Babel

by R.F. Kuang

Victoire and Letty, who now understood that the presence of women at Oxford was more of an open secret than an outright taboo, began slowly growing out their hair. One day Letty even appeared in hall for dinner wearing a skirt instead of trousers. The Univ boys whispered and pointed, but the staff said nothing, and she was served her three courses and wine without incident. But there were also significant ways in which they did not belong. No one would serve Ramy at any of their favourite pubs if he was the first to arrive. Letty and Victoire could not take books out of the library without a male student present to vouch for them. Victoire was assumed by shopkeepers to be Letty or Robin’s maid. Porters regularly asked all four of them if they could please not step on the green for it was off limits, while the other boys trampled over the so-called delicate grass all around them.

They were always hearing rumours of wild parties, nights at the pub spinning out of control, secret society meetings, and teas where so-and-so had been devastatingly rude to his tutor or where so-and-so had insulted someone else’s sister, but they never witnessed these events in person.

vituperation.

Still, Robin could not help but envy those boys – those born into this world, who uttered its codes as native speakers. When he saw Elton Pendennis and his crowd strolling and laughing across the green, he couldn’t help but imagine, just for a moment, what it might be like to be a part of that circle. He wanted Pendennis’s life, not so much for its material pleasures – the wine, the cigars, the clothes, the dinners – but for what it represented: the assurance that one would always be welcome in England. If he could only attain Pendennis’s fluency, or at least an imitation of it, then he, too, would blend into the tapestry of this idyllic campus life. And he would no longer be the foreigner, second-guessing his pronunciation at every turn, but a native whose belonging could not possibly be questioned or revoked.

The boys were all crowded around Elton Pendennis like leaves around a bloom. Up close, the reports of his good looks seemed not to be exaggerated one bit. He was one of the handsomest men Robin had ever encountered, a Byronic hero incarnate. His hooded eyes were framed by thick, dark lashes; his plump lips would have looked girlish, as Letty had accused, if they weren’t set off by such a strong, square jaw. ‘It’s not the company, it’s the ennui,’ he was saying. ‘London’s fun for a season, but then you start seeing all the same faces again year after year, and the girls don’t ever get any prettier, just older. Once you’ve been to one ball you might have been to them all. You know, one of my father’s friends once promised his closest acquaintances that he could liven up their gatherings. He prepared an elaborate dinner party, then told his servants to go out and extend an invitation to all the beggars and homeless sops they came across. When his friends arrived, they saw those motley stragglers, punch-drunk and dancing on tables – it was hilarious, I wish I’d been invited myself.’ The joke ended here; the audience laughed on cue. Pendennis, his monologue complete, looked up. ‘Oh, hello. Robin Swift, isn’t it?’ By now Robin’s tentative optimism that this would be a good time had evaporated. He felt drained. ‘That’s me.’ ‘Elton Pendennis,’ said Pendennis, extending a hand for Robin to shake. ‘We’re very happy you could make it.’ He pointed around the room with his cigar, wafti...

Robin sipped his wine, trying to match Pendennis’s listless affect. How did one make such a relaxed position look so elegant? ‘That’s what they call us.’ ‘What’s it you do? Chinese?’ ‘Mandarin’s my speciality,’ said Robin. ‘Though I’m also studying comparisons to Japanese and, eventually, Sanskrit—’ ‘So you are a Chinaman, then?’ Pendennis pressed. ‘We weren’t sure – I think you look English, but Colin swore you were an Oriental.’ ‘I was born in Canton,’ Robin said patiently. ‘Though I’d say I’m English as well—’ ‘I know China,’ Woolcombe interjected. ‘Kubla Khan.’ There was a short pause. ‘Yes,’ Robin said, wondering if that utterance was supposed to mean anything. ‘The Coleridge poem,’ Woolcombe clarified. ‘A very Oriental work of literature. Yet somehow, very Romantic as well.’ ‘How interesting,’ Robin said, trying his best to be polite. ‘I’ll have to read it.’

