unpracticed. Auo hwaai hhioehhu uaeiiiaou, for example, may look straightforward: “I would like a drink of milk” is the Cat-Human Phrasebook definition. But the people writing the phrasebook for the human ear are laboring under a terrible handicap, trying to transliterate from a thirty-seven-vowel system to an alphabet with only five. A human misplacing or mispronouncing only one of the vowels in this phrase will find cats smiling gently at him and asking him why he wants to feed the litter-box to the taxicab? … this being only one of numerous nonsenses that can be made of the above example.
So communication from our side of things tends to fall back on body language (stroking, or throwing things, both of which cats understand perfectly well) and a certain amount of monologue—which human-partnered cats, with some resignation, accept as part of the deal. For their communications with most human beings, the cats, like so many of us, tend to fall back on shouting. For this book’s purposes, though, all cat-to-human speech, whether physical or vocal, is rendered as normal dialogue: that’s the way it seems to the cats, after all.