Probably a convention of Elf hearing. Where should I sit? she asks Maitimë.

She gestures to the seat next to her. 


People come into the room.

One of them blinks at her. "- hello," she says. 

"Mother, this is Isabella. Isabella, Fëanáre Curufinwë, crown princess of the Noldor -"

"Darling, you can introduce me as something other than the hatstand for the handoff between the Queen and our next one -" and to Isabella - "I don't want the crown, it sounds like a tremendous waste of time. Isabella? What language is that? Where are you from?"

Isabella takes the suggested seat. "Isabella is a Latinized form of the Greek name 'Elizabeth', but the only language I actually speak is English, and I'm from a country called the United States of America or just America for short."

"The United States of America. I'm from a country called Tirion? I'm from a country called Valinor?"

"My understanding has been that Tirion is a city and Valinor a continent; I'm not actually clear if you have something quite analogous to countries as they exist on Earth. A country is the sort of thing one would be a princess of but in your case it seems to apply to a group of people and not a geographical unit."

"The Noldor is a group of people? Valinor is a geographical unit? Tirion is a city, Alqualondë is a city, Formenos is a city, my people is speaking English."

Isabella smiles and corrects conjugations. Continents are indeed a kind of geographical unit.

And soon enough she has the vocabulary to declare "my family is speaking English at dinner, no Quenya," at which her family giggles resignedly and go fetch platters of food. 

The two toddlers balancing on one of their sisters' laps request clarification about whether they're allowed to speak Quenya and are told that they are part of the family, aren't they.

...Isabella supplies dinner-relevant vocabulary and generally talks a lot so everyone else can talk too.

They are not deterred from talking by having vanishingly little vocabulary, but they mostly want to hear Isabella. What are humans like? What is Earth like? What are mages and psions? What are the most interesting open problems on Earth?

Humans are surprisingly similar to Elves in many ways but much faster-growing and shorter lived and less sing-y. Earth is high-tech and has things like phones and planes and computers. Mages and psions are this and that. Earth has all kinds of scarcity and tension and cutting-edge technical problems going on. Aside to Maitimë - I feel like explaining role might be awkward the same way explaining gender to a species of sexless aliens would be, advice?

Yeah, probably don't. My mother would have infinite questions about edge cases and she can ask them not in front of all her children.

I'll save it, then. Thank goodness English pronouns are gendered and not roled, there's languages that don't work that way...

She giggles into her garlic bread. My mother will doubtless go and learn them all. What pronoun do those languages use for children?

Ambiguous or neutral ones or neologisms that also apply to switches. Except there's one language family where boys get dom pronouns and girls get sub pronouns and they can change if needed. Mmmmmm garlic bread did she mention that Earth magic is hungry work.

Valinor is not short on food! The conversation, crippled only slightly by the fact most of the conversants hadn't heard of English an hour ago, turns to how to make human money so they can fix Earth things.

Preliminary evidence suggests that if they work well enough with Earth-style marketing they can have lucrative musical careers. Exporting local magic items like this grace ring that Maitimë got Isabella would also be a big hit, since mages and psions can't do persistently magical stuff of any kind.

"I want an Earth musical career!"

"And I want money so I think you should."

"Magic items are slow to make, unless there's some new breakthrough in thing-making -"

"What's the bottleneck?"

"Instructions for magic are very long - books of long - and you have to write them all into the metal with osanwë - that counts as English now, loanword - in sections because if you do one wrong you have to start the section over."