He has time, sure, though if it's hard to find someone who wants to come on short notice he's fine with waiting.

If the people doing the translating want some way to ask him questions about things he's open to that, too - they've been doing a good job, there's plenty of variation in the details of how different Crafters use the glyphs and they're within the range of that, but it wouldn't surprise him if they wanted the opportunity to ask questions sometimes anyway.

Vesherti doesn't say this, but no, it will not be hard to find a person who wants to teach Traveler languages.

What he does say is:

I found a teacher that can come over this afternoon. And yes, the translators would love to ask you questions about the glyphs. If you don't mind, I can share the code that lets them write letters to you with them?

Sure. He can have an outbuilding up in less than an hour, for the language teacher, to block out the background noise; if they'd like any particular layout or furnishings or acoustic properties besides 'quiet' it'd be useful to know ahead of time.

Vesherti assures him that whatever environment he finds conducive to learning should be fine. The teacher planned on bringing a screen like the others have been using to communicate with him, but if he wanted to set up an ansible pair that could be drawn on and erased for communication that would work too.

Sure, he can do that.

He has the outbuilding up by the time the teacher gets there; it's a smaller lumpen shape than the main house, with a big window in the front, chairs and a worktable for the two of them, a flat wall ready to be used as a blackboard, an ansibled writing tablet pair and an extra one for notetaking, and some extra crafting material for copying things off of the ansibled tablet. The pair of crows that have been hanging around his place were interested in sitting in on the lesson, so he's added some perching spots in various places around the room and is wearing a shoulder-mounted one so that one of the pair can more comfortably hang out on him.

Khavornsa arrives on time. This is somewhat unusual for him, but: aliens. Also, terrifyingly efficient diplomatic personnel who think that he should be the one to teach Traveler, out of everybody in the university's linguistics department. They probably have reasons.

It's quite exciting, anyway.

He peers around curiously at the outbuilding Traveler has set up, and waves through the window.

He waves back and goes to open the door and offer Khavornsa a hand in. (He wonders to himself whether it's just coincidence that they've arranged him meetings with two unusually good-looking men in a row, or if his friend said something about that - he wouldn't put it past her in the slightest, not that he minds. This one is less his type than Kharet, though, at least on first impression.)

He's glad Khavornsa could come; he'd like to get started on being able to use the local language, at least a little. He's not sure whether it makes sense for him to try to learn the spoken version or just the written; he's not sure he can make sense of the sounds for the spoken one but it might be hard to learn the written without that if it's based on it, so that's probably the first thing to figure out.

Khavornsa takes a moment to get used to writing on the clever little worktable and scribbles a reply.

"That was going to be my first question to you — our language has three different modes: written, sound-based, and signed. The structure of the language is the same for each one. Every written word, sound-based word, and signed gesture corresponds. Also, the written shapes of each word correspond to the sequence of sounds for the word. That's not quite the case for gestures, because signed languages have a pretty different structure. Anyway, the idea is that it's a lot easier to learn than three independent languages, but still allows people to communicate in whatever way they can."

"I can teach you whichever modes you want, but if you're worried about learning the sound-based one, it might make sense to start with the signed mode. Not everyone can sign, but most people can."

Signing does sound easier in that sense, yeah, though his main goal is to be able to read local writing and it doesn't sound like it's especially useful for that. He's also just curious on its own merits about whether he can make sense of spoken words; would it be inconvenient to try that first?

"No, not at all. Here, let me say an example sentence that shows off all the sounds of the language:"

He adds some LCTL writing and then a translation in Crafter glyphs. Then he looks up at Traveler, and clearly articulates:

"I ate thirty-six blue whales yesterday and I don't regret it."

"So I don't expect you to get all that on the first try — but can you hear how the sentence kind of breaks up into chunks? 'Ate' 'thirty-six' 'blue' 'whales' 'yesterday' 'regret-not' 'I'?"

He says each word again as he writes out the corresponding glyph or glyphs for it.

He caught some of that, less than a third of the syllables but not a lot less. He doesn't think he could confidently pick out the word boundaries but he suspects he can learn.

"Thirty," interjects the shoulder crow.

Khavornsa points at it.

"Yes, good pronunciation! Traveler, are you relaying the things I'm writing to them?" he asks, not entirely sure how involved in the lesson the crows are.

"And catching a third of the syllables is pretty good for a first go. If you learn like a typical Helper, you'll find things easier to pick up once you've spent some time listening to people talking. If you'd like, I can recommend some good recorded books to help train your ear. How about I go through each of the sounds and their symbols individually, and if that helps you pick apart words that's a good start, but if it doesn't it's also a good start to learning the writing?"

He's relaying, yeah; he should have mentioned, sorry. They're curious about learning the language too but he's asked them to just listen and not participate in this first lesson, to keep things from getting too chaotic. (The crow preens selfsatisfiedly at Khavornsa's compliment.) Recorded speech and a symbol reference document sound like they'd both be useful, yes.

Khavornsa nods.

"Alright."

