"...words are made out of sounds."

"Except when they're made out of marks or gestures, sure."

"...yeah, okay. So how do you say a word without saying any sounds -"

"I'm making noise, you wouldn't be able to hear me talk if I were magically inaudible, but I'm not making coded noise."

"So if I wanted to teach you a new word for a concept you were unfamiliar with, how would that work -"

"...then I'd know how to express the concept."

"I would say a collection of sounds. Would your ability to learn that collection of sounds be mediated by whether I understood it - or whether it actually truly meant that in some sense -"

"I'm not really paying attention to what sounds you're using."

"If I say the same word in different languages do you hear the same thing -"

"Probably? I'm not sure I'd notice."

He turns Allspeak off. He says 'computer' in every language he speaks and then looks up a few he doesn't and says it in those languages too. "Those all sound the same?"

"Mostly, yeah."

"Mostly? What are the exceptions? What about false cognates between languages -"

"They're sort of nuanced differently - I think you could probably get most of the same effect with tone of voice alone, if you wanted? - what's a cognate?"

The French for a mythological heroine after which a planet in Warp is named is the same as the Quenya for 'downfall'. He says both words.

The Bell can tell which he's referring to because one of them is a name and the other one means "downfall".

"They're the exact same set of sounds - the only difference is what I had in mind when I said them - what if I wrote them both down on pieces of paper and then mixed them up and then you read them, would you be able to tell which one I was thinking of when I wrote the characters even though the characters look identical -"

"Probably? I don't pay attention to exact lines any more than exact sounds."

He makes sheets of paper with both in the tengwar and both in the Roman alphabet and offers them to her.

She can in fact distinguish them.

"So your translation magic encodes meaning at the time of creation and gives you that - what if someone else tells me the word and I write it down without knowing which they mean, and then you read it -"

"I don't know, I - last talked to a mortal years ago and we didn't try that."

"Do you know where that mortal is?"

"Probably dead by now if she's lucky."

"Can you send me a mental image -"