my general tf language thoughts are that the cybertronian language is deeply complex in a way that would make it just kind of . unfeasible to be spoken by humans because they're communicating so much information at such high speeds that you'd have to be a computer to actually catch and process everything. every single word is basically a full sentence worth of context tags
counting in cybertronian is a little weird. numbers are . something.
“how old are you anyways?” miko asks.
“i’m-” bulkhead starts and then stops. he tilts his head and makes a face. “agh, i'm no good at translating our time to yours. i'm-”
and then bulkhead makes a noise. a long noise that lasts for maybe a total of thirty or forty seconds, made of a long series of clicks and beeps and static noises strung together until he finishes it off with, “-vorns.”
miko stares blankly at her partner. then, she turns to raf, asking, “hey, you understand robo-talk, right? what was that?”
raf swallows slightly. “i, um. i didn't catch all of that. he was… listing numbers really fast? i think?”
bumblebee lets out his own series of beeps and whistles.
“oh.” raf makes a soft noise of understanding. “in the cybertronian language, when you say how old you are, you… list every year you’ve been alive, i guess. so bulkhead is…”
“so bulkhead is…?” miko prompts.
raf swallows. “six… sixty thousand, two hundred and forty-five.”
“incorrect,” ratchet cuts in suddenly, “bulkhead is sixty thousand, two hundred and forty-five vorns of age. not earth years.”
miko lets out a long sigh. “so how long is a vorn, then? like… a week? a month?”
“a vorn is almost exactly eighty-three earth years,” ratchet says simply.
“but that would make bulkhead…” raf pauses for only a second to do the mental math, “… five million, three hundred and thirty-five years old?”
“how long do cybertronians live?” jack finally speaks up, voice weaker than he means it to be.
“until they die,” ratchet responds simply.
“ah… what’s a cybertronian’s lifespan?” raf tries instead.
ratchet makes an exaggerated sighing noise, one subtly tinged with static. “cybertronians are not like you organics. we do not have your slow decay into senescence. under ideal conditions, a cybertronian could live forever.”
that takes a moment to digest in their brains.
“… do you know how old the oldest cybertronian was?” raf asks.
ratchet pauses in his work, head tilting down some.
“… primus himself was said to have been born at the dawn of time. he was unfathomably old, even by our standards.” ratchet straightens out suddenly. “but primus died when cybertron did.”
bulkhead listing his age is him basically going “i’m one-and-two-and-three-and-four” and so on and so forth
the reason raf can generally understand bumblebee is because the destruction of his voice box means that bumblebee physically can't make a lot of the really complex sounds and omits a ton of tags and relies on context. this means he's a lot easier to understand to humans
not that raf would necessarily struggle with true cybertronian, but y’know.
