"The non-place is the opposite of utopia: it exists, and it does not contain any organic society." - Marc Augé, Non-Places
The Etymologist's Spire maintains strict quarantine protocols for each linguistic specimen. Dr. Marcus Thornweaver's latest directive mandates triple-layered semantic containment for all Indo-European hybrids after last month's cross-pollination event resulted in a strain of proto-Hindi inexplicably incorporating French future-conditional tenses. In the Morphological Markets, merchants trade in linguistic specimens according to strictly enforced taxonomies. The stalls arrange themselves in a spiraling pattern corresponding to historical language families, though recent [DEGRADED: phonetic drift] has caused several classifications to blur. Last week, a booth selling Aramaic root-systems was found to have migrated into the Uralic section, its proprietor insisting the geography had shifted around him. The Archive of Silence presents a particular cataloguing challenge, as failed specimens tend to [CONSUMED] their own documentation. Beatrice Wordsworth Chen has developed a novel preservat...
From the lore of The Architecture of Babel.