Editing Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (section)

===Part two===
The engineer Herbert Ashe, an English friend of Borges' father with a peculiar interest in [[duodecimal]] systems, dies of an [[aneurysm]] rupture. Borges inherits a packet containing a book, which was left by Ashe in a pub. That book is revealed to be the eleventh volume of an English-language encyclopedia entirely devoted to Tlön, one of the worlds in which Uqbar's legends are set. The book contains two oval blue stamps with the words '''''Orbis Tertius''''' inscribed in blue. From that point, as Borges reads the tome, part two comprehensively describes and discusses Tlön's culture, history, languages and philosophy.

The people of the imaginary Tlön hold an extreme form of [[George Berkeley|Berkeley]]'s [[subjective idealism]], denying the reality of the material world. Their world is understood "not as a concurrence of objects in space, but as a heterogeneous series of independent acts."<ref name="tlon115">"Tlön…", p. 115</ref> One of the imagined language families of Tlön lacks nouns, being centered instead in impersonal verbs qualified by monosyllabic adverbial affixes. Borges lists a Tlönic equivalent of "The moon rose above the water": ''hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö'', meaning literally "upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned." ([[Andrew Hurley (academic)|Andrew Hurley]], one of Borges' translators, wrote a fiction in which he says that the words "axaxaxas mlö" "can only be pronounced as the author's cruel, mocking laughter".<ref>{{cite web | author-last = Hurley | author-first = Andrew | url = http://shipwrecklibrary.com/borges/hurley-zahir/ | title = The Zahir and I | website = The Garden of Forking Paths | access-date = August 3, 2006 }}</ref>) In another language family of Tlön, "the basic unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic [[adjective]]", which in combinations of two or more forms nouns: "moon" becomes "round airy-light on dark" or "pale-orange-of-the-sky".<ref name="tlon115"/>

A dissident scholar of Tlön, going against the established philosophy and languages, tried to propound the theory of [[materialism]], suggesting that a number of coins still existed after a man lost them and they could not be seen by anyone, "albeit in some secret way that we are forbidden to understand". The proposition was scandalous and widely rejected by Tlön's academia, who considered it a [[sophism]] and a [[fallacy]]. A century later, another thinker formulated a [[pantheism|pantheistic]] conjecture that "there is but a single subject; that indivisible subject is every being in the universe, and the beings of the universe are the organs and masks of the deity"; this ended up triumphing over all other schools of thought. One of the effects is the rejection of [[authorship]], with books seldom being signed and the concept of [[plagiarism]] being alien because "all books are the work of a single author who is timeless and anonymous".

Another influence of that idealism is that, for about a hundred years, a class of duplicating, apparently atemporal objects called ''hrönir'' (singular ''hrön'') have been produced in Tlön. Objects also "grow vague or sketchy and lose detail" when they begin to be forgotten, culminating in their disappearance when they are completely forgotten.