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

* These receptions were entertaining at first, but quickly grew tiresome when it became apparent that Babel scholars were there less as distinguished guests and more as zoo animals on display, expected to dance and perform for wealthy donors. Robin, Victoire, and Ramy were always treated as national representatives of the countries they appeared to hail from. Robin had to put up with excruciating small talk about Chinese botanical gardens and lacquerware; Ramy was expected to elaborate on the inner workings of the ‘Hindu race’, whatever that meant; and Victoire, bizarrely, was always being asked for speculation advice in the Cape.

* Through Colin Thornhill and the Sharp brothers, Robin became aware of various ‘sets’ of people one might run with, which included ‘fast men’, ‘slow men’, ‘reading men’, ‘gentlemen’, ‘cads’, ‘sinners’, ‘smilers’, and ‘saints’. He thought perhaps he qualified as a ‘reading man’. He hoped he was not a ‘cad’.

* Many romantic Univ undergraduates fancied themselves successors to Percy Bysshe Shelley, who rarely attended lectures, was expelled for refusing to admit authorship of a pamphlet titled ‘The Necessity of Atheism’, married a nice girl named Mary, and later drowned in a violent storm off the Gulf of Larici.

* Robin, despite his general dislike of Shelley, had still read his thoughts on translation, which he grudgingly respected: ‘Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower – and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.’

* For example: ‘You know how the French refer to an unfortunate situation? Triste comme un repas sans fromage. Sad as a meal without cheese. Which is, really, the state of all English cheese.’

* Karl Wilhelm von Humboldt is perhaps most famous for writing in 1836 ‘On the Structural Difference of Human Languages and Its Influence on the Intellectual Development of the Human Race’, in which he argues, among other things, that a culture’s language is deeply tied to the mental capacities and characteristics of those who speak it, which explains why Latin and Greek are better suited for sophisticated intellectual reasoning than, say, Arabic.

* The military applications of this match-pair were really not as useful as Professor Playfair made them sound. It was impossible to specify which pieces of knowledge one wanted to remove, and often the match-pair only caused enemy soldiers to forget how to lace their boots, or how to speak the fragmented English they knew. The Duke of Wellington was not impressed.

* In the late eighteenth century, there had been a brief craze of the silver-working potential of created languages such as the abbess Hildegard of Bingen’s mystical Lingua Ignota, which had a glossary of over a thousand words; John Wilkins’s language of truth, which involved an elaborate classification scheme for every known thing in the universe; and Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty’s ‘Universal Language’, which attempted to reduce the world to a perfectly rational expression of arithmetic. All these faltered upon a common obstacle that later became accepted as basic truth at Babel: that languages are more than mere ciphers, and must be used to express oneself to others.

* 風暴.

* 颱風.

* ‘Awkward,’ Victoire would say, pointing to Robin, ‘comes from the Old Norse aufgr, which means “turned the wrong way round, like a turtle on its back”.’

‘Then Victoire must derive from vicious, not Victoria, for you are nothing but vice,’ Robin would retort.

* 尼.

* 涅槃.

* An understatement. A few short decades after Potosí’s ‘discovery’ in 1545, the silver city had become a death trap for enslaved Africans and drafted indigenous labourers working amidst mercury vapour, foul water, and toxic waste. Spain’s ‘King of Mountains and Envy of Kings’ was a pyramid built on bodies lost to disease, forced marches, malnutrition, overwork, and a poisoned environment.

* Two weeks into Michaelmas several freshers at Balliol had rented several punting boats and, in their drunken revels, created a traffic jam in the middle of the Cherwell that piled up three barges and one houseboat, costing incalculable pounds in damages. As punishment, the university had suspended all races until next year.

* It took a great deal of rigour and scrutiny to contribute anything to a Grammatica. Oxford was still smarting from the embarrassments dealt by a former visiting lecturer named George Psalmanazar, a Frenchman who, claiming to be from Formosa, passed off his pale skin by saying that Formosans lived underground. He had lectured and published on the Formosan languages for decades before he was exposed as a complete fraud.