Steganographic gift

The ability to deduce or intuit content and sometimes even context from written or drawn linguistic "raw material" without having previously experienced or studied the language in question. The ability is normally perimagial in origin.

The gift's name is derived from the cryptographic term steganography, which normally involves embedding encrypted material in other content in such a way that the presence of the encrypted material is not revealed. Steganography in the wizardly sense, however, involves the derivation of the language "payload" itself from the written material, sometimes even when the samples involved are relatively fragmentary.

When Carmela finds that she is able to extract some information from written material in the Cave of Writings underneath Arsia Mons on Mars, Mamvish suggests that she may be starting to manifest some form of the steganographic gift, possibly due to her relatively intensive studies of the Speech and (recently) her interaction with various alien cultures that use it as a language of discourse. AWOM