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

* Indeed, in the wake of Haiti’s liberation, the British began toying with the idea of importing labourers of other races, such as the Chinese (‘a sober, patient, industrious people’), as a possible alternative to African slave labour. The Fortitude experiment of 1806 attempted to establish a colony of two hundred Chinese labourers in Trinidad to create a ‘barrier between us and the Negroes’. The colony failed, and most labourers soon returned to their native China. Still, the idea of replacing African labour with Chinese labour remained attractive to British entrepreneurs, and would be continually revived throughout the nineteenth century.

* Formerly known as Gropecunt Lane, Magpie Lane was originally, as the name suggests, a street of brothels. This was not mentioned in Robin’s guidebook.

* There had once been a boy named Henry Little who’d visited Hampstead with his father, one of Professor Lovell’s colleagues in the Royal Asiatic Society. Robin tried to engage him in conversation about scones, which he thought as good an opening salvo as any, but Henry Little merely reached out and stretched Robin’s eyelids out so hard that Robin, startled, kicked him in the shin. Robin was banished to his room, and Henry Little to the garden; Professor Lovell had not invited his colleagues to bring their children over since then.

* This was true. University College had produced, among others, a Chief Justice of Bengal (Sir Robert Chambers), a Chief Justice of Bombay (Sir Edward West), and a Chief Justice of Calcutta (Sir William Jones). All were white men.

* 無 (wú) means ‘negative, not, without’; 形 (xíng) means ‘appearance, form, shape’. 五行 means not just invisible, but intangible. To illustrate: the poet Zhang Shunmin of the Northern Song dynasty wrote once that ‘詩是無形的畫, 畫是有形詩’; that poems were incorporeal (wúxíng) paintings, and paintings were corporeal poems.

* 幫忙 (bāngmáng), ‘to help, to lend a hand’.

* Sarah Stickney Ellis, a well-known author, published several books (including The Wives of England, The Mothers of England, and The Daughters of England) arguing that women had a moral imperative to improve society through domestic propriety and virtuous conduct. Robin had no strong opinion on the matter; he’d picked up her work by accident.

* This is, frankly, quite a generous description of the Legal Department. One could also argue that the business of translators in Legal was manipulating language to create favourable terms for European parties. One example is the alleged sale of land by King Paspehay to the English in Virginia ‘for copper’, despite the obvious difficulty of translating precisely the notions of European kingship or land as property into Algonquin languages. The Legal solution to these issues was simply to declare that the Algonquins were too savage to have developed those concepts, and it was a good thing the English were there to teach them.

* He was not. The eighth floor of the Institute had been reconstructed seven times since the building’s initial construction.

* A good amount of foundational Western scholarship on Sanskrit was done by German Romantics such as Herder, Schlegel, and Bopp. Not all of their monographs had been translated into English – at least, not well – and so most students studying Sanskrit at Babel were also required to learn German.

* Cf. the related German unheimlich.

* This is true. Mathematics is not divorced from culture. Take counting systems – not all languages use base ten. Or geometry – Euclidean geometry assumes a conception of space not shared by all. One of the greatest intellectual shifts in history involves the transition from Roman numerals to the more elegant Arabic numerals, whose place-value notation and concept of zero, signifying nothing, made possible new forms of mental arithmetic. Old habits died hard; in 1299, merchants in Florence were banned by the Florentine Arte del Cambio from using both zero and Arabic numerals: ‘He shall write openly and fully by letter.’

* Like Robin, Ilse was known to the English not by her birth name but by an adopted name; a combination of a chosen Anglicized name (Ilse) and the island from which she’d come (Dejima).

* The boys stayed out of this one. Privately, Ramy thought Letty had a fair point that as a woman, she was entitled to inherit none of the Price estate to begin with. Robin thought it was a bit rich for her to call herself ‘impoverished’ when they were all receiving stipends sizable enough that they could dine out whenever they felt like it.

* Robin, Victoire, and Ramy were all very disappointed to learn that corned beef had nothing to do with corn, but with the size of rock salt crystals used to cure said beef.

* A swindler, a grifter.

* Thief’s slang for a gaoler (jigger meaning ‘door’, and dubber meaning ‘closer’).

* 坦途.

* ‘On Agriculture’.