How Does Aycharaych's Telepathy Work?

Telepathy and Aycharaych

Flandry explains to a colleague and thus to us that a normal telepath detects mental patterns but must learn a different internal "language" for each telepathic race and even for each individual member of a non-telepathic race because minds lacking contact develop individual "languages." Contradicting this, Aycharaych instantly reads and understands at least the surface thoughts of any member of any species, even an inhabitant of a gas giant planet. Flandry speculates that Aycharaych detects an underlying resonance-pattern or basic life energy but this concept is questionable.

Although Anderson presents at least three attempted accounts of how Aycharaych’s telepathy might work, semantics involves arbitrary associations between symbols and meanings so how can Aycharaych detect meanings behind symbols? Admittedly, he reads living minds, not mere written records, but he must still interpret a "language." The character of Aycharaych was introduced in an early story so that Flandry could learn how to lie to a telepath – he allowed himself to be drugged and persuaded of falsehoods - but Aycharaych was such an interesting character in other ways that he returned and became the principle continuing villain of the series, although Flandry’s opposite number among the Merseians does rise through the ranks like Flandry.
-copied from here.

If Aycharaych merely detected patterned radiation from another brain, then he would not be able to interpret the patterns any more than we can understand an unfamiliar language merely by hearing it spoken. However, an intelligent being not only thinks thoughts in a particular language, e.g., English or Ymirite, but also applies the words of that language correctly thanks to an underlying body of memories and knowledge. Might the entire contents of another mind momentarily enter Aycharaych's brain? Thus, he would experience the totality of what an Ymirite experiences not only when that entity inwardly forms sentences in the Ymirite language but also when the entity understands the words in those sentences thanks to his long familiarity with them. Returning to his own mentality, Aycharaych would remember not only a sequence of symbols but also the meanings of those symbols as understood by the being that had formulated them.

See also Imagine and its combox.