Teffland wrote:@Pirusavia
Which effects does the fact, that the society consists of different animals have on the life in the society in contrast to human societies?
Some examples:
What happens, if a cat applies for a job, and the HR consists of dogs?
Are the special skills of animals used in a special way, so that animals of one race tend to get the same professions?
Are there professions, that cannot exist in human societies - like a professional illness smeller (dog)?
How do you e.g. build stairs for animals of different size?
Do animals walk in the human way?
How do languages work - can every animal produce the same basic sounds? Or do you use a gesture based sign language and body language?
Which effects does the fact, that the society consists of different animals have on the life in the society in contrast to human societies?
In the big picture,
it depends. Some things change, some not.
What happens, if a cat applies for a job, and the HR consists of dogs?
It depends on the HR's racial tolerance. Most of the times they don't give a damn, but if something serious like a traumatic racial incident, e.g. wars, genocides, etc. were happened recently or in the past, the canines were probably much more hesitant in accepting a feline worker. It works just like in our world where some ethnic groups hate other ethnic groups despite being neighbours.
sigh, BalkansAre the special skills of animals used in a special way, so that animals of one race tend to get the same professions?
Yes, most of the races tend to work in a specialty and this also affected society. For example, fox ethnicities tend to develop perfumery coming from their sensitive smelling, and felines tend to develop musical cultures, from their sensitive hearing. In much more modern examples, being natural burrowers, badgers are very common at mining projects, and ferrets, being very physically flexible, they specialize in working in a small space, like fixing tunnels. Emphasis at 'common', so not every particular race are working in that field.
These special abilities are also widely used by the military. In Pirusavia, otters and stoats, being natural good swimmers, are mostly drafted/conscripted into either the Navy, Coast Guard, or the Marines.
This also created stereotypes for every race, like "sniffer wolves", "miner badgers", "eavesdropping cats", etc. These stereotypes could be offensive sometimes, but it depends on the context.
Are there professions, that cannot exist in human societies - like a professional illness smeller (dog)?
Yes, this do exist, as stated by the previous answer.
How do you e.g. build stairs for animals of different size?
Stairs are not a very big deal, most of them just look the same as our world since the anthropomorphic animals in this world have similar size, height, and weight in real-life humans, usually only 1.5x larger than the average. (The weasels became bigger, the tigers became smaller.) Some tools are also made to adapt with body shapes, like helmets, which are usually made with roofing or sometimes hollowed out to accommodate ears.
Do animals walk in the human way?
Yes. The anthropomorphic animals have body structure very similar to humans, and they walk on their heels (plantigrade). Due to this evolution, most of them lost their ability to walk four-legged properly.
How do languages work - can every animal produce the same basic sounds? Or do you use a gesture based sign language and body language?
Language evolution here depends heavily on the skull shape and the animal's natural ability to produce sounds. Not every race could pronounce a phoneme correctly due to their physical difference, meaning standardization was difficult. Languages from larger animals tend to have deeper, throatier, voiced, guttural voice, while languages from smaller animals tend to have higher pitch, unvoiced consonants, and fricatives.
However, this is not always the case. In Pirusavia, for example, I will give an example of the language of Mervalian (marten people) and Samgurtian (otter people) (NB: They are in the same language family). Mervalians tend to have their phonology dominated by guttural sounds - they employ a wide use of 'gh' and 'kh' sounds, voiced consonants, and back vowels. On the other hand, Samgurtians are much dominant with fricatives, front vowels, and voiceless consonants, despite Samgurtians being physically larger than Mervalians.
Standard Pirusavian was based off from Eastern Mervalian dialect, which was the commercial centre of Pirusavia. Every race could learn Pirusavian, but their accent could be noticed easily because not all the sounds were adapted to them. This also applies to any other language in this world.
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