Isabella Mariel Swan ∀ &quot;Glass&quot;

"Uh. Hm. Say some of the words?" Glass asks.

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"Witch, witch," says Juliet, switching between languages, "wizard, wizard, sorceress, sorceress."

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"And you only just noticed this because the local language has words for those things and isn't English. Hmmmmm." Glass nibbles her lip, closes her eyes. "Witch, witch, witch - There might be a - no, I can't really make sense of it. I'm still figuring out how I work now."

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Sherlock kisses her anyway.

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Kissees!

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"What were you going to say? I promise not to take it as an irrefutable fact of the multiverse."

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"I was going to say, meta-language," says Glass, "but I have no idea what that would mean."

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"Can it not just be essentially a coincidence, deriving from the fact that the kinds of magic user in question don't have direct counterparts in the various worlds but the magic chose to translate the terms anyway?"

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"Nnnno, I think it's not that - not on the level I'm seeing through aura, anyway, that might be what we'd find on a causal level. There's some sort of reason wizards get the same terminology as Cam and witches the same as Amariah or Golden."

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"There's witches on my world too," Juliet adds. "Just, I'm not one."

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Glass nods. "And it wouldn't be just as good to call them sorcerers-in-my-language, and when you pentagon the language you know that, and Milliways knows that."

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"Do we trust their judgment?" wonders Steel.

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"I'm not at all sure. It doesn't seem to be making any egregious mistakes?" offers Glass. "...I think there's a reason we have all-male wizards and Amariah has all-female witches, I think we'd never find the reverse case but I don't know why."

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"Interesting again."

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"Those words in English do have some gendered connotations, in those directions," muses Juliet. "I think in my world it's technically gender-neutral, anyone can learn the magic, but women are somewhat more likely to use the word 'witch' - I don't know for sure, I haven't met many of these people in person and my written sources are not overwhelmingly reliable."

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"There isn't another word for the phenomenon in English on Aurum, and among people who are clued in to it being a general phenomenon - which is most people without their heads in the sand, at this point - it's gender-neutral, but historically media of various sorts which has fictitious varieties of magic-user gender-biases the words like that."

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"English, or some distilled meta-version of it, could easily be the metalanguage I'm hypothesizing," says Glass.

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"How many languages are spoken among the peal?"

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"We usually speak English when we're just talking to each other. We've picked up different sets for use at home," says Golden. "I know all languages on my Earth with a non-negligible speaking population."

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"I speak a bunch of demonic languages," says Juliet. "Not so much human ones, I'm starting with tidying up the underworld before I address the more run-of-the-mill problems with Sunshine."

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"Sarion speaks an Elvish language and a Thilanushinyel common tongue, Amariah picked up a witch language that she didn't originally speak fluently but added once she had access to coins, Aegis speaks recognizable English and a slightly less recognizable form called 'Stark' that was centrally standardized in Peace's history, Shell Bell has an accent and different idioms here and there but speaks intelligible English to us standard-Earthlings, Rose speaks something mutually intelligible with but not identical to Earth French and many of the other languages on her world have similar parallels including one that's close to English, Cam has his magic language which it turns out we can't use for magical purposes probably because we acquired it as adults, and Angela speaks Samarian and when she got coins she added Edori."

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"So English is by far the commonest native language among Bells," Sherlock concludes. "Cause or effect, I wonder?"

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"I think it's a consequence of us generally coming from Earths," says Juliet. "And generally being born in the United States when we do. I'm not sure why Rose came from Sorta France instead of Sorta England; maybe since Sorta England never colonized Sorta America in Rêverie there was no pull to the language above and beyond the pull to the country."

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