‘So what – I mean, what are you all going to do? With your degrees, I mean.’ They laughed. Pendennis rested his chin on his hand. ‘Do,’ he drawled, ‘is such a proletarian word. I prefer the life of the mind.’ ‘Don’t listen to him,’ said Woolcombe. ‘He’s going to live off his estate and subject all his guests to grand philosophical observations until he dies. I’ll be a clergyman, Colin a solicitor. Milton’s going to be a doctor, if he can find it in him to go to lectures.’ ‘So you’re not training for any profession here?’ Robin asked Pendennis. ‘I write,’ Pendennis said with very deliberate indifference, the way people who are very conceited throw out morsels of information they hope become objects of fascination. ‘I write poetry. I haven’t produced much so far—’ ‘Show him,’ Colin cried, right on cue. ‘Do show him. Robin, it’s ever so profound, wait until you hear it—’ ‘All right.’ Pendennis leaned forward, still feigning reluctance, and reached for a stack of papers that Robin realized had been set out for display on the coffee table this entire time. ‘Now, this one is a reply to Shelley’s “Ozymandias”,* which is as you know an ode to the unforgiving ravaging of time against all great empires and their legacies. Only I’ve argued that, in the modern era, legacies can be built to last and indeed there are great men of the sort at Oxford capable of such a monumental task.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I’ve opened with the same line as Shelley – I met a traveller from an antique la...

‘Of course that’s not the same,’ Pendennis said. ‘Translating poetry is for those who haven’t the creative fire themselves. They can only seek residual fame cribbing off the work of others.’ Robin scoffed. ‘I don’t think that’s true.’ ‘You wouldn’t know,’ said Pendennis. ‘You’re not a poet.’ ‘Actually—’ Robin fidgeted with the stem of his glass for a moment, then decided to keep talking. ‘I think translation can be much harder than original composition in many ways. The poet is free to say whatever he likes, you see – he can choose from any number of linguistic tricks in the language he’s composing in. Word choice, word order, sound – they all matter, and without any one of them the whole thing falls apart. That’s why Shelley writes that translating poetry is about as wise as casting a violet into a crucible.* So the translator needs to be translator, literary critic, and poet all at once – he must read the original well enough to understand all the machinery at play, to convey its meaning with as much accuracy as possible, then rearrange the translated meaning into an aesthetically pleasing structure in the target language that, by his judgment, matches the original. The poet runs untrammelled across the meadow. The translator dances in shackles.’ By the end of this spiel Pendennis and his friends were staring at him, slack-jawed and bemused, as if they weren’t sure what to make of him. ‘Dancing in shackles,’ Woolcombe said after a pause. ‘That’s lovely.’ ‘But I’m not a p...

‘His name was Lincoln. Lincoln and Letty Price. They were so close when they were children that all their family’s friends called them the twins. He came to Oxford some years before her, but he hadn’t half the mind for books as she does, and every holiday he and their father would fight viciously over how he was squandering his education. He was much more like Pendennis than like any of us, if you know what I mean. One night he went out drinking. The police came to Letty’s house the next morning, told them they’d found Lincoln’s body under a cart. He’d fallen asleep by the road, and the driver hadn’t noticed him under the wheels until hours later. He must have died sometime before dawn.’ Ramy and Robin were quiet; neither could think of anything to say. They felt rather like chastised schoolboys, as if Victoire were their stern governess. ‘She came up to Oxford a few months later,’ said Victoire. ‘Did you know Babel has a general entrance exam for applicants who don’t come specially recommended? She took it and passed. It was the only faculty at Oxford that would take women. She’d always wanted to come to Babel – she’d studied for it her whole life – but her father kept refusing to let her go to school. It wasn’t until Lincoln died that her father let her come and take his place. Bad to have a daughter at Oxford, but worse to have no children at Oxford at all. Isn’t that terrible?’ ‘I didn’t know,’ Robin said, ashamed. ‘I don’t think you two quite understand how hard it is...

