> Why does Maggie not simply go through the letters of the alphabet one by one to determine the original names of former humans? Also since it seems you can write in English why not write them out?
Good questions! The presence of humans and their knowledge of language in this setting are essentially a giant, disruptive edge case in the face of how the Gift of Understanding works, so this is going to get technical and complicated in ways that the characters themselves aren't necessarily aware of. Apologies in advance.
The answers to both of these lie in the fundamental differences between spoken and written language, and how they interact with this setting's system of Understanding. Language, in basic terms, is a system of symbols used to represent meanings. However, despite being connected by usage, a written language and its spoken counterpart are not interchangeable. One can be fluent in a spoken language but unable to read or write in it, and one can be able to read a written language without knowing how to speak it. Both can even exist in isolation without the other.
Understanding, as performed by the animals in this setting, is not a language, strictly speaking. There is no formal association of symbols with meanings. Rather, it is a system in which languages are spontaneously created in at the moment of communication, and then discarded immediately after a meaning is communicated. If a wolf barks with the intent to say "hello", that bark is a symbol meaning "hello" only in that moment. They can assign different meaning to the same sound later and know that others will get the message. Both we the readers and the human characters, however, are processing these meanings as if they were a uniform language, because having learned a language fundamentally alters the way we think.
To start, let's re-examine why humans "lose" their names in the first place when forced to use the Gift of Understanding. Names, as part of language, are symbols same as any other. However, the meaning of those symbols is variable depending on the context. There are plenty of people in the world named "John Smith." If I refer to a specific John Smith, the meaning of the name is "him" or "the specific person named John Smith who I am currently referring to." Most names also have linguistic origins with meanings attached, but it's very common to be ignorant of them. "John" comes from the Hebrew word "Yohannan," meaning "God is gracious," but I didn't know that until I looked it up just now. Maggie does happen to know that "Margaret" means "pearl", but none of the other humans introduced thus far, save for Song, ever put in that kind of research for their own names.
However, the Gift of Understanding is unconcerned with the symbol of a name. If someone named John Smith were to become a creature in this setting, the meaning of their name is forcibly divorced from the symbol in their memory. "John Smith" is just a sound they remember hearing, and when they Understand it, it means "me," or "myself."
So, let's tackle the questions themselves. What is stopping Maggie from going through the letters of the English alphabet one at a time, asking another human if their name starts with that letter, and then systematically reconstructing their name that way?
Maggie circumvents the separation of symbol and meaning by virtue of being a mimic. She can reproduce the sounds of her spoken name from memory, the same way a real myna will repeat words it hears without knowing what they mean. By using this sound to refer to herself, she re-creates the association between the memory of the sound and the meaning of her name, which seems to short circuit the Understanding of her and others who remember "Maggie" being spoken aloud. The reasons for is are currently mysterious, and the process is strangely taxing.
Maggie's mimicry, however, exists purely in the realm of spoken language, and an alphabet is a written construct. You do not construct a spoken word out of letters from an alphabet, you construct it out of phonemes, the individual sounds your mouth and vocal cords are capable of creating. Letters of an alphabet symbolically represent phonemes, but English is an especially cursed language with a dire lack of phonetic consistency, so most letters have more than one phoneme they can represent, and often overlap. Because of this, Maggie can't easily iterate over letters of the English alphabet and associate them with sounds. When she reads text written by Ink-Talon or another human, she's stuck Understanding it the same way as everyone else, and if she tries to read it aloud, she will simply say what she Understands it to mean. Now, could she theoretically iterate over phonemes instead and reconstruct someone's name that way? Technically, she could, but doing so would require knowledge and education on linguistics and phonetics that she doesn't have, and be prohibitively labor intensive. We, as author and audience, have the ability to use the internet to research phonemes. The characters in the story, however, don't.
Now for the second question: Why doesn't anyone just write their name? If they attempt to, one of two things can happen. Most often, they will simply write "me," "myself," etc, because that's the meaning that they're forced to think. If some one tried really, really hard, they could potentially draw each letter of their name one at a time as pictures divorced from meaning, much in the same way Maggie can make sounds from memory. However, if they then put those characters together to spell their name, they would simply read the meaning again. Written symbols are Understood far more directly than spoken language, which is why Maggie can be draining to listen to. For some reason, that extra step of processing is necessary for her little "cheat" to be possible.
Thanks for asking, and sorry this went off the rails so hard. It's a complicated subject, one that the characters themselves aren't equipped to work though with more than rudimentary scientific rigor at the moment. If only there were scholarly folk interested in how all of this works, too...
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> Do different names take different amounts of time to say? Like, if the same animal started using a longer/more specific name, would that make referring to them take longer, or would it be the same amount of time because the name points at the same set of concepts?
Generally speaking, no. If someone intends to refer to a person, then it will be understood that they are referring to them. As you said, "that person" is a simple and consistent concept. However, if that were all there was to it, then why have names at all? The "labels" that make up a name are an expression of identity, the parts of yourself you find most descriptive and definitive. Even if you can get by without one, would you want to? I'm sure some do, but most don't.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
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> If two animals have the same name, is telling which one somebody's talking about trivial or complex?
