That should definitely be covered in the talk. And we have other kinds of partnerships, but marriage is one of the most significant and the only irrevocable one.

She nods, and takes a moment to consider. Tell me more about genders? Unless that's private, but it doesn't seem to be.

Elves are either men or women. You can usually see the difference at a glance and most people dress to signal it because they don't want to be mistaken for the other thing. There are things women are better at and things men are better at but not too many of them. Occasionally someone's born the wrong one so they have to change it.

Yeah, we definitely don't have that. There's the anatomical difference, and it's occasionally possible to tell which someone has by how they look, but it's considered very private information in general - I suppose there could be differences in aptitude, we wouldn't have any way to know about them.

That's not rude. Though telling someone they should stop dressing in a way that indicates their gender because they ought to keep it private would be. 

Nod. People telling me about each other all the time has been a little disconcerting, but I'm not going to ask anyone to stop doing anything - I am planning on asking if some neutral Quenya words can be invented, since I don't think I'll be able to use the existing ones without the connotations from my culture sneaking in and using my language's neutral words is apparently confusing, but I don't mind if nobody else uses them.

People will be excited to invent words! Maybe some of the Maiar will use them. I appreciate your patience with all the cultural differences.

She grins. Yeah, I'd gathered that. And the cultural difference isn't that big of a deal. I mean, it would be, but, there's context - how curious might people be about why I came here and how I got separated from my tribe, by the way? That's one of the things that needs upsetting context to make sense, and it's not all that comfortable for me to talk about, but if people will wonder I'd rather just explain.

I don't think they'll ask. We all left scary worlds for Valinor so they'll assume it's that.

Nod. And that's more or less correct, yeah.

She checks her notes. So, families. Kobolds lay eggs; my impression has been that Quendi don't? And we don't do ownership, and that applies even to eggs, so the person who hatches an egg is usually not the same person who laid it - not that it's impossible to hold onto an egg if someone really wants to, but there's not an assumption that that's going to happen or even that the egg-parent would want to. That has a couple of useful effects; nobody ends up being an imprinted parent if they don't want to, and if the rest of the tribe thinks someone would make a bad parent, they generally won't be able to hold onto an egg long enough to hatch it. Hatchlings imprint on the first person they see when they hatch, and that's their imprinted parent. For the first two or three years a baby will be with their parent or another caregiver all the time; around the time they're walking reliably and can be trusted not to try to eat things they shouldn't, they're ready to start spending less time with their parent and more time with the rest of the tribe - for the littlest kids it's all about learning how the tribe works in general, but after a year or so they start taking more of an interest in specific adults and the things they're doing, and it's pretty common for kids to adopt more parents at that age, as they start working out how they fit into the tribe - adults have some choice, about that, but generally once a kid is attached, they're attached. She looks fondly amused. 

We do not lay eggs, no. The people who create the child will also be the ones who are the parent - we don't have imprinting, but the caretaker. Children can't acquire new parents, unless theirs die or cannot take care of them, and that's an awful tragedy to be avoided. They can acquire mentors and family-like figures.

Nod. We do mentoring, too, but that's not specific to children, and pretty much the entire tribe is family-like.

Our tribe is a little too big for that, I think. It is much bigger than yours. 

Nod. Kobold tribes can get as big as about 150 people, and then they end up either losing people to other tribes or splitting into two, depending on how good the leadership is and if there's a good candidate for a new chief - more than that and we can't get to know each other well enough to work together as a tribe. I'm not really sure we should be using the same term for kobold tribes and Quendi ones, they seem pretty different.

We can invite people to invent new words there too. They do seem very different. 

Mmhmm. You said something earlier about distinguishing tribes? I kind of wonder what you mean by that, for kobolds tribe membership comes down to who you're choosing to live with - for most people that's the tribe they hatched into, but switching tribes isn't especially uncommon.

We also can switch tribes, but it is pretty uncommon and you can usually tell our three major tribes apart by looking, there are differences in hair and skin color and face shape. 

Huh. Yeah, that sounds like a different thing entirely.

She looks over her notes. I should probably mention that kobolds don't do names, in with the bit about us not talking - I'm familiar with the concept but I don't have or particularly want one, and I definitely don't want suggestions from people I'm not close to, any ideas about that?

You can just say that just like among us, suggesting a name for someone is an intimate thing to do, you'd find it uncomfortable. Even though you don't have one. How do you want people to refer to you? What do you want them to call you?

That's perfect, good. People can just call me the kobold, there's not really any chance another one of us will turn up here.

Okay. But if there were several? I'm just trying to imagine calling everyone around me by descriptions - eventually the descriptions just would be the same as names, among our people...

That's sort of what we do, but it's not spoken descriptions, it's mimicked body language, and it changes by context - I'm not sure Quendi read body language well enough for that at all, but it works for us.

It is easier for me to conceptualize that as 'you have a sign language, and names in that' but perhaps it's impolite to try to round you off to us that way. 

She chuckles and shrugs. There isn't enough precedent for this for me to say anything's impolite in that direction. But it really isn't much like having names - the mimicry is at least as much about how the person's relevant as about who they are, it's not the same from one interaction to the next or even within the same interaction.

Well, lots of people have different names for different contexts, and people do communicate things about the capacity in which they think of the person by which name they use. But a lot less, I'll concede that.