“Language changes as it ages, becoming unrecognisable to itself in just ten generations. Our library is old. Not old like cities and civilisations but old like this mountain. Vanishingly few of its works have been written in living memory. Expect to wrestle with change. The books before you are fossils. Relics of an earlier age that have survived against all odds and in the face of common sense itself. “And like the branches of a tree, language forks and forks again until the common root is barely a whisper. Those branches spread and touch distant lands where strange tongues reshape both words
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