The Great Question

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A philosophical and linguistic concept common to most of the so-called 'civilized' peoples of Mlejnas, the 'Great Question' was best described by the linguist/cartographer/notorious forger Arn Rinitar as "That question which no language yet invented has been equipped to ask."

The first formal musings on the Great Question are to be found in the early 200's among the geomantic bureaucracy in the later Soilless Empire, specifically mentioned in Ts Vn Cll's Uy Hg'b or "Treatise on Speech/Thought".

"And thus it is reasonable that if words and things are equivilent, does it not follow that just as there are things which we cannot be, a rabbit is not a epileptic seizure any more than a man is the curvature of the moon, then truly, might there be words we cannot say, for they are not of our substance? More than that, questions that cannot be asked, for lack of the words with which to ask them, forever beyond our vocabulary and thus, our perception and reality. And just as well, for no answer from even the Greatest Question would have any use to those who are not made of its lexicon/substance."

-Uy Hg'b, Upper Zone Eight Red, page 122

There are some philological historians (Kamtan, Yldriar et al.), especially of the Logophanist school, who maintain that the idea predates the Uy Hg'b, citing certain translated fragments of the List of Lists, the lost scripture of the Self-spoken movement, a heretical offshoot of the Faith of the Words of Divinity. They line "And answer that phrase that is not known but only knows itself..." (Fragement X, line three) especially is heavily quoted, however, pre-Labab Logonist literature is a relatively new field and no consensus has ever been formed.