* 無 (wú) means ‘negative, not, without’; 形 (xíng) means ‘appearance, form, shape’. 五行 means not just invisible, but intangible. To illustrate: the poet Zhang Shunmin of the Northern Song dynasty wrote once that ‘詩是無形的畫, 畫是有形詩’; that poems were incorporeal (wúxíng) paintings, and paintings were corporeal poems.
* 幫忙 (bāngmáng), ‘to help, to lend a hand’.
* Sarah Stickney Ellis, a well-known author, published several books (including The Wives of England, The Mothers of England, and The Daughters of England) arguing that women had a moral imperative to improve society through domestic propriety and virtuous conduct. Robin had no strong opinion on the matter; he’d picked up her work by accident.
* This is, frankly, quite a generous description of the Legal Department. One could also argue that the business of translators in Legal was manipulating language to create favourable terms for European parties. One example is the alleged sale of land by King Paspehay to the English in Virginia ‘for copper’, despite the obvious difficulty of translating precisely the notions of European kingship or land as property into Algonquin languages. The Legal solution to these issues was simply to declare that the Algonquins were too savage to have developed those concepts, and it was a good thing the English were there to teach them.
* He was not. The eighth floor of the Institute had been reconstructed seven times since the building’s initial construction.
* A good amount of foundational Western scholarship on Sanskrit was done by German Romantics such as Herder, Schlegel, and Bopp. Not all of their monographs had been translated into English – at least, not well – and so most students studying Sanskrit at Babel were also required to learn German.
* Cf. the related German unheimlich.
* This is true. Mathematics is not divorced from culture. Take counting systems – not all languages use base ten. Or geometry – Euclidean geometry assumes a conception of space not shared by all. One of the greatest intellectual shifts in history involves the transition from Roman numerals to the more elegant Arabic numerals, whose place-value notation and concept of zero, signifying nothing, made possible new forms of mental arithmetic. Old habits died hard; in 1299, merchants in Florence were banned by the Florentine Arte del Cambio from using both zero and Arabic numerals: ‘He shall write openly and fully by letter.’
* Like Robin, Ilse was known to the English not by her birth name but by an adopted name; a combination of a chosen Anglicized name (Ilse) and the island from which she’d come (Dejima).
* The boys stayed out of this one. Privately, Ramy thought Letty had a fair point that as a woman, she was entitled to inherit none of the Price estate to begin with. Robin thought it was a bit rich for her to call herself ‘impoverished’ when they were all receiving stipends sizable enough that they could dine out whenever they felt like it.
* Robin, Victoire, and Ramy were all very disappointed to learn that corned beef had nothing to do with corn, but with the size of rock salt crystals used to cure said beef.
* A swindler, a grifter.
* Thief’s slang for a gaoler (jigger meaning ‘door’, and dubber meaning ‘closer’).
* 坦途.
* ‘On Agriculture’.
* These receptions were entertaining at first, but quickly grew tiresome when it became apparent that Babel scholars were there less as distinguished guests and more as zoo animals on display, expected to dance and perform for wealthy donors. Robin, Victoire, and Ramy were always treated as national representatives of the countries they appeared to hail from. Robin had to put up with excruciating small talk about Chinese botanical gardens and lacquerware; Ramy was expected to elaborate on the inner workings of the ‘Hindu race’, whatever that meant; and Victoire, bizarrely, was always being asked for speculation advice in the Cape.
* Through Colin Thornhill and the Sharp brothers, Robin became aware of various ‘sets’ of people one might run with, which included ‘fast men’, ‘slow men’, ‘reading men’, ‘gentlemen’, ‘cads’, ‘sinners’, ‘smilers’, and ‘saints’. He thought perhaps he qualified as a ‘reading man’. He hoped he was not a ‘cad’.
* Many romantic Univ undergraduates fancied themselves successors to Percy Bysshe Shelley, who rarely attended lectures, was expelled for refusing to admit authorship of a pamphlet titled ‘The Necessity of Atheism’, married a nice girl named Mary, and later drowned in a violent storm off the Gulf of Larici.
* Robin, despite his general dislike of Shelley, had still read his thoughts on translation, which he grudgingly respected: ‘Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower – and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.’
* For example: ‘You know how the French refer to an unfortunate situation? Triste comme un repas sans fromage. Sad as a meal without cheese. Which is, really, the state of all English cheese.’
* Karl Wilhelm von Humboldt is perhaps most famous for writing in 1836 ‘On the Structural Difference of Human Languages and Its Influence on the Intellectual Development of the Human Race’, in which he argues, among other things, that a culture’s language is deeply tied to the mental capacities and characteristics of those who speak it, which explains why Latin and Greek are better suited for sophisticated intellectual reasoning than, say, Arabic.
* The military applications of this match-pair were really not as useful as Professor Playfair made them sound. It was impossible to specify which pieces of knowledge one wanted to remove, and often the match-pair only caused enemy soldiers to forget how to lace their boots, or how to speak the fragmented English they knew. The Duke of Wellington was not impressed.
* In the late eighteenth century, there had been a brief craze of the silver-working potential of created languages such as the abbess Hildegard of Bingen’s mystical Lingua Ignota, which had a glossary of over a thousand words; John Wilkins’s language of truth, which involved an elaborate classification scheme for every known thing in the universe; and Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty’s ‘Universal Language’, which attempted to reduce the world to a perfectly rational expression of arithmetic. All these faltered upon a common obstacle that later became accepted as basic truth at Babeclass="underline" that languages are more than mere ciphers, and must be used to express oneself to others.
* 風暴.
* 颱風.