He quickly writes down an alphabet:

P B       T D K G

M          N    Ŋ

      Þ Ð  S Z X Q   H
      ɬ L

A E I O U

"These symbols here are for all the sounds that don't involve cutting off the airflow — aaa, eee, iii, ooo, uuu. These are called vowels. The rest of the symbols are for sounds that involve cutting off the airflow to different degrees. Consonants. The ones on the top are complete stops — p, b, t, d, k, g — and the ones on the bottom are softer — þ, ð, s, z, x, q, h, ɬ, l. The ones in the middle are the ones that involve letting a little bit of the sound through your nose — m, n, ŋ. Where the symbols come in pairs, the one on the left is said without buzzing your vocal chords, and the one on the right is said while buzzing them."

"Every word is made up of syllables. Each syllable is one consonant, followed by one vowel, possibly followed by another consonant. That rule isn't perfect — my name, for example, is from an older system and ends up having three consonant sounds in a row. But for almost all words except names and specific technical words, you can break them up like that."

He goes through each of the sounds again more slowly, showing Traveler how the shape that he wrote the alphabet in loosely corresponds to where in the mouth the sound is produced. Then he invites him to try and make the various sounds.

Studying linguistics means that he has long ago lost all embarrassment about standing around making random sounds.

He's fortunately not completely unused to making sounds - he's never been very into singing but he's done some of it, and it's handy to be able to mimic various animals when you find yourself interacting with them, among other use cases - but he struggles with making the sound he intends to, especially with the ones he can't differentiate yet. The crow comments that he can tell the difference between most of those, and he'll help with practice for food, which sounds fine to Traveler.

Well, he is telepathic. Being able to understand the sounds is probably more important than being able to produce them reliably, in his case.

Khavornsa will be ready to switch to just focusing on writing if Traveler seems to be getting frustrated, but for now he takes a moment to point out that the language is designed so that the length of a word carries useful information, even if you're not sure what a word is.

"Short words, like 'ti' or 'hab' are either stand-in words for a specific common thing or grammatical words that show how the sentence is structured. 'ti', for example, is the word for 'I'. 'hab' indicates that an action is being done to something. Longer words like 'paþmes' are for less common ideas — things that you'd usually have a normal glyph for, in the Crafter system. Very long words, like 'ðogulhsatevim', are precise or technical words, like a detailed compound glyph. So if I said something like 'zaveh ti hab paþmes', you don't need to know 'zaveh' or 'paþmes' to know that I'm talking about me doing something to something. And even if you didn't remember 'hab', you can still tell that it's probably attaching 'paþmes' to the sentence, instead of starting a new idea."

(He's not frustrated yet; he's in a pretty good mood today for some reason.)

That is handy, yeah. Or will be, once he can tell words apart. Is there internal structure to the words like that at all?

Yes!

Khavornsa can talk at great length about derivational morphology, but the gist of it is: short words have less internal structure than long words, because they're pressed for space, but closely-related grammatical words are still designed to share a common base sound to make them easier to remember as a group. Longer words are often formed by suffixation according to a set of fairly regular rules. There are a very small number of generic suffixes that can be applied to any word, but the language generally tries to avoid them because they make it hard to maintain an exact correspondence with the signed mode.

To start with, though, he recommends not worrying too much about all that. Recognizing common suffixes is probably helpful for puzzling out compound words, but what will be more helpful is having basic vocabulary down.

It's neat, anyway. And knowing that the internal structure is there makes the whole thing feel less disconcertingly arbitrary even if the structure itself isn't useful to him yet.

It's a good idea to start with basic vocabulary, though, yes; does Khavornsa have any opinions on what he should pick up first? As a goal to work toward, he means; he expects to do better with one.

He thinks about this.

"I normally recommend people start with food words, since that means they can practice multiple times a day, and everybody needs food at some point. Your goal being to travel to lots of different places, though, you might want to start with words for directions, so that you can ask the way to a place and understand people's responses."

That does sound like a good approach, yeah.

The crows would like some food words, though.

Sensible of them.

"Alright — let's do some of both."

Khavornsa introduces Traveler and the crows to such words as 'nut', 'meat', 'cooked', 'that way', 'left', and so on.

The crows are definitely better at this than he is, which he takes with amused grace and doesn't let discourage him. He's going to need practice on most of the sounds; his estimate earlier that he could differentiate a third of them might have been a little optimistic.

Learning a first language is hard for everyone. It takes babies years, and they have the advantage of not being up to much else in that time.

Once they have enough words down for basic example sentences, he'll take a brief detour into grammar, which is relatively straightforward. After that he'll practice distinguishing words with them as much as they'd like, and then leave Traveler with recommendations for more learning material.

"I like suggesting that people listen to recordings of old Complicated Social Rules tournaments, because the people there tend to speak slowly and clearly. You can leave them on in the background so your ear gets used to the sounds, or listen more intently as practice. Recordings of people reading books are also good, especially if you can get a translation to read along with. I'll send you the names of some good starting books."

That seems workable to him. He doesn't have a sound playback machine yet, what should he be looking for with that?