Babel

by R.F. Kuang

‘The Chinese fānyì, for example, connotes turning or flipping something over, while the second character yì comes with a connotation of change and exchange.

In Arabic, tarjama can refer both to biography ...

In Sanskrit, the word for translation is anuvad, which also means “to say or ...

The difference here is temporal, rather than the spatial ...

In Igbo, the two words for translation – tapia and kowa – both involve narration, deconstruction, and reconstruction, a breaking into pieces that ma...

The differences and their implications are infinite. As such, there are no languages in which translation...

Italian – tr...

‘Translate,’ he said. ‘Tradurre.’ The moment he lifted his hand from the ...

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 aga...

‘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 t...

‘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 contact with. Easy way to waste a couple dozen pounds if you’re not careful.’ He placed the engraving pen back on the worktable.

Never forget this. The ultimate viability of translation is a fascinating philosophical question – it is, after all, what lies at the heart of the story of Babel. But such theoretical questions are best left for the classroom. Not for experiments that might bring down the building.’

‘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.’

Languages affect each other; they inject new meaning into each other, and like water rushing out of a dam, the more porous the barriers are, the weaker the force.

Most of the silver bars that power London are translations from Latin, French, and German. But those bars are losing their efficacy. As linguistic flow spreads across continents – as words like saute and gratin become a standard part of the English lexicon – the semantic warp loses its potency.’

‘He’s convinced that Romance languages will yield fewer returns as time goes on.’

‘So much has been translated from other European languages to English and vice versa in this century.

We seem unable to kick our addiction to the Germans and their philosophers, or to the Italians and their poets. So, Romance Languages is really the most threatened branch of the faculty, as m...

The Classics are getting less promising as well. Latin and Greek will hang on for a bit, since fluency in either is still the purview of the elites, but Latin, at least, is getting more colloquial than you’d think. Somewhere on the eighth floor there’s a postdoc working on ...

That’s why you three are so valuable.’ Anthony pointed at them all in turn except for Letty. ‘You know languages they ...

‘Well, you’re all right for a bit, but only because Britain’s developed its sense of national identity in opposition to the French.

The French are superstitious heathens; we are Protestants. The French wear wooden shoes, so we wear leather. We’ll resist French incursion on our language yet. 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 ...

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.’

‘Do you know the official punishment in China for teaching Mandarin to ...

‘Professor Chakravarti told me the same thing. The Qing government are – they’re scared. They’re scared of the outside.’

‘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 peo...

‘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.’

‘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?’

‘And what weather patterns are always drifting across the Caribbean?’ ‘Typhoons,’ she said, then blinked. ‘Taifeng? Typhoon?

‘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...

‘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...

Languages are only shifting sets of symbols – stable enough to make mutual discourse possible, but fluid enough to reflect changing social dynamics. When we invoke words in ...

‘All you have to do is look at artefacts, documents, and the like. But how do you research the history of words? How do you determine how far they’ve travelled?’ Professor Lovell looked very pleased by this question. ‘Reading,’ he said.

‘There is no other way around it. You compile all the sources you can get your hands on, and then you sit down to solve puzzles. You look for patterns and irregularities.

We know, for instance, that the final Latin m was not pronounced in classical times, because inscriptions at Pompeii are misspe...

This is how we pin down sound changes. Once we do that, we can predict how words should have evolved, and if they don’t match our predictions, then perhaps o...

Etymology is detective work across centuries, and it’s devilishly hard work, like finding a needle in a haystack. But our particular needles...

That year, using English as an example, they began the task of studying how languages grew, changed, morphed, mul...

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 co...

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 lan...

They dug through languages like they were mines, searching for valuable veins of common heri...

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 pau...

Such interrogations infiltrated all their conversations, became the default way they made sense of each other and everything else.* They could no longer look at the world and not see stories, histories...

And the influences on English were so much deeper and more diverse than they thought. Chit came from the Marathi ch...

Coffee had made its way into English by way of Dutch (koffie), Turkish (kahveh), and o...