"Well, you could put off starting this one but I don't see what that nets you."

"Oh, nothing, I'll do it, I'm just whining."

"I'll use the Atbash and keep track of Al Bhed to see if either suddenly becomes comprehensible to you."

"Okay. It'd be really interesting if there were an intermediate stage."

"It would! But we can check whether time's the deciding factor or what if we look at conlangs by age," she says, and grabs her phone again to look up a list of those.

"Huh. Apparently Elvish is older than I'd thought, almost a hundred years old. Well..."

She starts looking words up in various conlangs and writing them down, starting from 1910.

"How old did you think it was?"

"Like fifty or sixty years," she shrugs.

Here's a word in Adjuvilo, a language invented in 1910! Does it make sense?

Mostly.

Mostly? That's interesting. Can they qualify that? Some words but not others, general gist but not particular words...?

Most of the words, actually, but the grammar seems weird.

Fascinating. She writes this down, and skips back to the previous language in the Wikipedia list instead of the next, Ido.

That one fairies just understand!

And Occidental?

They understand that too.

"...okay so it's not about age."

"What else do they have dissimilar?"

She looks it up. "Adjuvilo and Ido were both Esperanto offshoots, apparently, and Adjuvilo has mostly the same vocabulary as Ido but with different grammar. There's suspicion that it was constructed to create dissent amongst Ido-speakers? And Occidental was a completely different project."

"The ones that are similar might be bleeding into each other or something."

"But it's weird that it'd consider one a language and the other not-a-language... Well, I mean, I guess Adjuvilo wasn't as widely spoken? Or maybe at all?" She frowns at her phone.

"You didn't check?"

"There's a handy list of conlangs by date of creation, not so much by number of speakers. It's certainly nonzero, though."

"How much can you speak a language if only a few other people speak it?"