"They were developed independently by different cultures and no one wanted to give theirs up when they all met."

"Fair enough. The locals here, and the Men, were illiterate. I think the Dwarves have a script."

"There are more spoken languages than there are alphabets back home," she nods. "A lot of cultures adopted someone else's."

"Fëanor invented ours."

"...How long ago was this?"

"Seven hundred years? Coming up on eight, maybe."

"Huh. All the written languages I'm used to are thousands of years old."

"Our world isn't very old. My oldest cousin is older than the written word."

"Sometimes it feels incongruous, how much older than me you are and how much older my world is than yours."

"I should really say that it's our peoples who are younger. Our world saw countless Ages before the Elves awakened. But that was only around ten thousand years ago."

"I have...no idea how old my species is, but our recorded history goes back, mm, about half that."

"There are still a few people alive from the very beginning." 

"...What was the beginning like?"

"They awoke. Fully grown, with some knowledge - they could walk - but not language, and no memories. They formed tribes, and lived in the woods, and invented words, and called themselves Quendi - speakers, singers, namers - because they were the only things they met that had the gift of speech. They are called the Unbegotten and they're greatly honored back in Valinor."

"Hah. Do you have any idea how many peoples, back home, their name for themselves is just 'people' in their own language? I've never looked at the statistics but it's supposed to be a lot. Hey, does that mean the language you're not supposed to speak just means 'language'?"

"My cousins told Odette about that? Of course they did. And yes, it does."

"Why wouldn't they have?"

"Puts people in an awkward position if she gets stubbornly curious, and we generally don't regale Men with a half-millennium of political complications as it'd be unfair to them."

"She's ticked off with the people who are enforcing it--she's pretty consistently using the words 'linguistic blackmail'--but she does, y'know, acknowledge that you have valid reasons for acceding to the blackmail and it's not exactly a problem she can just throw lots of magic at and expect things to work out better than if she'd just left well enough alone."

"It very much is not, and I'm glad she recognizes it. We're gifted with languages. The price is lower than you'd think."

"If you told her that I bet she'd nod and add it to the list of reasons she's not, in fact, meddling, but it's not going to make her not annoyed about it."

"When the war's over things will change. I think there are many people who'd - flinch, at raising children never to know our language - but we're not raising children anyway."

"Yeah. If you were human, and didn't have magic--if you had to have children now or never--if stopping speaking the language meant it would be lost--I don't think Odette would have been as calm about it."

"We killed thousands of innocent people."

"Well. Put 'em on the list."