Three Tales and a Memo

The Witch enters a neighborhood like a rumor of ill-intent. She attacks not the bricks nor the bond between the bricks nor the people but the bond between the people: she teaches a secret language of her own (one they say so secret she chooses it anew for each new place) and in that new language they think and say what can't be thought or said in the words of those around them. And so they become their own country among themselves. Thus is poison spread.

***

Given sufficiently sophisticated mathematical linguistics a language is as self-contained as a phrase or a word, yet its influence on mental frameworks is pervasive and persistent. The engineering and bottom-up teaching of bespoke languages is therefore plausible as an efficient vector for self-sustainable social change. Plausibility turns to self-evident possibility by these words.

***

Possessed, the Prophet walks among cities. She carries languages like heavy loads: we take them to help her but more languages grow inside her every day, and she must walk to another city to shed another tongue before the cacophony consumes her. She pays with this curse her attempt to learn the secret  of language-making, which she learned well enough to know it's something that, learned, cannot be refrained from. We help her because she did this to give us freedom, and because in the moment between our learning of her language and her forgetting of it for a new one she is, for the span of a phrase, not alone.

***

Jamie,

These are the English translations of the basic tale in Conlangs 3, 19, and 22, as recorded in Barra Mansa, Ordos, and Taormina. The accuracy of these translations has been validated by software analysis, despite the text of all three in their original languages being exactly the same (and the same, as far as we can tell, of the partial recordings we have from the other sites).  Your request for global surveillance coordination to find the individual alluded to in those tales is approved, but I can only make it our second highest-priority search.

The best linguist in the team working on the incidents disappeared a few days ago. With any luck he was kidnapped or killed, but what if he's out there teaching new languages? What if it's contagious?

Worried,

Rob