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

Help from postgraduates here was technically forbidden, but sweet, kind Cathy O’Nell surreptitiously slipped Robin a faded yellow pamphlet on the basics of match-pair research one afternoon when she caught him looking dazed and scared in the library.

‘It’s just in the open stacks,’ she said sympathetically. ‘We’ve all used it; have a read through and you’ll be fine.’

The pamphlet was rather dated – it was written in 1798, and employed many archaic spellings – but did contain a number of brief, easily digestible tips. The first was to stay away from religion. This one they already knew from dozens of horror stories. It was theology that had got Oxford interested in Oriental languages in the first place – the only reason Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac had initially become subjects of academic study was the translation of religious texts. But the Holy Word, it turned out, was both unpredictable and unforgiving on silver. There was a desk in the north wing of the eighth floor that no one dared approach because it still occasionally emitted smoke from an unseen source. There, it was rumoured, some foolish graduate fellow had attempted to translate on silver the name of God.

More helpful was the second lesson in the pamphlet, which was to focus their research by looking for cognates. Cognates – words in different languages that shared a common ancestor and often similar meanings as well^* – were often the best clues for fruitful match-pairs, since they were on such close branches of the etymological tree. But the difficulty with cognates was that often their meanings were so close that there was little distortion in translation, and thus little effect that the bars could manifest. There was, after all, no significant difference between the word chocolate in English and in Spanish. Moreover, in looking for cognates, one had to be wary of false friends – words which seemed like cognates but had utterly different origins and meanings. The English have did not come from the Latin habere (‘to hold, to possess’), for example, but from the Latin capere (‘to seek’). And the Italian cognato did not mean ‘cognate’ like one might hope, but rather ‘brother-in-law’.

False friends were especially tricky when their meanings appeared related as well. The Persian word farang, which was used to refer to Europeans, appeared to be a cognate of the English foreign. But farang actually arose from a reference to the Franks, and morphed to encompass Western Europeans. The English foreign, on the other hand, originated from the Latin fores, meaning ‘doors’. Linking farang and foreign, then, produced nothing.^*

The third lesson in the pamphlet introduced a technique called daisy-chaining. This they vaguely recalled from Professor Playfair’s demonstration. If the words in their binary match-pair had evolved too far apart in meaning for a translation to be plausible, one could try adding a third or even fourth language as an intermediary. If all these words were engraved in chronological order of evolution, this could guide the distortion of meaning more precisely in the way they intended. Another related technique was the identification of a second etymon: another source that may have interfered in the evolution of meaning. The French fermer (‘to close, to lock’) was for instance quite obviously based on the Latin firmāre (‘to make hard, to strengthen’) but had also been influenced by the Latin ferrum, meaning ‘iron’. Fermer, firmāre, and ferrum could then, hypothetically, create an unbreakable lock.

All these techniques sounded good in theory. They were much harder to replicate. The difficult part, after all, was coming up with a suitable match-pair in the first place. For inspiration, they took out a copy of the Current Ledger – the comprehensive list of match-pairs in use across the Empire in that year – and skimmed through it for ideas.

‘Look,’ said Letty, pointing at a line on the first page. ‘I’ve figured out how they make those driverless trams run.’

‘Which trams?’ asked Ramy.

‘Haven’t you seen them running around in London?’ said Letty. ‘They move of their own accord, but there’s no one driving them.’

‘I always thought there was some internal mechanism,’ said Robin. ‘Like an engine, surely—’

‘That’s true of the larger ones,’ said Letty. ‘But the smaller cargo trams aren’t that big. Haven’t you noticed they seem to pull themselves?’ She jabbed excitedly at the page. ‘There are bars in the track. Track is related to trecken, from Middle Dutch, which means to pull – especially when you go through the French intermediary. And now you have two words that mean what we think of as a track, but only one of them involves a moving force. The result is the tracks pull the carts forward themselves. That’s brilliant.’

‘Oh, good,’ said Ramy. ‘We’ve only got to revolutionize transportation infrastructure during our exams, and we’ll be set.’