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Katalina nodded, interested. "There are some words that aren't like that?" she asked curiously when Joshua said 'most'. She would have thought that all words would be like that, just to be simpler. Perhaps there was more to this than she had thought. Uh oh.

She brightened up, too, when Joshua mentioned her name. "Yes," she said. "I want to see yours, too." Then she frowned. "But mine has one of the funny letters, doesn't it?" By 'the funny letters', she meant the ones that sounded alike. The ones she was thinking of were C and K, so in a way, she was right. Joshua would just have to choose one.

But yes, she wanted to see it written. It might be interesting to see if she could learn to write it herself, too.

Katalina frowned. "Well, that doesn't seem to make much sense," she said. "Our way is much simpler, I think." Just don't write at all, she thought. Yes, simpler, but who knew how much had been forgotten over the years?

She looked at the two versions of her name and pointed at the K version. "I like that one," she said. She examined it for a minute or two, then asked, "Can I try?"

Katalina grinned a little. "I guess that's why we don't write," she said. "We have nothing to write on."

Very carefully, she began to copy the letters of the version she'd liked. It was difficult, she realized in some surprise. The muscles in her arms and hands had never been trained to do things like this - hold a pencil, shape letters. It was hard to manage.

After a few minutes of painstaking work, she handed the notebook back to him. "It's not very good," she mumbled, looking embarrassed.

It wasn't. The printing was the large, careful, awkward print of a child. The last a was backwards and the letters weren't very well-formed. But she certainly had the idea.

But she had tried - not only her name, but Joshua's. Oddly, she'd done his better than she'd done hers.

Katalina smiled, delighted by his praise. "Really?" she asked. She looked over his shoulder to see the book again. "Yours looks much nicer," she said critically, apparently not as pleased with her own effort as she perhaps should have been. "I think I did the little round one backwards." She meant the 'a'.

She flexed her fingers a little, looking down at them in some mild surprise. "It feels funny," she said at last. "Does it always feel so weird?"

"If you say so," replied Katalina calmly, frowning a little as she curled and uncurled her fingers in an attempt to get them to stop buzzing. "But what can I practice on? Paper doesn't go in water, like you said, and there's nothing much I can write on underwater."

Then she shrugged and smiled a little. "But in the meantime, as long as we're here...are there any other words I can practice, or do you want me to try and teach you some things?"

Katalina smiled. "Well, as you know, we don't write," she said. "So I can't teach you that. I guess we can start with some of the more basic sounds - a lot of sounds have one specific meaning, and if you pronounce it wrong, you're saying something else entirely. So you have to be careful. I won't start with those ones."

She sat back and made a few sounds in her own tongue. Then she said, "Those are basic conjuction words - and, but, so. Things like that. Repeat them for me." She grinned.

Katalina was giggling. "You just called me something unrepeatable," she replied. "But that's okay. We'll work on it." She found it immensely entertaining that he'd managed to make curse words out of the conjunctions. Especially since they were nothing alike.

But as she'd said, they'd work on it. He would get better at it, as she supposed she would at the writing.

"It's okay," Katalina said. She felt a little sorry that she'd laughed, although it had been amusing. He hadn't laughed at her when she'd been making mistakes. "Of course," she replied when he asked if she could repeat them.

She made the sounds again, slowly, dragging them out a little so that he could get a better idea of the sound itself. When she stopped, she smiled at him a little sheepishly. "I'm not very good at this whole teaching thing, I'm afraid," she said.