"The body of the people is always represented as absolutely completed, ripened, as never-aging, as ever-victorious." — Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (1965)
Pneumatik is not crude. This must be stated plainly, and early, because scholars arriving from adjacent shards with their written grammars and their tidy phonemic alphabets invariably make the error of categorizing it so. Pneumatik is a semiotic system of demonstrable sophistication, studied formally at Das Pneumatische Institut für Höhere Resonanzstudien and recorded in Die Zisterne der Zungen beneath Kanalgrund's oldest square. It has tense, aspect, and degree of conviction. It has what linguists at the Institut controversially call 'Hauchpolitik' — breath-politics — a pragmatic register that encodes social position, dissent, deference, and desire within variations of pitch, duration, and ambient temperature. A long, low rumble descending in register over three seconds constitutes, in formal Pneumatik, the equivalent of a written petition: it is a registered grievance. A sharp staccato double-burst is the traditional greeting exchanged between equals. [REDACTED] constitutes a marriag...
From the lore of Flatulence as Logos: The Pneumatic Language of the Disenfranchised.