Bilingual Animal definition

To address a debate from here.

There seems to be a conflict over Bilingual Animal's scope. There are different interpretations:

• Animals can have a conversation with both humans and animals.
• Animals can both talk human language and make animal sounds.

Also AmourLeFou have unilaterally added this to the description (along with the image they had to bring to IP themselves):

Here can be the place to talk all this out and bring it to TRS if we can't settle on the description.

Animals that can type/write/use words and make their sound seems like a different concept from an animal that can both talk to humans and animals.

I guess the assumption is that "making an animal sound" is just speaking animal language, we just don't have a Translation Convention for it.

Interesting. The description for the trope could use trimming down, but it seems to include both of the highlighted cases:

• An animal speaks a human language and produces "natural" sounds for its species.
• An animal speaks a human language and also speaks an "animal language" that is understandable to animals but not to humans.

Is the former really tropable? We already have Talking Animal as a trope and it includes by implication animals being able to converse with humans as well as use natural sounds. Weirdly, Talking Animal does not reference Bilingual Animal. Someone forgot to do their cross-referencing.

So I guess we really have three categories:

1. Animal can speak human languages but cannot communicate with other animals.
2. Animal can speak human languages and also makes natural sounds, which are not an actual language.
3. Animal can speak human languages and "animal languages", which are understood by other animals as normal speech would be to humans.

I feel like #1 and #2 should both be variations of Talking Animal. Otherwise Bilingual Animal and Talking Animal have too much overlap. And are there really that many examples of #1?

Edited by Fighteer on May 17th 2022 at 2:36:33 PM

#2 might be covered by Furry Reminder.

Ugh. This is what I mean when I talk about overly aggressive splitting. We end up getting multiple tropes that cover the same basic ideas. I think a wick check is in order to look for example overlap.

It was launched in 2020 and only has 45 wicks, so that wouldn't be too hard.

I've added this trope to Tropes Needing TRS for the record.

Also, Furry Reminder is a really poor title. If I didn't know what it meant already I'd assume it's something like Sorry, I'm Gay for furries. The fewer references we make towards Furry Fandom, the better, especially in trope titles.

Some people get weirdly obsessed with animals in fiction.

Edited by Fighteer on May 18th 2022 at 10:31:30 AM

I admit, I wrote it, but I'm not "weirdly obsessed", I swear.

The "weirdly obsessed" was a reference to furries (people who are sexually attracted to anthropomorphic cartoon animals), not the Bilingual Animal page.