"I wouldn't tell people I knew you, then."

"...I don't mean I care whether people are offended at me, I mean I care whether people are offended."

"Why?"

Is he always like that.

Yeah, just keep explaining.

"They'd be offended because it matters to them, and it's not nice to decide that other things ought to matter to them instead and they should only get those things."

"If keeping languages secret matters to people then I guess I won't go yelling the language in their faces but I really don't think that's a good enough reason not to learn it. It matters to my parents that I be happy and small in Valinor and do what I'm told but it mattering to them doesn't make me bad for not doing it, even if it matters a lot, even if it matters more than anything."

"You belong to yourself. The language belongs to the oracles and they use it to tell who's supposed to be oracle after them."

"Languages don't belong to anyone and I still don't see how it'd be worse at doing that if I learned it."

"If you don't think languages can belong to someone you might teach people and then lots of people would know it and they couldn't use knowing it as an indicator. Why couldn't it belong to them?"

"- the point of things belonging to people is that they should be able to trust that if they put lots of work into something it will be where they left it. If not for that we wouldn't have property at all. I do not see how that applies to languages."

"...that's not exactly why we have property on Samaria. People own lots of things they didn't work on."

"If they traded them for things they worked on that makes sense as an extension."

"The language is a gift," tries Isabella. "Jovah gives it to people who are supposed to be oracles."

"How does Jovah give it to them?"

"The way Peninnah explained it she had some odd dreams and afterwards she could read over the previous oracle's shoulder."

"If someone wrote a song for someone else and they wanted it to just be for the two of them and not let anyone else hear it, that would be fair, but if someone else happened to be a mile away and heard them composing the song, that person wouldn't be doing anything wrong either."

"...You can hear that far? Anyway, you weren't planning anything nearly that innocent."

"I just want to see how much I pick up from being around the oracle."

"They don't speak it, they just write it to Jovah."

"It would be wrong to read peoples' private notes. I wouldn't do that."

"Okay, good."

"But if I do find people speaking the language elsewhere or a textbook or something I'm gonna learn it."

Sigh. "Maybe you can start with Edori and Jansai."

"Cool! Where do I go to learn those?"