"Will you want to have your new tree already grown before we move them?"

Is it obvious she's anxious to wrap this up and never have anything to do with it ever again?

"Grown some, yeah, but I can get it big enough to hold sparrows fast."

"Then I suppose we could just send Yellow to the library to post the ad there while you grow your tree."

"And soon we will be able to shoo Yellow altogether."

"If I were a fairy I'd offer to do it myself but alas."

Nod.

"Is he up? We could send him now."

"Yeah, he's up."

Promise writes up her ad and assigns Yellow his errand.

"...and I think I wanna do some science while we wait."

"Oh?"

"Test stuff! There's lots of stuff to be tested. Especially with plain speak. And a couple of the fairies we interviewed were okay with helping."

"Have fun."

"Thanks!" Pause. "Do you wanna come, too?"

"Do you think I'd be helpful?"

"Well, the practical thing you'd bring to the table is the fact that you're my Master and they're not, and also you're really smart and might come up with stuff, but I was asking mostly 'cause you might have been curious or interested in it for itself."

"I'll come along."

"Awesome! They're in one of the courts here—I wish fairies had phones, I'd know if we can show up or if they're busy, but oh well."

She gets up and makes her way to the appropriate gate.

Follow follow. "What are you thinking we'd try first?"

"Well the very first thing I wanna try to figure out is just what counts as a language for plain speak. I was pretty surprised Elvish does but Al Bhed doesn't."

"Why?"

"'Cause they're both fictional languages spoken by fictional peoples who also happen to have a nonzero number of real people who can actually speak them. The difference between them is how many people have spoken it ever, how old each is, and the fact that Elvish is its own language with its own syntax and vocabulary and stuff whereas Al Bhed is just a cipher applied to English. But the difference between something being a cipher and being a completely different language is quantitative and in-game it's a language. So."

"Are there intermediate cases?"

"I mean, it's quantitative in theory, in practice I think the closest thing to an intermediate case would be a dialect and those are close enough to languages that I'd be very surprised if they didn't count. My thing is that languages are basically just arbitrary sets of sounds attached to arbitrary meanings plus arbitrary-but-consistent rules about how to relate those sounds to each other to form more complex ones, and that's true of Al Bhed as well as of Elvish and Esperanto."

"Are all these sets of rules the same age?"

"Inasmuch as a non-constructed language can be said to have an age, no. Al Bhed is only like five or six years old, English has been evolving for thousands of years but something that's recognisably English has existed for maybe a few hundred, Elvish is a few decades old, Esperanto's about one or two hundred years old."