The eighth floor was given over to four researchers on experimental linguistics. They sat at a table and made up new words all the time, new syntactic constructions, new inflexions, whole new languages were born, bandied, died, above their coldening meat dishes. Languages that followed predicate logic and were incapable of telling falsehoods grammatically, that had no adjectives, that were only actions and manners, hyperpolysynthetic languages one word of which sufficed for a chapter in a book of others, languages of tone, languages of vocal quality, sign languages, tap languages, a grammar of eructation.
In the old days the previous king’s reign they had the license to conduct the forbidden experiment, to toy with young orphans, to bring up children without any words to describe colors except “clear” and “dusk.” The humanitarian impulse of the current monarch discouraged that, despite the four researchers’ tremendous findings.
The ninth floor was split into three ateliers. An experimental typographer occupied the first. Its only window spit out a view on a technical courtyard which the man loved: in its twistings of pipes and piled litter of electrical boxes, pumps, stained steaming chimneys he found gobs of letterforms.
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