He shakes his head. "Wow. No, everything's spelled as it sounds. We had to adapt it for Sindarin, it was created for our native language, but we adapted carefully."

"Well, it doesn't help that a lot of languages use that alphabet, but they don't always use it the same way--" she shows him the letter J. "In Anglic this is pronounced [soft g sound] and in Iberian it's pronounced [h sound] and if you're using this alphabet for Germanic it's pronounced [y sound]."

"Perhaps a difference between Elves and Men is that we'd call a convention, debate it for a hundred years, standardize, and take a few hundred more to start using the standard, but we would eventually end up having one."

"Yeah, there's no way you'd get everyone to agree on a standard back home."

"My impression of Men, perhaps unjustly colored by the relative youth of their civilizations, is that they have a harder time agreeing on things in general."

"That one I'm not going to argue with."

"There's been one incident of war and one incident of murder in all of Elven history. My family was involved in both, I have no idea what that says about us."

"Elven history has significantly fewer actors and a highly unifying enemy? People, in general, are a lot better at cooperating when they have an external threat to cooperate against."

He laughs. "All your world needs is Morgoth."

"I'd rather have the internal dissent."

"You don't say. Want to try writing something out? See if you have the idea?"

Whimsically, she transliterates the hymn she was singing on the way between towns before things went to hell. Then she copies out a handful of sentences in Sindarin from her still-imperfect but improving grasp of the language.

He corrects a few minor details, reminds her of a few of the rarer sounds. "Teaching someone a new alphabet seems easier than teaching them to write in the first place."

"Probably, yeah."

"I expect by now you can read the printing press instructions we wrote together, if you care to look over them and make sure they're right. And we have books, but wear gloves and be careful, they were all scribed by hand."

"I can do that. Where are the instructions?"

Someone brings them in. "I'm going to ride south tomorrow morning," he says, "try to persuade some people to start thinking about the retaliatory strike we're going to need once the pressure lets off."

"...D'you mean remind my sister to do that?"

"We're not letting your sister charge Angband alone. I am sure that she features in Maedhros' planning, and she's one of the complications I need to tell everyone about, but if she goes after Angband alone she will die."

"I mean remind my sister to persuade people, not remind my sister to charge Angband."

"I'm actually not very worried about Maedhros's commitment or ability to bring his brothers in line, now that they have Odette I expect they'll be eager to attack. We're allied with a lot of other people who need to be apprised of all the news."

"Ohh, that was a continuation of what you were going to do, not an instruction. Okay, that makes more sense."

"Oh, sorry, yes. You can stay here and do as seems right to you; you can ride south if you've developed a fondness for horses or want to see Nargothrond - it's beautiful - or anything but you're just as safe here."

"I might leave to go back to teaching...people...magic...osanwe is an ability. The reasons for the mind magic taboo don't apply, any more than they do for translation magic--I think I can talk Odette into seeing it that way, too. Ooh."

"I'd be delighted if there were a way for you to have osanwë capabilities! I can assign someone to translate the essential experience to your students in the meantime."