#r-f-huang
The word loss was inadequate. Loss just meant a lack, meant something was missing, but it did not encompass the totality of this severance, this terrifying un-anchoring from all that he'd ever known. #loss #grief
"Every language is complex in its own way. Latin just happens to work its complexity into the shape of the word. Its morphological richness is an asset, not an obstacle. Consider the sentence he will learn. Ta hui xue. Three words in both English, and Chinese. In Latin, it only takes one. Disce. Much more elegant, you see?" Professor Lovell #complexity
"[You don't know English] as well as you think you do. Plenty of people speak it, but few of them really know it, its roots and skeletons. But you need to know the history, shape, and depths of a language, particularly if you plan to manipulate it as you will one day learn to do. And you'll need to attain that mastery of Chinese as well. That begins with practicing what you have." #language
"You see?" asked Anthony. "Languages aren't just made of words. They're modes of seeing the world. They're the keys to civilisation. And that's knowledge worth killing for."
"Words tell stories." This was how Professor Lovell opened their first class that afternoon, held in a spare, windowless room on the tower's fifth floor. "Specifically, the history of those words - how they came into use, and how their meanings morphed into what they mean today - tell us just as much about a people, if not more, than any other kind of historical artefact."
"We get the word etymology from the Greek etymon," continued Professor Lovell. "The true sense of a word, from etumos, the "true or actual". So we can think of etymology as an exercise in tracing how far a word has strayed from its roots. For they travel marvellous distances, both literally and metaphorically."
Phonological calques are often semantic calques as well. Words spread.
They studied semantic shifts, syntactical change, dialectical divergence, and borrowing, as well as the reconstructive methods one might use to piece together the relationship 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 even utter 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. #linguistics
"Translators are always being accused of faithlessness," boomed Professor Playfair. "So what does that entail, this faithfulness? Fidelity to whom? The text? The audience? The author? Is fidelity separate from style? From beauty??
"There is no right answer, of course. None of the theorists before you have solved it either. This is the ongoing debate of our field. Schleiermacher argued that translations should be sufficiently unnatural that they clearly present themselves as foreign texts. He argued there were two options: either the translator leaves the author in peace and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace and moves the author towards him. Scheiermacher chose the former. Yet the dominant strain in England now is the latter - to make translations sound so natural to the English reader that they do not read as translations at all." #communication #translation
"There are no kind masters, Letty," Anthony continued. "It doesn't matter how lenient, how gracious, how invested in your education they make out to be. Masters are masters in the end." #slavery #power
Robin wondered then how much of Anthony's life had been spent carefully translating himself to white people, how much of his genial, affable polish was an artful construction to fit a particular idea of a Black man in white England and to afford himself maximum access in an institution like Babel. And he wondered if there would ever be a day that came when all this was unnecessary, when white people would look at him and Anthony and simply listen. when their words would have worth and value because they were uttered, when they would not have to hide who they were, when they wouldn't have to go through endless distortions just to be understood. #race #equality
Professor Craft tried, haltingly, to comfort them, surveying her memory for ancient words on this most human of dilemmas. She spoke to them of Seneca's Troades, of Lucan's Vulteius, of the martyrdom of Cato and Socrates. She quotes to them Cicero, Horace, and Pliny the Elder. Death is nature's greatest good. Death is a better state. Death frees the immortal soul. Death is transcendence. Death is an act of bravery, a glorious act of defiance. #death #literature