"Are all actions divided into 'not a strike against someone's personhood' and 'definitive proof of nonpersonhood', or is there a gray area?"

"You could demonstrate cowardice and be believed to not have much worth and then later demonstrate courage and it'd be fine. Not every person is equally good and not every bad act is irredeemable - that's not identical to the question of how bad an act is, perfidy's not as immediately bad as other things that get treated similarly but it's impossible to know someone has redeemed themself because it's about deception."

"Huh. Do any of your intuitions about how to apply this word change when truth magic is available?"

"...Yeah, I don't immediately see how you'd redeem yourself after committing perfidy but with truth magic I'm less sure it's definitely impossible. - Actually, resurrection changes more, the last thing you can do if there's no hope of redemption is kill yourself - I don't know what that'll mean going forward."

"Does personhood rely on it being socially understood that one is a person, so that there couldn't be such a thing as a secret person who redeemed themself without anyone knowing about it?"

There is a brief pause for extremely loud internal screaming.

"...Now that you say it in so many words, I'm not confident which way most people would answer if you polled everyone in Sesat, but I've always assumed that was a thing that was possible at least in theory. It's not - it's not the same kind of nonsense as 'my globe is pointy', it's nonsense like 'my apple is blue.'"

"Huh, what a good analogy, thank you!" says the linguist, merrily oblivious to the internal screaming. "Okay. So Quenya 'person' got translated as Sesati 'person', but the first one means something like - let's try this on - 'sophont', how does that sound to you?"

"An... entity that knows things?"

"An intelligent being, a sapient."

"I... guess? Is that supposed to include children?"

"Depends if you're talking about a species of sophonts or a sophontic individual!"

"That is also going to be confusing but I think - I haven't heard it used like that before, it sounds like a new coinage, so at least it doesn't sound like it definitely means something else."

"If you don't already have a word for a concept then adjusting Allspeak to render it anyway will tend to do that, yes. For the Sesati 'person' maybe we want it to translate into other languages as something like - hm, in Classical Chinese junzi?"

"That one's currently translating as a way I'd address someone who was important for reasons that didn't relate to the military."

"Does Sesati 'person' have any synonyms?"

"...In Sesati? Not exact ones, I might say 'men and gods' if I didn't know any better but 'men and gods and a thousand other things not listed' isn't as catchy. I want to say maybe," an honorific that doesn't quite have an English equivalent but is similar to san, "is close - it's a way to refer to your equals politely when your equals don't merit other titles, so - mostly people like me wouldn't use it in the absence of a philosophical commitment to the idea of treating everyone as an equal and it'd be insulting to replace some other honorific with it but it might work? Or - honestly, if I were a diplomat from Vanda Nossëo, I might want to say whatever would translate as 'good person', it's not actually the same but it's not concrete enough to point to a specific way it's definitely wrong."

"Hmm, I hate it when I can't just find something linguistically inarguable they won't get politics into... how do you feel about, taking a different tack here, constituent - it gets used in democracies most, but etymologically it's not wedded to that -"

"What exactly are they constituting, a society? I - honestly don't think you can reasonably claim it's the people that constitute a society. Maybe especially not Sesat."

"Huh that's a rabbithole out of scope of this meeting but certainly very interesting... Okay, the graceless option is to just force 'person' and 'person' to go through as loanwords, how does this look if you turn your Allspeak off for a second -" He writes That individual is a námo in the eyes of Vanda Nossëo even though they are not a person in the eyes of Sesat.

"Huh. It's not quite - a way you're allowed to make words be in Sesati? But I think it's fine."

"Okay. If I don't think of anything brilliant and perfect, forcing 'námo' it is. If I get a million envoys wailing at me about use cases can I have you back in to hash those out, they're going to be all 'but what about námor who are slaves in other places for unrelated reasons' and 'but I don't want to disparage the character of námor who were born into slavery', they're so picky -"

"I don't mind but - I mean, they might actually mean 'people' sometimes, it's obviously not what they mean if they're saying 'it doesn't matter if they have honor' but if they're taking offense at someone's character being disparaged then maybe they want to say 'person' about that, uh, námo, on purpose instead of by accident. Also I'm not totally confident about whether 'slave' is translating right given how badly the entire surrounding context has been translated - it's not just the word 'person' although I think there's probably no seamless way to handle the pronouns, that seems ideologically motivated even if it's not conscious enough to be intentional."

"Oh boy. The word I'm hearing when you say 'slave' means a námo who is not meaningfully free to stop providing services to their employer, especially if it's because they are owned by another námo or organization thereof."

Sigh. "...So do you maybe want to hire someone to teach you Sesati, because that's completely wrong, that's unfree labor - does that translate the same way to you - slaves are bought and sold, slaves are livestock but now I'm not confident livestock is going to translate right. I mean - people in Sesat will mostly tell you that slaves are livestock, I don't want to vouch for the claim, personally. Serfs are, uh, inarguably people. Subject to the same caveats as anyone else about secret evil schemes."

"I'd love to hire someone to teach us Sesati but it seems to me like the word for 'slave' I'm using just in fact also applies to Sesati serfs. We can distinguish 'chattel slave' and 'serf' going forward if that helps."