How could a species that breathes through its skin develop spoken language?
I've been working on a fantasy race recently of sentient bipedal salamanders (sorta) and was talking with a friend about them until one of us realised that since they're amphibians they would breathe through their skin, which means they wouldn't have lungs, which means that they wouldn't be able to speak like we do.
I'm not entirely against revising their biology to give them lungs, even if rudimentary ones, but I'd like to exhaust my options before I do that. My world also has a magic system which could hypothetically be used to communicate but I'd like to avoid using that as well, since if they could do it who's to say that any random animal couldn't.
So yeah, any ideas?
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1 answer
In our human world, languages can be signed via movement of the arms, hands, and fingers (with the latter two communicating the most information) or they can be spoken with air moving up from the lungs, over the vocal cords, and then shaped by the vocal tract.
Spoken language can be done without air.
Some spoken languages (like the Khoisan languages, the clicking language family of Africa) have consonants that involve clicking the tongue in various ways. Others use glottal stops in the throat or higher up in the vocal tract.
It would be easy to imagine a human language that did those things and also clicked teeth, smacked lips, or made other noises with the mouth.
You say your species is bipedal. Bipedal implies hands that are free to manipulate objects (and likely with some decent dexterity...which may not be a given, but you can add it in).
Hands like that can easily be used to articulate a signed language. While you ask in your title for spoken language, you imply other language forms are acceptable, since "magic" is possible.
There's no reason why a species might not combine signs and sounds as well. It isn't generally done in human signed languages because those languages evolve in Deaf communities. But even there, the occasional sound comes through.
For example, hands and fingers might articulate the structure of words and the mouth sounds could fill in grammar. Think of a language like Hebrew where the root or each word is the consonant sequence and the vowels used to create syllables can change the gender, tense, or part of speech. I can imagine a language where the positions and motions of the hands give the root and the sounds round it out into a full word.
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