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

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 misspelled in a way that leaves the m out. 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 our hypothesis about linked origins is wrong. Etymology is detective work across centuries, and it’s devilishly hard work, like finding a needle in a haystack. But our particular needles, I’d say, are quite worth the search.’

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

In addition to Etymology, they each took on an extra language that year. The point was not to attain fluency in this language, but to, through the process of its acquisition, deepen their understanding of their focus languages. Letty and Ramy began studying Proto-Indo-European with Professor De Vreese. Victoire proposed a number of West African languages she hoped to learn to the advisory board, but was rejected on the grounds that Babel possessed insufficient resources for proper instruction in any of them. She ended up studying Spanish – Spanish contact was relevant to the Haitian-Dominican border, Professor Playfair argued – but was none too happy about it.