‘Translators are always being accused of faithlessness,’ boomed Professor Playfair. ‘So what does that entail, this faithfulness? Fidelity to whom? The text? The audience? The author? Is fidelity separate from style? From beauty? Let us begin with what Dryden wrote about the Aeneid. I have endeavoured to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age.’ He looked around the classroom. ‘Does anyone here think that is fidelity?’ ‘I’ll bite,’ said Ramy. ‘No, I don’t think that can possibly be right. Virgil belonged to a particular time and place. Isn’t it more unfaithful to strip all that away, to make him speak like any Englishman you might run into on the street?’ Professor Playfair shrugged. ‘Is it not also unfaithful to make Virgil sound like a stuffy foreigner, rather than a man you would happily carry on a conversation with? Or, as Guthrie did, to cast Cicero as a member of the English Parliament? But I confess, these methods are questionable. You take things too far, and you get something like Pope’s translation of the Iliad.’ ‘I thought Pope was one of the greatest poets of his time,’ Letty said. ‘Perhaps in his original work,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘But he injects the text with so many Britishisms that he makes Homer sound like an eighteenth-century English aristocrat. Surely this does not accompany our image of the Greeks and Trojans at war.’ ‘Sounds like typical English arrogance,’ said Ramy...

Schleiermacher argued that translations should be sufficiently unnatural that they clearly present themselves as foreign texts. He argued there were two options: either the translator leaves the author in peace and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace and moves the author towards him. Schleiermacher chose the former. Yet the dominant strain in England now is the latter – to make translations sound so natural to the English reader that they do not read as translations at all. ‘Which seems right to you? Do we try our hardest, as translators, to render ourselves invisible? Or do we remind our reader that what they are reading was not written in their native language?’ ‘That’s an impossible question,’ said Victoire. ‘Either you situate the text in its time and place, or you bring it to where you are, here and now. You’re always giving something up.’ ‘Is faithful translation impossible, then?’ Professor Playfair challenged. ‘Can we never communicate with integrity across time, across space?’ ‘I suppose not,’ Victoire said reluctantly. ‘But what is the opposite of fidelity?’ asked Professor Playfair. He was approaching the end of this dialectic; now he needed only to draw it to a close with a punch. ‘Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always ...

Robin had hoped he might have the chance to visit Japan that summer, but he was sent instead to the Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca to maintain his Mandarin. The college, which was run by Protestant missionaries, enforced an exhausting routine of prayers, readings in the classics, and courses in medicine, moral philosophy, and logic. Never did he get the chance to wander out of the compound onto Heeren Street, where the Chinese residents lived; instead, those weeks were an unbroken stream of sun, sand, and endless Bible study meetings among white Protestants.

‘Welcome back.’ Normally he lectured in a plain suit, but today he’d donned a black master’s gown with tassels that swished dramatically around his ankles. ‘The last time you were allowed on this floor, you saw the extent of the magic we create here. Today, we’ll dismantle its mysteries. Have a seat.’ They settled into chairs at the nearest workstations. Letty moved aside a stack of books on hers so she could see better, but Professor Playfair barked suddenly, ‘Don’t touch that.’ Letty flinched. ‘Pardon?’ ‘That’s Evie’s desk,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘Can’t you see the plaque?’ There was, indeed, a small bronze plaque affixed to the front of the desk. They craned their necks to read it. Desk Belonging to Eveline Brooke, it read. Do not touch. Letty gathered her things, stood up, and took the seat next to Ramy. ‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled, cheeks scarlet. They sat in silence for a moment, not sure what to do. They’d never seen Professor Playfair so upset. But just as abruptly, his features rearranged themselves back into his regular warmth and, with a slight hop, he began to lecture as if nothing had happened.

