"Nothing that has entered the Glass shall leave it; nothing that has spoken shall be silenced but by its own end." – the Charter of Keeping, first article
FIELD REPORT – Bureau of Impossible Geography SURVEYOR: Ottoline Marsh REPORT 3 OF 14 SUBJECT: How a language lives here, and how it ends The Glass is governed by a document of eleven articles called the Charter of Keeping, written on vellum and kept in a case in the Archive of Silence, where nobody reads it, because everybody knows it by heart. Its first article forbids anything that has entered the Glass to leave it. Its second forbids anyone but the Head Gardener to cut a living stem. Its fourth gives every bloom a listener at dusk. Its seventh governs grafting, and is the longest and most disputed sentence in Glossolaria. A language in the Glass lives the way a plant lives, and it ends the way a plant ends. Most of the beds are healthy. Their blooms open every evening and speak, and a listener writes the sentence down. Some flourish beyond reason: there is a bed of Old Prussian in the west aisle that has spread across three neighbouring plots and must be cut back by the Head Gard...
From the lore of The Architecture of Babel.