I'm currently working with a friend to create the world that a video game takes place in. It's an open world sci-fi sort of thing, and I decided to start developing the first alien race and their language. The aliens in question are like a hybrid of humans and silicone-based plants, who are native to Mars and other planets in our own solar system and beyond. They started out as just sentient moving plants, but over time they became more humanoid. As for their language, I decided that like plants on Earth, they should be able to communicate with each other through signals from their roots. It would be sort of like telepathy, and there would be no need for a spoken language until they had contact with other intelligent species. I've already figured out how the spoken part of their languge would work, but I'm stuck on the writing system. It would make the most sense for it to be logographic if they communicated without words in the first place, right? Or could it evolve to be phonetic for ease of communication with other species? I'm also partially basing it off of the Maya script, which combines use of syllables and logograms. I'd like to hear you guys' opinions. Thanks!
You might look into them developing a sign language to speak with other intelligent species; if they were initially able to communicate with each other purely 'telepathically' there would be no reason for them to develop vocal cords, particularly when a signed language could do the job just as well. As for the writing system, logographic sounds right, we have plenty of earth examples, and they don't necessarily start using phonetics for ease of communication. The only time you're liable to see phonetic Mandarin is in teaching material for non-native speakers to help with pronunciation.
I read somewhere that they're finding out trees really do communicate through their roots, even to the extent that sometimes they'll keep a cut treestump alive (by passing it nutrients) to keep its connections open. So maybe their language would be chemical, stored in long chains like dna, with some ideas easily readable and translatable to other species and others relying on context only available to plants, or libraries of previously-shared chemical vocabulary. Older logograms and more recent phonograms could coexist, and the phonetics wouldn't be limited by vocal cords. The language might be capable of being comprehended at several speeds, with an exact idea being reproduced, losslessly, into the other plant over the course of several weeks, but with a quick preview version having evolved on top of that since they started becoming humanoid. Most words might be coined to suit the situation, but come bundled with their entire etymology, dictionary definition and the sensory and emotional information needed to understand them. I'd imagine it being machine sequenced and the first pass resembling something that has been Google translated back and forth. An accurate translation might require a connection to several other individuals who remember parts of the vocab. Writing per se might not be needed: they could permanently store the chemical-texts in their flesh and duplicate them into their young when they reproduce.