‘The core principle underlying silver-working is untranslatability. When we say a word or phrase is untranslatable, we mean that it lacks a precise equivalent in another language. Even if its meaning can be partially captured in several words or sentences, something is still lost – something that falls into semantic gaps which are, of course, created by cultural differences in lived experience. Take the Chinese concept dao, which we translate sometimes as “the way”, “the path”, or “the way things ought to be”. Yet none of those truly encapsulates the meaning of dao, a little word that requires an entire philosophical tome to explain. Are you with me so far?’ They nodded. This was nothing more than the thesis Professor Playfair had hammered into their heads all of last term – that all translation involved some degree of warp and distortion. Finally, it appeared, they were going to do something with this distortion. ‘No translation can perfectly carry over the meaning of the original. But what is meaning? Does meaning refer to something that supersedes the words we use to describe our world? I think, intuitively, yes. Otherwise we would have no basis for critiquing a translation as accurate or inaccurate, not without some unspeakable sense of what it lacked. Humboldt,* for instance, argues that words are connected to the concepts they describe by something invisible, intangible – a mystical realm of meaning and ideas, emanating from a pure mental energy which only takes form...

The Greek kárabos has a number of different meanings including “boat”, “crab”, or “beetle”. Where do you think the associations come from?’ ‘Function?’ Ramy ventured. ‘Were the boats used for catching crabs?’ ‘Good try, but no.’ ‘The shape,’ Robin guessed. As he spoke it made more sense. ‘Think of a galley with rows of oars. They’d look like little scuttling legs, wouldn’t they? Wait – scuttle, sculler . . .’ ‘You’re getting carried away, Mr Swift. But you’re on the right path. Focus on kárabos for now. From kárabos we get caravel, which is a quick and lightweight ship. Both words mean “ship”, but only kárabos retains the sea-creature associations in the original Greek. Are you following?’ They nodded. He tapped the ends of the bar, where the words kárabos and caravel were written on opposite sides. ‘Affix this to a fishing ship, and you’ll find it yields a better load than any of its sister crafts. These bars were quite popular in the last century, until overuse meant fishing yields dropped down to what they were before. The bars can warp reality to some extent, but they can’t materialize new fish. You’d need a better word for that.

‘It is most often used to create a sugary home remedy that acts as an antidote to most types of poison. An ingenious discovery by a student named Evie Brooke – yes, that Evie – who realized the word treacle was first recorded in the seventeenth century in relation to the heavy use of sugar to disguise the bad taste of medicine. She then traced that back to the Old French triacle, meaning “antidote” or “cure from snakebite”, then the Latin theriaca, and finally to the Greek theriake, both meaning “antidote”.’ ‘But the match-pair is only between English and French,’ said Victoire. ‘How—’ ‘Daisy-chaining,’ said Professor Playfair. He turned the bar around to show them the Latin and Greek engraved along the sides. ‘It’s a technique that invokes older etymologies as guides, shepherding meaning across miles and centuries. You might also think of it as extra stakes for a tent. It keeps the whole thing stable and helps us identify with accuracy the distortion we’re trying to capture.

‘Here’s something I came up with quite recently on commission for the Duke of Wellington.’ He uttered this with evident pride. ‘The Greek word idiótes can mean a fool, as our idiot implies. But it also carries the definition of one who is private, unengaged with worldly affairs – his idiocy is derived not from lack of natural faculties, but from ignorance and lack of education. When we translate idiótes to idiot, it has the effect of removing knowledge. This bar, then, can make you forget, quite abruptly, things you thought you’d learned. Very nice when you’re trying to get enemy spies to forget what they’ve seen.’*

