"It grants fluency in any language you hear spoken while you're wearing it, for a little while after you hear some - mine would let me talk to you just fine if you spoke your own language at me, I just wasn't sure how to say so without demonstrating. It doesn't work as well on writing, I might be able to puzzle out your book a bit if I tried but I wouldn't be able to write back unless I learned how the long way."

"Our language has weak audiovisual isomorphism: that is to say, the written language and the spoken language are bijective phonemically. If I read out the text to you, would you understand it?"

He will then offer one of the copies to Rinka, and open his own. It's illustrated. He turns to a page that shows the day sky. The parts are labeled zmasolri, mecysolri, tsani, dilnu, tumsfe, tankoi, meclunra, zmalunra. Mecysolri, Zmalunra and Meclunra are currently not visible in the sky — Zmavliterdi is a circumbinary planet. From the illustration and description, Zmasolri is a Type G star and Mecysolri is Type K.

"You may keep the copy we are offering you. It is offered at no cost and if you accept, it will be your property."

"Thanks." She grabs the offered book and hangs onto it while she studies the opened copy. "Having it read to me helps a lot, yeah. Uh, if knowing where you stand about stuff being passed around is important to you - the necklaces I gave you belong to my crewmates, but we can replace them without too much trouble, so if you want to keep them you can, and if you want to give them back we'd appreciate it in the short term but it wouldn't make a big difference in the long term."

Huh. Her words imply that they don't pay much attention to ownership? Maybe if you live in a world where you have flying islands, it's not so necessary to care about material things.

"We can return them at your request. In treating with you, we will refrain from plans that assume taking ownership of the necklaces. And yes, I can read out the dictionary to you, or any of the works here. Is it more helpful to you to learn grammar or vocabulary?" The diplomat has copies of Gerna le Manri Balgugbau.

"Given that you have translation artifacts, it's also possible that learning language is less important to you. If so, I can show different books." Yes, he's fishing for information! It's informative what they decide to focus on!

"I like the thought of being able to read your language, and I bet my crewmates will like it even more, so language as a place to start is fine by me. Do you want to come up to the islet to talk? We can rig up a shelter to get out of the cold a bit and you can meet the other two. Or we can stay here if you'd rather, I'm pretty cozy in my cold-weather gear."

Should he come up to the islet? Command orders him to do so. Tarban is super apprehensive but he's well trained enough not to show it. Hopefully their cameras and microphones are and will still be usefully transmitting.

"We would also be very pleased to learn your language. And we would be pleased to come to your islet." 

How is the islet boarding process like.

Rinka takes wing to get up onto the islet, lowers it until the lowest roots on the bottom are touching snow, then kicks loose a rope ladder from one of many firmly anchored posts around the islet's rim.

As she's doing this, the other two are setting up a sort of tent enclosing much of the islet's surface, held up by the trellis on one side and the hut on the other and temporary supports in between, with sturdy canvas walls that block the wind and allow some relatively warm air to begin collecting inside.

Tarban is soooooo greedy* that Rinka can just fly.

The two of them will take the rope ladder up, the drone attaching the bags to its shoulder to be able to climb. They will wait patiently for the setting up to happen — does the setting up happen materialistically or is there ✨ magic ✨ involved? Also it's so wild that they have crops growing on the islet, though really the fact that an islet can fly at all is already really wild. Adding a finite number to infinity does not make it bigger.

*Zmavlire'a use the term 'greedy' when you want something that someone has, but you don't begrudge them having it, in contrast to 'envious'.

Setup seems fully materialistic; the only plausibly magical item involved is a great big clay pot that the silver-haired alien with the snow leopard tail lugs out of the hut, which is full of hot coals that only begin tangibly radiating heat once she takes off the lid.

Rinka shrugs off her wingpack after sealing the tent behind the visitors, and loosens her coat once Esri brings out the heater.

"So, I'm Rinka, and that's Faelin," the eight-foot-tall one with homegrown wings, "and Esri," the silver-haired one who's quite short by local standards but comfortably in the middle between Rinka and Faelin. "Haven't got your names yet, but Esri, they gave us this book" (she passes it over) "and seemed willing to teach their language out of it."

Silver-furred snow leopard ears perk up interestedly, distinguishing themselves from the surrounding hair.

