"Phonemes?" Mao Zhengzhi murmured, his brow furrowing slightly.
Seeing the confusion on Mao Zhengzhi's face, Meng Lu hurried to explain.
"A phoneme is the smallest unit of speech, classified according to the natural properties of speech sounds."
"Like vowels and consonants. For example, the Chinese we currently use has a total of thirty-two phonemes."
"All our everyday communication relies on those thirty-two phonemes."
"As for communication between these giant fish, I've identified fifty-two phonemes so far. There may be others we haven't discovered yet, but these fifty-two should let us perform a basic analysis of their language system."
Lü Yongchang and Mao Zhengzhi nodded repeatedly.
She certainly knew her field.
Lü Yongchang turned his attention back to the Holographic Image beside him, carefully examining all the processed speech segments.
"Hm?"
His gaze shifted slightly, as though he had noticed something.
Under Meng Lu's and Mao Zhengzhi's watchful eyes, Lü Yongchang stepped forward and reached out to mark an area in the Holographic Projection.
"Professor?" Meng Lu watched his movements in surprise, puzzled for a moment.
Lü Yongchang said nothing, focusing instead on processing the speech segments within the marked area.
With Zero's help, Lü Yongchang easily removed the various frequency fluctuations that carried information.
Then a relatively stable frequency spectrum, still showing small, random fluctuations, appeared before them.
"This is..." Realization dawned on Mao Zhengzhi. As a biologist, he had already grasped the significance of what Lü Yongchang was doing. "No wonder we couldn't find any similarities back then, no matter how hard we tried!"
"So this was the problem!"
Meng Lu, however, still looked bewildered.
With language as her primary field of research, she did not understand the purpose of Lü Yongchang's actions.
"These are the ultrasonic frequencies the giant fish use to probe their surroundings. You can think