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With Apologies to Douglas Adams
The problem of adequate communication between cultures has always bedevilled humanity. It became a thousand times worse once it became necessary to communicate with non-humans, the hydrogen-breathing species and outlier races like the Warlocks or Kneptish.
Early, pre-Conclave, solutions required a sorcerer to cast the appropriate translation matrices. This rapidly proved unworkable since the population of sorcerers has never been very large and each translation matrix only works with a specific pair of languages. Some time later magitechnicians created translator nodes, which were simply worn by those who wished to converse, but were still faced with the problem of the near exponential growth of the number of translation matrices required as the Conclave expanded.
It took just a single mind to formulate the solution to this problem. It took many years of further study to implement her solution, but the pressing nature of the problem (the number of translation matrices necessary for Conclave functions had passed a hundred thousand) meant that the effort was made.
The solution she suggested was simple - rather than translate directly between languages and deal with the ballooning number of matrices this required, why not translate to and from some intermediary language that was specifically designed for that purpose. The creation of this language was anything but simple. It had to be able to accurately and unambiguously convey cultural context & emotional concepts, nuance & slang, to such an extent that when translated to another language the recipient would understand both what the speaker had said but how they had said it. The final language would, the research team soon realised, have to be so rich and so complex that it would be almost impossible to learn, instead its direct application would be limited to Watchers and other such systems.
The completion of this intermediate language was hailed as the most important breakthrough in the history of communications. By general acclimation the junior researcher who proposed it, now a respected professor and contributor to the language, was immortalised by having this language named after her.
Her name was Bathel Bellutisi.
The language is called Babel.
