A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr., is told in standard American English with frequent snippets and even extended passages in ecclesiastical Latin, some explained, and some left to the reader's devices to interpret. A Canticle for Leibowitz posits that over eighteen centuries all modern languages evolve, leaving the monks of the Order of Beatus Leibowitz unsure about texts they preserved and unable to communicate with superiors without reliance on a device that transcribes, translates, and transmits messages from and to regional dialects.