The Department of Dead Languages crest, which features a dark red feather piercing a gold pocket watch on a chain.
The Department of Dead Languages (DDL) is one of six (rumored, seven) departments of A New School. Their subjects of study include cryptography, linguistics, anthropology and classics, and they meet in an abandoned Cracker Corp. factory building.
Averno Bible Description[]
Housed in the abandoned Cracker Corp factory, the Department of Dead Languages is notorious on campus. As soon as you walk through the front door (torn off its hinges long ago) and into the cavernous building, with its towering walls of broken window panes and hasty scrawls in indecipherable languages, you are transported to another time. Some believe the languages of the dead were never meant to be spoken. That to form the words of a long-dead tongue is to invite ghosts onto your lips. The halls echo with Latin, Greek, Akkadian, signs written in Coptic and Sumerian directing you to the room filled with plush couches that serves as a dorm room, the kitchen with outdated technology that catches fire nearly every day, and the study library that is populated at all hours of the night. When the DDL was established, the students began speaking another language as well. A stranger, wilder one. No one knows where it came from, or really how they learned. It feels as though it has always been there. No signs direct you to the rooms where the most ancient languages are spoken and cast. Bronchoscopy, haruspicy, daphnomancy and augury- the languages that require no words. Students climb the fire escape to watch the sky, translate the language of storms, leaving words behind in favor of the deeper forms of knowing. The students of the DDL know that the gods are always talking. You just have to know how to listen.
Professors[]
Dinara Kabyl - Department Head and professor of Cryptology
Robert Johnson - Professor of Latin
Chione Blim - Professor
Majors[]
This department's majors are Cryptography and Linguistics.
Known DDL Students[]
- Sicero
Trivia[]
- The crest of the Department of Dead Languages (pictured above) includes a dark red feather piercing a gold pocket watch on a chain.
- The department colors are dark purple and cream.
- The motto is "Vivant Linguae Mortuae" which translated to "May dead languages live" and 'Long live dead languages"