It depends! Technically, names are layered meaning. As I said in that first monster of an answer, the exact meaning of a name is informed by the context in which it is used. Transporter Steady-Step is the name of the horse who carted our group of unlucky humans to the city, but a "fuller" or "more complete" name would technically be "[A?/The?/This?] Transporter with Steady Steps." However, we are reading and writing this story in a language, and our human cast is thinking in one as well. Languages are concerned with things like "length" and "readability," so it is prudent to abstract it for our/the character's benefit, so long as the meaning remains relatively unchanged.
Note the ambiguity on the "full" name, however. Stead-Step could be the only one of its name, or it could be one of many. This is by design. If two creatures sharing a name are together, or being deliberately referred to in the same discussion, the context alters meanings enough to make referring to "that one" trivial. However, there is utility in being ambiguous. If one is aware of a group of animals with the same name, then they can use use the name to refer to any nonspecific one of them, or even the group as a collective. Some animals, mainly those organized in some shared labor or goal, will choose the same name for themselves as a philosophical statement on their unity and shared ideals. Each member speaks for all of their name, and their actions reflect on all of them.
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> Can speakers "speak slowly" and what benefit does that confer for listeners, if anything?
Some modes of expression are more concise than others. It takes longer for someone like Song to get something across "vocally" than it does with a gesture, or by making a sound using the environment (Salamanders lack vocal cords, and any meager sounds they can make are accomplished by expelling air from their lungs with more force/effort than your typical animal vocalizations would require). The fastest means of communicating are those that combine modes of expression to convey more information at once. Vocalizing while also using body language is the most immediately common way for most animals to accomplish this. However, doing this can have accessibility concerns for those both those with different sensory capabilities, and can create difficulties for the Attuned as well. A salamander like Song does not have good enough eyesight to be able to glean much information from all but the most exaggerated of gestures, for example. Thus, in order to effectively communicate with her, one has to "speak slowly," or more accurately limit themselves to less efficient modes of expression so that she doesn't miss any of it.
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> To what extent is miscommunication still possible?
A lot of this is related to what I said in the previous answer but there's more to add here.
There are two ways in which miscommunication typically occurs. The first is when one person is expressing ideas another is confused by or otherwise lacks context for, and then the second person makes incorrect assumptions about them. The second, and more common way is due to missing information. For example, someone communicating with a combination of vocalizations and body language can potentially be overheard by someone who can't clearly see the "speaker" and thus the information conveyed to them is "lossy," for lack of a better term. Tone/emotional information could be missing, for example. Or details intended to be given clearly could become vague and imprecise. Making sure everyone in a conversation is aware of the sensory capabilities or limitations of everyone else is seen as important for avoiding social faux pas.
Attunement can cause similar problems, but not because of a lack of perception. Rather, Attunement imposes a limit on what information one can process to compensate for the influx of extra information from elsewhere, and this can lead to misunderstandings if someone is unaware of it.
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> Got another double feature this time about Markings. can they be mechanically copied like by carving a stamp or with a printing press? Would using something like a typewriter be enough to imbue Meaning into typewritten material?
Yes to both questions, but not for the reasons you might think. By far the most fantastical part of Understanding (to the point that how it actually happens in-universe is a mystery and subject of no shortage of scholarly research) is that intent creates meaning, superseding both the means and medium of communication. If you carved a message into a stamp with an intent to spread it around, then it would convey that message perfectly. However, if you gave the stamp to someone else, and they decided to use the stamp with a different intent, then theirs would be the one conveyed. In a scenario both humorous and existentially horrifying, you could have two identical markings side by side created by two different people using the same stamp tool created by a third person, and yet anyone who looks at them would clearly recognize the unique messages conveyed by each, and then any one who looked at the stamp tool itself would recognize the message of the person who carved it. (This is, in fact, rather unnerving even for people who have been Understanding things that way their whole lives. Deliberately copying markings with different intent is seen as extremely rude as a result.) By this principle, a typewriter would also work fine, so long as the buttons are pressed with intent. The actual symbols printed on the paper, however, would not matter.
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> Say someone attached a stamp and something to stamp with on some kind of mechanism such as various gears and a water wheel. Someone can create the stamp, someone else can build the mechanism, someone can put the stamp and replace the stamp within the mechanism, someone can start the mechanism with intent, someone can stop and restart the mechanism with intent, someone can slow down or speed up the mechanism with intent, someone can restart the mechanism not knowing what it does. someone can throw a rock at the stamp, damaging it while the mechanism keeps running, with or without intent
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> All this is a somewhat plausible but ridiculous thought experiment, but I've been mainly actually thinking about things like audio recordings, probably something simple like vinyl or a cassette. Someone can record audio with meaning onto a cassette, but it becomes odd if someone else has to play it and accidentally or intentionally overwrites the meaning.
We are getting way into the weeds of hypothetical edge cases at this point, but generally one of two things will happen when things become so convoluted.
Option 1: The intent of the last person to act in the sequence is expressed by the effects of their act, which may or may not obscure the meaning of previous expressions depending on how much of the results of those actions are still perceptible.
Option 2: The fact that people are deliberately making things complicated and confusing becomes the overall intent and the entire exercise is left with "this is purposefully nonsensical" as its meaning.
Audio recordings are an unknown. Canonically, they do not currently exist in the setting. I'd like to think that the original intent of the recording is preserved up to a point, though, as in Option 1 above. The listener would simultaneously get the meanings expressed in the recording and in the intent behind playing it back, unless the person playing it back distorted or damaged it.