Eira tilted her head, considering how much of a lesson he actually wanted. Decided, since he had asked, to give him the entire bowl — and perhaps the spoon as well.
"The Original Tongue is what existence itself was speaking before anything else had been invented," she said. "Before the current cosmic beings chopped reality up into their little regional dialects. Before gods had names or even stumble upon the concepts of writing, names and reading and decided to monopolise it for their own amusement.
"At the beginning — which, to be clear, Master, is a very long time ago, I mean beginning-beginning — there was only the one language, and that language was real in a way your modern tongues are not. To speak it was to shape. To name a thing in the Original Tongue was to define the thing. To write a word of it onto the surface of an object was to tell the object what it now was."
"So — creationby speech."
