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Mortal and Promise in fairyland
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"I guess it would, but you're stuck with the code you know. Maybe you're missing lots of nuance."

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"...that had not occurred to me. Now I want to learn every language ever—actually I wonder if that works, or if it'll always look English no matter what."

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"No idea."

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"And, speaking of which... can you purposely write it ambiguously?"

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"Yeah." She does. "But if a code doesn't allow ambiguity I guess it'll have to resolve somehow."

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"...augh, I wish I had a Spanish speaker here. I'll store this piece of paper for later."

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"Sure."

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"Let's see what other ideas I had... this was homonyms, homophones should probably work the same, and transient versus permanent 'to be'... Hmm, partial words?"

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"What do you want me to do, stop writing mid-word?"

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"Yeah, and I want to do the same, and I also want to write words wrong, and see what plain speak makes of it."

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Promise writes "sorcery" only she stops partway through. "sor", it looks like to Mortal.

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Yeah, that's to be expected.

Mortal does the same with the word "monkey," stopping at "mon." "Does this look like it could start any obvious specific words, for you?"

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"I don't think I know whatever the thing is."

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"Could that start the word 'money'? Or 'love'? Or 'monkey'?"

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"...I don't know what a monkey is," Promise says. "This might be a better experiment if you stopped partway through a word I do know."

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"Hmm..." She tries "fa" (fairy, or family, or fatal...) and "app" (appear, or appearance, or application...) and "co" (court, or command, or comma...).

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"I can tell it's writing and how it might be pronounced if I think about it but not what word it is."

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"But like, could you come up with a list of possible words it could be, without working out how it might be pronounced?"

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"...I don't know how I'd go about doing that."

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"Well... I mean, you do have syllables, right, you can work out that a mortal's name has one of those."

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"Yeah? That involves knowing how it's pronounced."

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"So when you say words that aren't names they don't... get divided into syllables?"

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"Not generally, no..."

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"Huh. How about—" And she writes the word "misteak."

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"...why did you write it like that?"

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