Parseltongue: And how to speak it

Chapter 1: Introduction/Lesson 1

Parseltongue is everything but simple, but it is very concise. Snakes will only give you the information they feel you need and expect you to read between the lines to understand them. This is what has led to the belief that they are being shady, or manipulative. In reality, that is simply how their language is built. Most sentences will be very short and consist only of the subject, object, and verb. The rest has to be pieced together based on the listener's knowledge, context clues, and loose interpretation.
If you are not lucky enough to have been born a Parselmouth, you will have a harder time distinguishing some of the sounds a snake is capable of producing, and thus will have difficulty when getting beyond the most basic words and word forms. Furthermore, as there is no written form of Parseltongue, I will be attempting to describe it using the English alphabet, and some sounds will be lost in translation. Be careful when listening to our class snakes, as their speech will not match exactly to our classroom approximations.
Before we can start learning vocabulary, we must learn some basics about the language, such as the range of sounds that can be made.