"I would very much enjoy the look on Bastien's face the first time I'm able to respond to him in Orlesian..." Her own accent, at least so far as single words and phrases are concerned, is passable only when she's not trying. "But I wouldn't want to take up all your time."
"Well, if there's no particular time constraint, I could always slowly work it into the existing curriculum," he says, thoughtful. "The two languages use the same alphabet for the most part, so it isn't as if you'd be starting from scratch. Though the tricky part about Orlesian if you want to speak it is that a lot of the letters are evidently decorative, since they indicate nothing about pronunciation."
Spoken like a man who learned how to read Orlesian years before he heard anyone speak it, and was very confused when he finally did.
He gets up and looks to find a book in Orlesian to illustrate. "Alright, so you know in Trade, most of the time the letters in a word indicate the sounds, either on their own or with their neighbors. Ah." He comes and opens the book to a random page.
"In Orelsian, as I understand it, a lot of them indicate things about where the word came from, but you don't actually pronounce all of them. For example, this word, all of the last four letters are silent. I suspect it's why Orlesians with a thick accent swallow the ends of words in Trade."
"Very Orlesian of them. What if we just learn the words and not the spelling?" Not a serious question. Her tone might've been flat but her expression gives that away.
"I'm not entirely certain how that would work with reading," he says with a laugh, "though if you want to give it a try, I'll gamely keep you company through the attempt."
"Nah, learning the normal way is fine," she says, and plucks a book off the shelf.
"In the meantime, maybe I'll read this." She holds the book aloft so they can both read the title: Love in the Time of Darkspawn. "Think it'll be any good?"
"Almost certainly not, but possibly entertaining. Though," he adds, "if it seems likely the love is with a Darkspawn, rather than just against the backdrop of them, I advise you to abandon the book immediately."
She snorts and flips through the pages for no real reason other than fidgeting. "I was thinking maybe it was about being in love and fighting the darkspawn, but I'll keep that in mind."
Returning to the table, Athessa collects her things, scraping loose papers into a pile. "Anything I should have ready for next time? Besides the usual, 'course."
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Spoken like a man who learned how to read Orlesian years before he heard anyone speak it, and was very confused when he finally did.
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"In Orelsian, as I understand it, a lot of them indicate things about where the word came from, but you don't actually pronounce all of them. For example, this word, all of the last four letters are silent. I suspect it's why Orlesians with a thick accent swallow the ends of words in Trade."
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Athessa stares at the word, sounding it out phonetically first, and then dropping the last four letters and reading it again that way.
"Are they doing that on purpose?"
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"In the meantime, maybe I'll read this." She holds the book aloft so they can both read the title: Love in the Time of Darkspawn. "Think it'll be any good?"
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Returning to the table, Athessa collects her things, scraping loose papers into a pile. "Anything I should have ready for next time? Besides the usual, 'course."