Babel : Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (9780063021440)

Thus began a morning of memorizing basic vocabulary – agricola, terra, aqua – which was daunting, but then seemed easy compared to the head-spinning explanations of declensions and conjugations which followed. Robin had never been taught the fundamentals of grammar – he knew what worked in English because it sounded right – and so in learning Latin, he learned the basic parts of language itself. Noun, verb, subject, predicate, copula; then the nominative, genitive, accusative cases . . . He absorbed a bewildering amount of material over the next three hours, and had forgotten half of it by the time the lesson ended, but he came away with a deep appreciation of language and all the words for what you could do with it.

‘That’s all right, lad.’ Mr Felton, thankfully, was a patient fellow, and seemed sympathetic to the mental brutalization he’d subjected Robin to. ‘You’ll have much more fun after we’ve finished laying the groundwork. Just wait until we get to Cicero.’ He peered down at Robin’s notes. ‘But you’ve got to be more careful with your spelling.’

Robin couldn’t see where he’d gone wrong. ‘How do you mean?’

‘You’ve forgotten nearly all the macron marks.’

‘Oh.’ Robin suppressed a noise of impatience; he was very hungry, and just wanted to be done so he could go to lunch. ‘Those.’

Mr Felton rapped the table with his knuckles. ‘Even the length of a single vowel matters, Robin Swift. Consider the Bible. The original Hebrew text never specifies what sort of forbidden fruit the serpent persuades Eve to eat. But in Latin, malum means “bad” and mālum,’ he wrote the words out for Robin, emphasizing the macron with force, ‘means “apple”. It was a short leap from there to blaming the apple for the original sin. But for all we know, the real culprit could be a persimmon.’

Mr Felton departed at lunchtime, after assigning a list of nearly a hundred vocabulary words to memorize before the following morning. Robin ate alone in the drawing room, mechanically shoving ham and potatoes into his mouth as he blinked uncomprehendingly at his grammar.

‘More potatoes, dear?’ Mrs Piper asked.

‘No, thank you.’ The heavy food, combined with the tiny font of his readings, was making him sleepy. His head throbbed; what he really would have liked then was a long nap.

But there was no reprieve. At two on the dot, a thin, grey-whiskered gentleman who introduced himself as Mr Chester arrived at the house, and for the next three hours, they commenced Robin’s education in Ancient Greek.

Greek was an exercise in making the familiar strange. Its alphabet mapped onto the Roman alphabet, but only partly so, and often letters did not sound how they looked – a rho (P) was not a P, and an eta (H) was not an H. Like Latin, it made use of conjugations and declensions, but there were a good deal more moods, tenses, and voices to keep track of. Its inventory of sounds seemed further from English than Latin’s did, and Robin kept struggling not to make Greek tones sound like Chinese tones. Mr Chester was harsher than Mr Felton, and became snippy and irritable when Robin kept flubbing his verb endings. By the end of the afternoon, Robin felt so lost that it was all he could do to simply repeat the sounds Mr Chester spat at him.

Mr Chester left at five, after also assigning a mountain of readings that hurt Robin to look at. He carried the texts to his room, then stumbled, head spinning, to the dining room for supper.

‘How did your classes go?’ Professor Lovell inquired.

Robin hesitated. ‘Just fine.’

Professor Lovell’s mouth quirked up in a smile. ‘It’s a bit much, isn’t it?’

Robin sighed. ‘Just a tad, sir.’

‘But that’s the beauty of learning a new language. It should feel like an enormous undertaking. It ought to intimidate you. It makes you appreciate the complexity of the ones you know already.’

‘But I don’t see why they have to be quite so complicated,’ Robin said with sudden vehemence. He couldn’t help it; his frustration had been mounting since noon. ‘I mean, why so many rules? Why so many endings? Chinese doesn’t have any of those; we haven’t got tenses or declensions or conjugations. Chinese is much simpler—’

‘You’re wrong there,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Every language is complex in its own way. Latin just happens to work its complexity into the shape of the word. Its morphological richness is an asset, not an obstacle. Consider the sentence He will learn. Tā huì xué. Three words in both English and Chinese. In Latin, it takes only one. Disce. Much more elegant, you see?’

Robin wasn’t sure he did.