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

* Omar ibn Said was a West African Islamic scholar captured into slavery in 1807. When he wrote his autobiographical essay in 1831, he was still enslaved by American politician James Owen in North Carolina. He would remain enslaved for the rest of his life.

* This was only the beginning of the multiple flaws of Schlegel’s work. Islam he considered a ‘dead empty Theism’. He also assumed that Egyptians were descended from Indians, and argued Chinese and Hebrew were inferior to German and Sanskrit because they lacked inflection.

* Many of Babel’s customers were ready to believe that their silver-work made use of foreign languages, but not that their maintenance involved foreign-born scholars, and more than once Professor Chakravarti had had to enlist one of the white fourth years to accompany him and Robin on trips just to get them through the door.

* The manuscript in question – named the Baresch Codex after the alchemist who brought it to public attention – is a vellum-bound codex of what appears to be magic, science, or botany. It is written in an alphabet combining some Latin symbols and wholly unfamiliar symbols; this alphabet employs no capitalization and no punctuation marks. The script appears closest to Latin, and indeed makes use of Latin abbreviations, but the manuscript’s purpose and meaning have remained a mystery since its discovery. The manuscript was acquired by Babel in the mid-eighteenth century, and many Babel scholars since have failed to translate it; the alphabet used for resonance links takes inspiration from the manuscript’s symbols but represents no progress in deciphering the original.

* And even this exam ritual was rather tame compared to the way things were done in the late eighteenth century. Back then fourth years were subject to what was called the ‘door test’, in which recent examinees lined up to walk through the entrance the morning after grading finished. Those who had passed would step through the door with no trouble; those who had failed would be treated by the tower as trespassers, and suffer whatever violent punishment the current wards were designed to inflict. This practice was finally abolished on the grounds that maiming was not proportionate punishment for academic underperformance, but Professor Playfair still lobbied annually to bring it back.

* Though many Babel graduates were happy to work in Literature or Legal, the silver-working exam had higher stakes for scholars of foreign origin, who found it difficult to find prestigious postings in departments other than the eighth floor, where their fluency in non-European languages was most valuable. Griffin, upon failing his silver-working test, had been offered a continuation track in Legal. But Professor Lovell had always expressed the belief that nothing except silver-working mattered, and that every other department was for unimaginative, untalented fools. Poor Griffin, who had been raised under his contemptuous and exacting roof, agreed.

* The English night and Spanish noche, for example, are both derived from the Latin nox.

* A trap as tricky as false friends is folk etymologies: incorrect etymologies assigned by popular belief to words that in fact had different origins. The word handiron, for instance, means a metal tool to support logs in a fireplace. One is tempted to assume its etymology involved the words hand and iron separately. But handiron is truly derived from the French andier, which became andire in English.

* Jīxīn: 雞心; jìxing: 記性.

* A reasonable mistake. The characters in yànshǐ are 艷史. 史, shǐ, means ‘history’. 艷, yàn, can mean both ‘colourful’ and ‘sexual, romantic’.

* 鮮.

* Gabriel Shire Tregear, a London-based print seller and flaming racist, issued a series of caricature prints known as ‘Tregear’s Black Jokes’ in the 1830s which aimed to ridicule the presence of Black people in social situations where Tregear thought they did not belong.

* In the mid-eighteenth century, Babel scholars were briefly seized by an astrology fad, and several state-of-the-art telescopes were ordered for the roof on behalf of scholars who thought they could derive useful match-pairs from the names of star signs. These efforts never yielded anything interesting, as astrology is fake, but the stargazing was pleasant.

* Milton, 1645:

‘Come, and trip as ye go,

On the light fantastick toe.’

* In that time, the authorities in Oxford, like those in London, seemed to think the poor were akin to little children, or animals, rather than grown, intelligent adults.