Shown above is one of my drawings of my extraterrestrial intelligent lifeform called the Shshi. Ki'shto'ba, who is well over a meter in length, was based on the terrestrial termite species called Macrotermes bellicosus; it is a formidable Warrior but also the proverbial gentle giant. Its name is pronounced to have the rhythm of "hit your paw" and does not have the rhythm of "Manitoba." I can be pretty flexible as to how the names in my writings are pronounced, but I'm adamant about that one.
This character comes from my unpublished novel called The Termite Queen. Part of its premise early on is to discover whether this blind and deaf species has language and how it communicates. It develops that giant alien termites communicate through the transmission of radio waves from one set of antennae to another. This produces nothing but waveforms on a spectrograph; the problem is, how do we make such patterns intelligible to the human mind? I'll just say, it's possible. You'll have to wait until I get the book published to find out how.
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