"In most contexts in Seris, 'jie' means to draw on, make use of, or borrow and lend. Its simplest literal meaning is to let someone else use your property temporarily, to be returned later...
Perhaps we could use that to demand that the contract be forcibly annulled on the grounds of a material misunderstanding!"
"We know what 'jie' means, but what does that have to do with a material misunderstanding?" Froya asked, puzzled.
"Uh... Seris grammar is very flexible!
Take a spell duel between the two of us, for example...
'Roland dealt Skord a crushing defeat' means Roland won.
'Roland scored a resounding victory over Skord' still means Roland won.
'Jie' works the same way. On its own, the word isn't actually precise.
Because Skord's wording was imprecise, this Pact contains a textual ambiguity."
Although none of the others present specialized in Linguistics as Roland did, they still had to study it as a foundational subject. They immediately understood that this was a question of word order, subjects, and objects.
Seris and the Atrelin Language had very different grammatical conventions. The Atrelin Language alone had nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, instrumental, locative, and vocative cases.
But the underlying principles were the same.
Sometimes, a word could not convey its meaning precisely, and had to be interpreted in context.
"You mean I didn't borrow gold coins from that Lizh Demon, but lent gold coins to him instead?"
When Skord heard that, he nearly jumped with excitement.
"That actually works?" Froya was dumbfounded. "But will playing word games like this really help?"
"That's fine. What we need right now is a pretext.
Don't underestimate words. Language and writing are the true magic of this world, capable of harnessing the power of the mind.
Because what they concern is 'cognition'!
Only through 'cognition'