Babel

by R.F. Kuang

‘The Adamic language.’ Professor Lovell made a face. ‘I don’t know why he fills your minds with that stuff. It’s a pretty metaphor, certainly, but every few years we get an undergraduate who’s determined to discover the Adamic language in Proto-Indo-European, or otherwise wholly invent it on his own, and it always takes either a stern talking-to or a few weeks of failure for him to come back to his senses.’ ‘You don’t think that an original language exists?’ Robin asked. ‘Of course I don’t. The most devout Christians think it does, but you’d think if the Holy Word were so innate and unambiguous, there’d be less debate about its contents.’ He shook his head. ‘There are those who think that the Adamic language might be English – might become English – purely because the English language has enough military might and power behind it to credibly crowd out competitors, but then we must also remember that it was barely a century ago that Voltaire declared that French was the universal language. That was, of course, before Waterloo. Webb and Leibniz once speculated that Chinese might, in fact, have once been universally intelligible due to its ideogrammatic nature, but Percy debunks this by arguing Chinese is a derivative of Egyptian hieroglyphs. My point being, these things are contingent. Dominant languages might keep a little staying power even after their armies decline – Portuguese, for instance, has far outstayed its welcome – but they always fade from relevance eventually....