‘So there it is. It’s all quite easy once you’ve grasped the basic principle. We capture what is lost in translation – for there is always something lost in translation – and the bar manifests it into being. Simple enough?’ ‘But that’s absurdly powerful,’ said Letty. ‘You could do anything with those bars. You could be God—’ ‘Not quite, Miss Price. We are restrained by the natural evolution of languages. Even words that diverge in meaning still have quite a close relationship with each other. This limits the magnitude of change the bars can effect. For example, you can’t use them to bring back the dead, because we haven’t found a good match-pair in a language where life and death are not in opposition to each other. Besides that, there’s one other rather severe limitation to the bars – one that keeps every peasant in England from running around wielding them like talismans. Can anyone guess what it is?’ Victoire raised her hand. ‘You need a fluent speaker.’ ‘Quite right,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘Words have no meaning unless there is someone present who can understand them. And it can’t be a shallow level of understanding – you can’t simply tell a farmer what triacle means in French and expect that the bar will work. You need to be able to think in a language – to live and breathe it, not just recognize it as a smattering of letters on a page. This is also why invented languages* will never work, and why ancient languages like Old English have lost their effect. Old Engli...

They run out of charge in a matter of weeks, after which they need to be touched up, as we put it.’ ‘For a fee?’ Robin asked. Professor Playfair nodded, smiling. ‘Something has to pay for your stipends.’ ‘So that’s all it takes to maintain a bar?’ asked Letty. ‘Just having a translator speak the words in the match-pair?’ ‘It’s a bit more complicated than that,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘Sometimes the engravings have to be reinscribed, or the bars have to be refitted—’ ‘How much do you charge for those services, though?’ Letty pressed. ‘A dozen shillings, I’ve heard? Is it really worth so much to perform a little touch-up?’ Professor Playfair’s grin widened. He looked rather like a boy who’d been caught sticking his thumb in a pie. ‘It pays well to perform what the general public thinks of as magic, doesn’t it?’ ‘Then the expense is entirely invented?’ Robin asked. This came out more sharply than he’d intended. But he was thinking, then, of the choleric plague that had swept through London; of how Mrs Piper explained the poor simply could not be helped, for silver-work was so terribly costly. ‘Oh, yes.’ Professor Playfair seemed to find this all very funny. ‘We hold the secrets, and we can set whatever terms we like. That’s the beauty of being cleverer than everyone else.

Amazed, they watched as the bar trembled with greater and greater violence. It was awful to witness. The bar seemed to have come alive, as if possessed by some spirit desperately trying to break free, or at least to split itself apart. It made no sound other than a fierce rattling against the table, but Robin heard in his mind a tortured, accompanying scream. ‘The translation match-pair creates a paradox,’ Professor Playfair said calmly as the bar started shaking so hard that it leapt inches off the table in its throes. ‘It attempts to create a purer translation, something that will align to the metaphors associated with each word, but this is of course impossible, because no perfect translations are possible.’ Cracks formed in the bar, thin veins that branched, split, and widened. ‘The manifestation has nowhere to go except the bar itself. So it creates an ongoing cycle until, at last, the bar breaks down. And . . . this happens.’ The bar leapt high into the air and shattered into hundreds of tiny pieces that scattered across the tables, the chairs, the floor. Robin’s cohort backed away, flinching. Professor Playfair did not bat an eye. ‘Do not try it. Not even out of curiosity. This silver,’ he kicked at one of the fallen shards, ‘cannot be reused. Even if it’s melted down and reforged, any bars made with even an ounce of it will be impotent. Even worse, the effect is contagious. You activate the bar when it’s on a pile of silver, and it spreads to everything it’s in con...

They sat around their regular table at the Buttery, feeling rather dizzy with power. They’d been repeating the same sentiments about silver-working since class had been let out, but it didn’t matter; it all felt so novel, so incredible. The whole world had seemed different when they stepped out of the tower. They’d entered the wizard’s house, had watched him mix his potions and cast his spells, and now nothing would satisfy them until they’d tried it themselves.

