Diverged human tongue
Veray
First contact 2312 · living tongue · diverged human line · 2 words recorded
Another long-stranded human population, and another Earth-descended tongue — but one shaped by a different history: a people who watched their sky fail and worked out, correctly, who had done it. Where Ferren speech is formal and patient, Veray speech is clipped, and it has developed a precise vocabulary for obligation, debt and recovery that Earth-standard covers only clumsily.
Not xenolinguistics. A human language, left alone long enough to drift.
Physiology
Human. A separate diverged line from the Ferren, with its own build and colouring.
Structure
Earth-descended. Divergence is lexical and idiomatic; the register is markedly terser than Ferren.
Contact protocol
No translator required. What is hard to translate is not the words but the claim underneath them, which Earth has an interest in hearing as rhetoric.
Recorded vocabulary
These are not words a translator is needed for. They are the words that mean something Earth-standard has no equivalent for, because no Earth speaker has had to live with the thing being named.
recovery
What it actually means
Taking back from Earth's abundance. Not a euphemism for theft in Veray usage — the word carries the whole argument, that what is taken was already owed, and it is used in ordinary sentences about ordinary cargo.
the dark
What it actually means
Their own failing sky, spoken of as a place rather than an event — something a family is under, that a person comes out of, and that a world is finally lost to.