The scythe hounds say that the first word any of them ever used was “Hey!” (or rather its scythe hound equivalent) and that it was used to mean everything. If someone took your food, you said “Hey!” and mean, “Stop that!” If you saw something and said, “Hey!” to your friends, you would mean, “Come here!” Hey is yes and no, it is all directions and the names of all people you know and all things you see. Hey is a battle cry and a coo of affection.
But with more complex ideas and thoughts, “Hey” lost its magical power. You can't say “hey” to express that you're worried there might not be enough prey animals to eat next year, so there were new words. You can't use “hey” to represent all of the numbers for math.
There were new words then, the simplest being monosyllabic grunts and the most specific being polysyllabic compound words with no real translation to English. Most words have their roots in onomatopoeia, with some more obvious than others. For purposes of simplification, scythe hound words will be recorded in standard IPA (international phonetic alphabet).
The word /'wɑː.kʌ / is translated to “bird”, but to refer to a specific kind of bird, you have to say /'wɑː.kʌ / and imitate the sound the bird makes at the same time. In the end, the word for “raven” will be different from the word for “peacock.”
Additionally, the word for “bad” is a low growl (which varies based upon what kind of bad they are referring to), the word “sleep” is an onomatopoeia for the sounds people make while sleeping, and the word for “wind” is made by blowing out your mouth.
All words in their base form are nouns, even verbs in their infinitive form. Suffixes change meaning in words, sort of like how some past tense verbs end in -ed or how present progressives end in -ing. Adverbs, for instance, end with -/'ɕɛ/.
Scythe hound writing is difficult to learn for all of these reasons. There are only thirty or so symbols to express sounds in the scythe hound language, and each symbol means a number of things. Reading the language is time consuming, but generally not necessary. Because they live significantly longer than humans, they have more time to memorize information and pass it along.
Some words to tide you over-
Tail Scythe- /'kla:.tɬa:/ (This word is semi-tonal; it is spoken with reverence)
Person- /'a:.ʁiː.ə/
Baby or Cub- /'ʃɛ:r/
Yes- /'ʒa:n/
No- /'li:/