Right now I’m playing with a pair I think might be useful in bakeries. Flour and flower.’ ‘Aren’t those just entirely different words?’ asked Letty. ‘You would think,’ said Anthony. ‘But if you go back to the Anglo-French original of the thirteenth century, you’ll find they were originally the same word – flower simply referred to the finest part of grain meal. Over time, flower and flour diverged to represent different objects. But if this bar works right, then I should be able to install it in milling machines to refine flour with more efficiency.’ He sighed. ‘I’m not sure it will work. But I expect a lifetime of free scones from Vaults if it does.’ ‘Do you get royalties?’ asked Victoire. ‘Every time they make a copy of your bars, I mean?’ ‘Oh, no. I get a modest sum, but all proceeding profits go to the tower. They do add my name to the ledger of match-pairs, though. I’ve got six in there so far. And there are only about twelve hundred active match-pairs currently in use throughout the Empire, so that’s about the highest academic laurel you can claim. Better than publishing a paper anywhere else.’ ‘Hold on,’ said Ramy. ‘Isn’t twelve hundred quite low? I mean, match-pairs have been in use since the Roman Empire, so how—’ ‘How is it that we haven’t covered the country in silver expressing every match-pair possible?’ ‘Right,’ said Ramy. ‘Or at least, come up with more than twelve hundred.’ ‘Well, think about it,’ said Anthony. ‘The problem should be obvious. Languages affe...

But it’s really the colonies and the semi-colonies – Robin and China, Ramy and India; boys, you’re uncharted territory. You’re the stuff that everyone’s fighting over.’ ‘You say it like it’s a resource,’ said Ramy. ‘Well, certainly. Language is a resource just like gold and silver. People have fought and died over those Grammaticas.’ ‘But that’s absurd,’ said Letty. ‘Language is just words, just thoughts – you can’t constrain the use of a language.’ ‘Can’t you?’ asked Anthony. ‘Do you know the official punishment in China for teaching Mandarin to a foreigner is death?’ Letty turned to Robin. ‘Is that true?’ ‘I think it is,’ said Robin. ‘Professor Chakravarti told me the same thing. The Qing government are – they’re scared. They’re scared of the outside.’ ‘You see?’ asked Anthony. ‘Languages aren’t just made of words. They’re modes of looking at the world. They’re the keys to civilization. And that’s knowledge worth killing for.’

‘Words tell stories.’ This was how Professor Lovell opened their first class that afternoon, held in a spare, windowless room on the tower’s fifth floor. ‘Specifically, the history of those words – how they came into use, and how their meanings morphed into what they mean today – tell us just as much about a people, if not more, than any other kind of historical artefact. Take the word knave. Where do you think it comes from?’ ‘Playing cards, right? You’ve got your king, queen . . .’ Letty started, then broke off when she realized the argument was circular. ‘Oh, never mind.’ Professor Lovell shook his head. ‘The Old English cnafa refers to a boy servant, or young male servant. We confirm this with its German cognate Knabe, which is an old term for boy. So knaves were originally young boys who attended to knights. But when the institution of knighthood crumbled at the end of the sixteenth century, and when lords realized they could hire cheaper and better professional armies, hundreds of knaves found themselves unemployed. So they did what any young men down on their luck would do – they fell in with highwaymen and robbers and became the lowlife scoundrels that we label as knaves now. So the history of the word does not describe just a change in language, but a change in an entire social order.’

In the days before this lecture, Robin had dreaded taking a class with his guardian. But it turned out not to be awkward or embarrassing. Professor Lovell treated him just like he had in front of company back in Hampstead – distant, formal, his eyes flitting always over Robin’s face without landing, like the space where he existed could not be seen.

