Babel

by R.F. Kuang

Professor Chakravarti began with questions so basic that Robin at first couldn’t see how they were worth answering, until he picked apart their implications and realized they were far beyond his scope of understanding. What was a word? What was the smallest possible unit of meaning, and why was that different from a word? Was a word different from a character? In what ways was Chinese speech different from Chinese writing? It was an odd exercise to analyse and dismantle a language he thought he knew like the back of his hand, to learn to classify words by ideogram or pictogram, and to memorize an entire vocabulary of new terms, most having to do with morphology or orthography. It was like tunnelling into the crevasses of his own mind, peeling things apart to see how they worked, and it both intrigued and unsettled him. Then came the harder questions. Which Chinese words could be traced back to recognizable pictures? Which couldn’t? Why was the character for ‘woman’ – 女 – also the radical used in the character for ‘slavery’? In the character for ‘good’? ‘I don’t know,’ Robin admitted. ‘Why is it? Are slavery and goodness both innately feminine?’ Professor Chakravarti shrugged. ‘I don’t know either. These are questions Richard and I are still trying to answer. We’re far from a satisfactory edition of the Chinese Grammatica, you see. When I was studying Chinese, I had no good Chinese-English resources – I had to make do with Abel-Rémusat’s Elémens de la grammaire chinoise and...