Mortal and Promise in fairyland
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"Okay. You may write test orders for me."

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He writes the little star that's supposed to mean 'unfold your wings' on a piece of paper in front of her.

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No dice.

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"Was a long shot," he sighs. "If I were to try to extrapolate from this, I'd expect it has something to do with the number or proportion of people who actually used and understood the language at some point in history."

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"That seems like a weird thing for it to hinge on."

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"Well, it hinges on something... I wonder if simple ciphers work. Actually I wonder if dead languages do work, even. And if I have to even know what I'm saying."

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"No idea."

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"Hmmm... I'm gonna ask my employee to find the words 'wave' and 'hand' in Japanese and send them to me without telling me which is which then see if I can use one of them to order you." He emails something to that effect. And then he grabs two different ciphers. "I have an idea about a possible way to test the thing about number of users."

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"Oh?"

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"A few ideas, actually. One is conlangs—that's invented languages -, the other is languages spoken by only a handful of people alive, and the other is using common and uncommon ciphers. More specifically, there is for example this one cipher invented for a game a few years ago and some people sort of speak it, but not, like, a countryful of them, and it's technically just English with the letters changed around. And then there's a cipher I can make up right now, which will still be just English with the letters changed around but in a way no one uses."

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"Okay. ...I'm not totally clear on what letters are but okay."

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"...oh, erm. Mortals need to encode their speech because of lack of magic and we encode it in stable sounds and there are minimal bits of those sounds that get combined in different ways to form words. It's actually a bit more complicated than that because sometimes a single letter can represent more than one sound at the same time and even sometimes different sounds in different places, and it's pretty fascinating and I could tell you a lot about it if you want, but the only relevant part in all of that is that if plain speak works with the cipher lots of people know and not with the cipher no one does then that's pretty conclusive evidence about at least some parts of what it cares about when it comes to communicating with humans."

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"Okay."

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"Anyway! I got two words, one for 'hand' and one for 'wave' and I don't know which is which, can I try using one and the other? This one has the most practical relevance, I think."

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"You may do that."

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The first word he says in Japanese turns out to be 'wave.'

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She waves.

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"Okay, this is good, means it doesn't rely on my understanding of the words, or at least not exclusively, there might be languages and alphabets where writing these orders out is faster than sign language. Probably not faster than stamping, though, so if that works then best possible thing." Beat. "I'd still want to figure these things out for the sake of science, though..."

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"What does science need with the information?"

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"I was using 'science' here as a shorthand for 'the drive to figure out how things work and why.'"

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"Oh."

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"Okay, so, ciphers. This one was used by the game and bunches of people know it—it's called Al Bhed, if you're curious. Fyja," he tries to order her to wave, pronouncing it 'feae-jaeah' according to the guide he found online.

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She does not wave.

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"Okay, cipher doesn't work, now..." He emails an employee and gets the word 'wave' in a conlang, a nearly extinct language, and Latin. He tries the conlang first.

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Esperanto works.

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