The Old Tongue

Ah, yes. What a time. Language became a strange thing after the birth of the Spikedrive. Words blended together, cultures shared words, and by the birth of the 26th century we had a pretty mixed up language. Now, admittedly, they called it "The Common Tounge", or "common" - but we use that word now, and ours is different, so quite frankly? No.
Theirs is The Old Tongue to us. But what a mess it is! As a student of the universe's many languages, it's so clearly mid-development! Another few hundred years? It would've been BRILLIANT! Now, our language is a mess too, there's lots of concepts we can't convey, but when you're using like... let me check, uhm... 5 different scripts? And only parts of them from what we can tell?! Oh, come on, really?
Very glad to see that our folks did better. Most of our worlds here developed better - Something about Cultural Delegation. The leftovers of Old Tongue are there on isolated worlds, don't get me wrong - but we did better. You'd be amazed at how that works out for the worse, though.
Imagine trying to unravel your history from text books written in god knows how many half-scrambled languages; We don't know some things solely because translating it takes FOREVER! We've made AIs for it, and they do a good job, sure, but there's so much.... humanity in it. It takes a hand to interperate, and another to teach the first to understand what the intricacies are. So much unsaid, so much over-said. Ah, the mess that it is.
It's almost beautiful, really. Until you read it aloud and some Cyewpan fool understands it better than you do. Nightmare, honestly.
At the end of the day, though, I've got the deepest respects for it's speakers. They understood something we don't; Despite all our recent attempts to refound the Empire of Humanity, we barely know how to work together anymore. We were successful because we coulds it down and have a conversation.
Now we have a language barrier to being able to trade successfully. Ah, ain't that the way of things.