The corpus changes languages for different reasons
Latin maxims, Greek terms, Spanish place and character language, French titles, German theory vocabulary, Japanese names, Russian words, Hangul, Sanskrit-derived religious language and other foreign material recur too often to remain scattered across reference pages. But “multilingualism” is not one technique here.
Seven recurring uses
- semantic precision — a borrowed term does a job English is not doing cleanly;
- sound — the mouth likes the word before the taxonomy does;
- visual form — scripts and diacritics alter the page as image;
- world signal — names and phrases locate a scene socially or geographically;
- corruption — translation, memory or spelling damages the inherited object productively;
- quotation / lineage — a phrase keeps its source attached;
- joke / false prestige — high-minded or foreign language can be punctured by the surrounding register.
Translation is not guaranteed fidelity
The corpus is comfortable with approximation, misquotation, sound substitution and hybrid language. That makes it important not to silently “correct” a strange phrase in the encyclopedia before checking whether the wrongness is itself the event.
Corpus footprint
A broad discovery scan finds language/translation or named-language vocabulary in 127 of 212 archived publications. Dense nodes include 𝐴 𝐇𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝑜𝑓 𝐒𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐦 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝐅𝐨𝐠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝐃𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐦𝐬, 𝐒𝐏𝐀𝐂𝐄 𝐅𝐋𝐘𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐓𝐈𝐆𝐄𝐑 █ ００１: 𝐕𝐄𝐍𝐆𝐀𝐍𝐙𝐀 𝐂𝐈𝐄𝐆𝐀, .EXE: 150 People I Don't Need, Described and NPR2 'SOUND & STORY: James Quentin Devine'.
Related
Recurring Language · Shadow Lineages · Corruption Chains · Quantum Entendre