‘We get the word etymology from the Greek étymon,’ continued Professor Lovell. ‘The true sense of a word, from étumos, the “true or actual”. So we can think of etymology as an exercise in tracing how far a word has strayed from its roots. For they travel marvellous distances, both literally and metaphorically.’ He looked suddenly at Robin. ‘What’s the word for a great storm in Mandarin?’ Robin gave a start. ‘Ah – fēngbào?’* ‘No, give me something bigger.’ ‘Táifēng?’* ‘Good.’ Professor Lovell pointed to Victoire. ‘And what weather patterns are always drifting across the Caribbean?’ ‘Typhoons,’ she said, then blinked. ‘Taifeng? Typhoon? How—’ ‘We start with Greco-Latin,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Typhon was a monster, one of the sons of Gaia and Tartarus, a devastating creature with a hundred serpentine heads. At some point he became associated with violent winds, because later the Arabs started using tūfān to describe violent, windy storms. From Arabic it hopped over to Portuguese, which was brought to China on explorers’ ships.’ ‘But táifēng isn’t just a loanword,’ said Robin. ‘It means something in Chinese – tái is great, and fēng is wind–’ ‘And you don’t think the Chinese could have come up with a transliteration that had its own meaning?’ asked Professor Lovell. ‘This happens all the time. Phonological calques are often semantic calques as well. Words spread. And you can trace contact points of human history from words that have uncannily similar pronunciations. Languages...

They studied sound changes; why the English knee had a silent k that was pronounced in the German counterpart; why the stop consonants of Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit had such a regular correspondence with consonants in Germanic languages. They read Bopp, Grimm, and Rask in translation; they read the Etymologiae of Isidorus. They studied semantic shifts, syntactical change, dialectical divergence, and borrowing, as well as the reconstructive methods one might use to piece together the relationships between languages that at first glance seemed to have nothing to do with each other. They dug through languages like they were mines, searching for valuable veins of common heritage and distorted meaning. It changed the way they spoke. Constantly they trailed off in the middle of sentences. They could not utter even common phrases and aphorisms without pausing to wonder where those words came from.

They could no longer look at the world and not see stories, histories, layered everywhere like centuries’ worth of sediment.

And the influences on English were so much deeper and more diverse than they thought. Chit came from the Marathi chitti, meaning ‘letter’ or ‘note’. Coffee had made its way into English by way of Dutch (koffie), Turkish (kahveh), and originally Arabic (qahwah). Tabby cats were named after a striped silk that was in turn named for its place of origin: a quarter of Baghdad named al-‘Attābiyya. Even basic words for clothes all came from somewhere. Damask came from cloth made in Damascus; gingham came from the Malay word genggang, meaning ‘striped’; calico referred to Calicut in Kerala, and taffeta, Ramy told them, had its roots in the Persian word tafte, meaning ‘a shiny cloth’. But not all English words had their roots in such far-flung or noble origins. The curious thing about etymology, they soon learned, was that anything could influence a language, from the consumption habits of the rich and worldly to the so-called vulgar utterances of the poor and wretched. The lowly cants, the supposed secret languages of thieves, vagabonds, and foreigners, had contributed such common words such as bilk, booty, and bauble. English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.

Robin took Sanskrit with Professor Chakravarti, who began their first lesson by scolding Robin for having no knowledge of the language to begin with. ‘They should teach Sanskrit to China scholars from the beginning. Sanskrit came to China by way of Buddhist texts, and this caused a veritable explosion of linguistic innovation, as Buddhism introduced dozens of concepts that Chinese had no easy word for. Nun, or bhiksunī in Sanskrit, became ni.* Nirvana became nièpán.* Core Chinese concepts like hell, consciousness, and calamity come from Sanskrit. You can’t begin to understand Chinese today without also understanding Buddhism, which means understanding Sanskrit. It’s like trying to understand multiplication before you know how to draw numbers.’ Robin thought it was a bit unfair to accuse him of learning out of order a language he’d spoken from birth, but he played along. ‘Where do we start, then?’ ‘The alphabet,’ Professor Chakravarti said cheerfully. ‘Back to basic building blocks. Take out your pen and trace these letters until you’ve developed a muscle memory for them – I expect it’ll take you about half an hour. Go on.’