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

‘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. But that’s quite an advanced technique – don’t worry about that for now.’

He lifted the third bar to the right. ‘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.’^*

Professor Playfair put the bar down. ‘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 English would be a silver-worker’s dream – we’ve got such extensive dictionaries and we can trace the etymology quite clearly, so the bars would be wonderfully exact. But nobody thinks in Old English. Nobody lives and breathes in Old English. It’s partly for this reason that the Classics education at Oxford is so rigorous. Fluency in Latin and Greek are still mandatory for many degrees, though the reformers have been agitating for years for us to drop those requirements. But if we ever did so, half the silver bars in Oxford would stop working.’

‘That’s why we’re here,’ said Ramy. ‘We’re already fluent.’

‘That’s why you’re here,’ Professor Playfair agreed. ‘Psammetichus’s boys. Wonderful, no, to hold such power by virtue of your foreign birth? I’m quite good with new languages, yet it would take me years to invoke Urdu the way you can without hesitation.’

‘How do the bars work if a fluent speaker must be present?’ Victoire asked. ‘Shouldn’t they lose their effect as soon as the translator leaves the room?’

‘Very good question.’ Professor Playfair held up the first and second bars. Placed side by side, the second bar was clearly slightly longer than the first. ‘Now you’ve raised the issue of endurance. Several things affect the endurance of a bar’s effect. First is the concentration and amount of silver. Both these bars are over ninety per cent silver – the rest is a copper alloy, which is used often in coins – but the triacle bar is about twenty per cent larger, which means it’ll last a few months longer, depending on frequency and intensity of use.’

He lowered the bars. ‘Many of the cheaper bars you see around London don’t last quite as long. Very few of them are actually silver all the way through. More often, they’re just a thin sheen of silver coating over wood or some other cheap metal. 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—’