Corpora
It had become necessary to modify the language during suspension. If the corpus remained entirely inert during the long periods of hibernation it became deformed. Not quite mutations, the tiny, almost imperceptible changes affected its use in speech, creating tiny delays in the elaboration of phrases. The delays gradually became more marked until they interfered with communication, becoming confused with the complex interactions of the habitants’ spoken codes.
As a result, the habitants revived to find their language changed since their last period of consciousness. This, more than the changes in their environment, disconcerted them the most, leading to a subtle, insidious form of alienation. Each revival thus heralded a phase of intensive language-learning, aided by the corpus, but ever more reluctantly entered into. As well as the psychological effects, the habitants became increasingly enamoured of archaic forms, as though in protest at the re-education process. Many refused to speak in anything but the archaic tongue, obstinately preserved in local memory and resolutely cordoned off from the larger corpus. This obstinacy, in turn, led to ever-longer sentences and a tortured syntax which would tax even the habitants’ legendary cognitive powers. In time, no sentence could be accommodated within the habitants’ periods of consciousness which, with the ever-greater cognitive load, gradually became shorter.
There were two consequences. The habitants became, as it were, crazed with language, inserting subordinate clauses of breathtaking complexity into every sentence; and the corpus became corrupted. Because the enormous computations could not be accommodated locally, they made periodic incursions into the corpus, subtly modifying its terms. As a result, the habitants were wiped out and the corpus which should have preserved their memory instead denied the very fact of their existence. But, I say, forget them. They are not important now.