"I am Tarban, this is Sint."

Tarban lacks the discernment to know that Faelin's wings are homegrown and not storebought, but is very impressed internally regardless.

"And yes, I would be very pleased to teach you Standard Imperial. It is the language of government in our country and our laws are written in it. It is the most widely spoken language here" because they mandate that everyone learn it.

Sint puts down its bags on the ground.

Esri bounces a little in place and gets out her notebook and pen. "Please do!"

"And let us know if there's anything you need to be more comfortable," Rinka adds, dragging a wooden folding chair out of the hut and offering it to Tarban. "We're not best equipped for hospitality but we do have food, water, and chairs, and might be able to come up with more if there's something you're missing."

"Chairs and a table would be good." What is the lighting situation in the tent? He might request better lighting. "We've already eaten and drunk, though thank you for offering." And also because it's very inadvisable to be eating and drinking the alien food and water before testing it because it might be contaminated. They already have tubes and water reservoirs in their suits if they get thirsty.

Tarban will pull out paper and pen also. He has a ballpoint pen.

Faelin is bringing out a folding table and a second chair.

And Rinka is ducking back into the hut to grab some glowing baubles of glazed white clay which she hands to Faelin to string from the tent roof, providing a soft but decently functional light,

while Esri takes the table and chair and sets them up excitedly for language lessons.

The string lights are So Pretty! He will not make any reactions to it, though. It has not been authorized.

"Are you more interested in grammar or vocabulary?" He did ask this previously but he didn't get an answer, so he's awkwardly asking it again. Not that he is showing the internal awkwardness. That would not be in accordance with his orders.

"I think grammar is a more sensible place to start since it provides a framework for understanding the language more clearly," says Esri.

"I can teach grammar first."

The author presents the language as being like Lojban because he is fluent in it, though it's not diegetically Lojban.

Diegetically, Standard Imperial only has verbs, or predicates, with arguments being variables passed into verbs but which aren't explicitly stated (i.e. there is no syntactic difference between a matrix predicate and a relative clause). Variables are passed as arguments into multiple predicates through adjacency or anaphoric pronouns. Words inflect based on the number and type of their parameters. 

Zmavlimu'ean variables can be of the following syntactic types: entity, event, property, relation, number, quote. Most predicate parameters only accept certain types of variables, and so the parameters that a variable is passed into have to agree with each other. Otherwise it's a type error and is ungrammatical. Variables have static type, but there are helper predicates (helpredicates) that create a new variable with similar meaning and different type. Here are the particles and inflections that let you open clauses to encode events, properties, relations, numbers, and quotes, and here is how you close them.

There are also semantic types that are subclassifications of each syntactic type. For example, the 'entity' type has the subclassifications 'person' and 'nonperson'. There are separate personal pronouns for persons and nonpersons — they're bijective. There's an first person pronoun for nonpersons. The pronoun section doesn't mention that it doesn't have grammatical gender, it merely doesn't talk about it.

There are no exceptions in the grammar and all words of the same class have to work the same way. It's a point of pride, though Tarban won't say that explicitly. It's possible for it to be parsed by machines and there are programs you can run to check for syntax and type correctness. Code for such parsers in several different languages (which are not necessarily meant to all be read by computers) are available as an appendix at the back of the book. The parsers don't natively catch semantic type errors, since semantic type isn't expressed morphologically through inflection, though it's possible to use dictionaries to check for it.

While this initial lesson is ongoing, Rinka brings out another chair for Sint and then keeps passing lights to Faelin until the whole tent is quite pleasantly lit.

Esri, meanwhile, is thoroughly fascinated by the features of the language and then even more thoroughly sidetracked by the introduction of computers as a concept.

"You can teach your language to a machine?? How? What does it mean for a machine to understand a language?"

Sint would not normally sit, but Tarban orders the drone sit because it feels awkward, given that their hosts have deliberately already put out chairs for all of them.

"It's not...understanding. It's just checking whether a piece of text is grammatically valid. Similar to how you can use machines to add and subtract, though here, we've structured our language to be especially amenable to checking by machines. Well, the aspects that make it easy for machines to check also make it easier for people to learn — the latter was the original design intention. It's possible to make a nonsensical or meaningless sentence that is still grammatically valid, and which the machine would say is grammatically valid."