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

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.

‘Did I hear my name?’ Anthony slid into the seat across Robin. He peered around at their faces, then smiled knowingly. ‘Oh, I remember this look. Did Playfair give you his demonstration today?’

‘Is that what you do all day?’ Victoire asked him excitedly. ‘Tinker with match-pairs?’

‘Close enough,’ said Anthony. ‘It involves a lot more thumbing through etymological dictionaries than tinkering per se, but once you’ve seized upon something that might work, things get really fun. 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 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.’

‘Professor Lovell told me something similar,’ said Robin, remembering. ‘He’s convinced that Romance languages will yield fewer returns as time goes on.’

‘He’s right,’ said Anthony. ‘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 much as they’d like to pretend they own the building. 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 a revival of Manx and Cornish, but no one thinks that’s going to succeed. Same with Gaelic, but don’t tell Cathy. That’s why you three are so valuable.’ Anthony pointed at them all in turn except for Letty. ‘You know languages they haven’t milked to exhaustion yet.’

‘What about me?’ Letty said indignantly.

‘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 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?’