One Curious Kobold

[lurkingkobold]

It's winter, and all is well with the tribe. Their new magic, an ability to make portals from one place to another, which was found by one of their members during the early-summer trip to meet with the other tribes in the area, let them both build up a decadent food stockpile and move to a much deeper part of the cave system without the worry of being unable to find their way back out. No-one has had to go hungry, and even the fiercest ice storm doesn't reach them; they are as content as kobolds can be.

Well, aside from their new mage, that is. She's bored, and curious. Making portals to known places is straightforward enough, with the magic she found, but that's far from the limit of what it can do... so one day, she slips away, portals off to a different cave system - one can't be too careful, after all - and experiments.

Temperature roughly the same... gravity roughly the same... air the same, not into stone or underwater or in a volcano or on top of a mountain... but, instead of patterning it after a place she knows, what happens if she only specifies those things, and lets the innate patterns of the spot she's casting on do the rest? Particularly this one part, which seems to specify the world...

She finishes the spell, and hesitates for just a moment before activating it.

Comments

[calescent]

Some of these are repeats, but Kiri writes down the new ones, and translates them, and repeats the translations of the old ones in case they've been forgotten.

[lurkingkobold]

That was bound to happen sooner or later; the kobold doesn't have a list to refer to, after all.

She does seem calmer, now. What's next?

[calescent]

Kiri identifies what she's been doing as writing. One writes so that one can read. Would the kobold like to learn to read?

[lurkingkobold]

...um?

The kobold was assuming that Kiri's writing was similar to the kind of mnemonic device she sometimes constructs out of twine or rocks, where each knot or stone is a reminder of a particular idea, and the arrangement of them suggests connections between the ideas, but it's up to the user to know which things represent what; it's not really teachable like Kiri is suggesting.

[calescent]

"Welchin words are written," Kiri assures her. "Watch -" She writes down this is writing, shows it to the kobold, points at each word, says what they represent, then hands the paper through the little window to Aleko. "Hey, Aleko, read that aloud?"

[liakoura]

"This is writing?" says Aleko. "No kidding, what else would it be, origami?"

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold is very impressed.

[calescent]

Yay!

"So, kobold want learn read?"

[lurkingkobold]

Yes.

[calescent]

Awesome.

So, Welchin has an alphabet, which are these symbols, and each one makes a sound - Kiri writes out all the symbols in order for the kobold and she can have her own copy, and then she says the sounds that each one might be found making in a typical word.

And "fire" is actually a nice simple word in Welchin. Here it is in letters, all of which make quite predictable sounds: would the kobold like to sound it out?

[lurkingkobold]

She would! And successfully, at that.

[calescent]

And here's a few more to try - Kiri skips around the vocab list, making sure she doesn't throw in any silent letters or digraphs just yet. "Water" is simple, "what", "sky", "walk".

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold is a fairly quick study, at least at this level of complexity.

After a few words, she gets a little ambitious, and tries to construct 'kobold' out of the letters.

[calescent]

Since Kiri had to make up a spelling in the first place, it's pretty intuitively put together in her notes - just like that, in fact. She points it out.

[lurkingkobold]

What a pleased kobold this is.

[calescent]

So cute!

All right, here's some more complicated stuff - these two letters together make this other sound. Sometimes. Kiri gives the kobold an apologetic look about the sometimesness.

[lurkingkobold]

Well, so long as the times are only when there is a word with this other sound and isn't a word with the two obvious sounds, that shouldn't be too bad. Probably. Hopefully?

[calescent]

At least within the scope of this vocabulary they're working with, that is the case! My, what a good memory the kobold has.

Here are three more digraphs, and words which contain them.

[lurkingkobold]

That's probably going to take some practice to keep straight, but she's got the basic idea, and draws some little pictograms on the notes to help her work it out again later if she needs to.

[calescent]

And here are some sentences, all written out - Kiri's already been forgetting not to conjugate things kind of a lot, but all written out it's obvious that the various forms of verbs are the same. Except for 'to be', that one's all over the place - Kiri makes a chart of it for the kobold.

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold had noticed the verb forms, actually, but seeing them written out does help. (The sentences are regular enough that she can also think of the collection as something like one of her mnemonic lists, which makes it quite a bit easier.)

'To be' is weird, but it's the words that are irregular, not the spellings, so she shouldn't have too much trouble picking it up if she's dealing with the language enough for it to matter. (Which... she could, huh. She could bring some books home, and be able to read them whenever she wants, rather than having to come back and listen to Kiri to keep her hand in. Amazing.)

[calescent]

Kiri has a book in her bag; she gets it out. "Book," she supplies. "I found you in my library; a library is where people put books."

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold nods and mimics these words; she obviously doesn't know their equivalents, if there even are words for those things in animalperson.

[calescent]

Kiri adds the words to her list, and shows the kobold how they're spelled. "You learn fast," she remarks. ...She doesn't have "fast". Well, it's easily gestured. "Fast," she says, moving a hand left to right rapidly, "slow," it slows to a crawl.

[lurkingkobold]

Aww. She does, she knows, but it's nice to have that recognized.

Here's those words. (Her translation of 'fast' is closer in meaning to 'quick', but, good enough.)