Brain Rot Tongue
The builders made the language before the Fall, to solve a problem that ended their world anyway.
The problem
Their world did not speak aloud. Thought went out through a chip and arrived in somebody else's head, and between the two ends it had to be translated, because a thought is not words: one person thinks in pictures, another in sound, another in the words of the language they were raised in. The chip did its best, and its best was an approximation, and across a whole world talking constantly the approximations compounded.
What that produced was not confusion so much as certainty. Everything anybody received had been shaped to fit them on the way in, so everything felt native, and anything that did not fit felt like an attack. A statement made in general arrived as a statement made at you, and was answered as one. Misunderstanding stopped being an accident and became the ordinary condition of speech, and it made people furious with one another for things nobody had said. It was worse because nobody could see anybody: entire lives of conversation with people never met, no face to check a tone against, nothing to correct a misreading before it hardened.
The fix
The young worked it out, and it was a language. They noticed that a few things never drifted — not objects, which everybody holds privately, but the shared pictures everyone had seen in the same form from the same source and could not hold any other way. A word built out of one meant the same thing in every head it reached.
So they built a tongue out of those and nothing else, and the pictures were not theirs. They were ours. The builders had been watching our world for a long time, and what they took was our internet: our jokes, our phrases, the images everyone in our world had seen. A picture from their own world came attached to whatever each of them felt about it, and feeling is exactly what drifts in transmission. Ours came attached to nothing; they had all seen the same image, none of them had been anywhere near it, and not one had any stake in what it meant. It was inert, and inert was what they needed. A word made from somebody else's joke cannot be taken personally, cannot be shaded, and cannot arrive meaning something the sender did not intend. Its grammar was stripped to almost nothing, because the meaning rode in the words themselves. It was fast and compressed. But the point was that a thing said in it arrived unchanged, and arrived cold.
Why it does not mark gender
Nobody could see anybody, so a pronoun that specified was claiming to know something the speaker could not know, and a wrong claim of that kind did not arrive as an error. Calling a man a woman is an insult in most of the languages the chip was translating between, so a guess gone astray arrived as contempt, in a world already answering things nobody had said. Better a word that claimed nothing: Peep meant a person and that was all, and when gender mattered a speaker attached bro- or sis- and moved on. Nine centuries later the pronoun has worn down to Peif and the prefixes have detached and attached themselves to everything else. What nobody planned is where the formal pair came from: da- and ma- were daddy and mommy, and not in the family sense — what a person called a dominant partner, authority willingly answered. The Pact era took them up because they were the words to hand for that idea. A magistrate addressed as da-Jor is being given a word that began as bedroom slang, and nobody in the world has any idea.
The name
It did not name itself. The name came from the people who despised it, who could not get past a serious instrument of communication assembled out of jokes, and every one of their sayings meant the same thing: this is the tongue of a rotted brain. The young who spoke it took the insult and used it, as the young do. The fix came too late; by the time the tongue was widespread the argument had already become a war, and The Fall and Year One describes the rest.
Afterward
The survivors did not pass the name on; they had decided the old world was not to be handed down, and a joke at the language's expense would not help anyone take it seriously. So the first layer is called Eldspraecha and that is all it has ever been called here. Its words sit under the modern ones the way foundations sit under a house, and the pictures that made them exact were borrowed from a world that stopped existing for anyone who could check. A modern speaker says Byoef for death and Glufri for bread and Maerd when something delights them, and not one of those words carries the image it was built from. They mean what people have agreed they mean, which is how every language before or since has worked, and which the builders would have found tragic.