"A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." – a saying popularised by Max Weinreich, 1945; Oleander Frost adds: "and a seed is a language with a coat."
FIELD REPORT – Bureau of Impossible Geography SURVEYOR: Ottoline Marsh REPORT 10 OF 14 SUBJECT: Seed running CLASSIFICATION: Restricted to the Desk The first article of the Charter forbids anything that has entered the Glass to leave it. Oleander Frost has broken it nineteen times. I did not discover this. Oleander told me, on a bench on the Wardian Wharf at night, because, they said, the Bureau would find out in the end and they preferred to be the one who said it. They opened the long coat. Sewn inside it, in rows, were small glass phials, each stoppered with wax, each holding a cutting no longer than a finger. A seed runner takes a cutting from a bed at night, which is a crime against the second article as well as the first, and carries it out of Glossolaria to somewhere in the world where there is a mouth willing to learn the language. A schoolteacher in Cornwall. A grandson in Oklahoma. A choir on the Isle of Man. The cutting is planted there, in a pot on a windowsill, and the ...
From the lore of The Architecture of Babel.