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‘Right. It’s fairly good going.’ Robin took a sip of wine. ‘Though Professor Craft lectures like she wouldn’t notice if she were speaking to an empty room, and Professor Playfair seems to have missed a calling for the stage.’
Professor Lovell chuckled. Robin smiled, despite himself; he had never been able to make his guardian laugh before.
‘Did he give you his Psammetichus speech?’
‘He did,’ said Robin. ‘Did all that really happen?’
‘Who knows, except that Herodotus tells us so,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘There’s another good Herodotus story, again about Psammetichus. Psammetichus wanted to determine which language was the foundation of all earthly languages, so he gave two newborn infants to a shepherd with the instructions that they should not be allowed to hear human speech. For a while all they did was babble, as infants do. Then one day one of the infants stretched out his little hands to the shepherd and exclaimed bekos, which is the Phrygian word for bread. And so Psammetichus decided the Phrygians must have been the first race on earth, and Phrygian the first language. Pretty story, isn’t it?’
‘I’m assuming no one accepts that argument,’ said Robin.
‘Heavens, no.’
‘But could that really work?’ asked Robin. ‘Could we actually learn anything from what infants utter?’
‘Not that I’m aware of,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘The issue is it’s impossible to isolate infants from an environment with language if you want them to develop as infants should. Might be interesting to buy a child and see – but, well, no.’ Professor Lovell tilted his head. ‘It’s fun to entertain the possibility of an original language, though.’
‘Professor Playfair mentioned something similar,’ said Robin. ‘About a perfect, innate, and unadulterated language. The Adamic language.’
He felt more confident talking to the professor now that he’d spent some time at Babel. They were on more of an equal footing; they could communicate as colleagues. Dinner felt less like an interrogation and more like a casual conversation between two scholars in the same fascinating field.
‘The Adamic language.’ Professor Lovell made a face. ‘I don’t know why he fills your minds with that stuff. It’s a pretty metaphor, certainly, but every few years we get an undergraduate who’s determined to discover the Adamic language in Proto-Indo-European, or otherwise wholly invent it on his own, and it always takes either a stern talking-to or a few weeks of failure for him to come back to his senses.’
‘You don’t think that an original language exists?’ Robin asked.
‘Of course I don’t. The most devout Christians think it does, but you’d think if the Holy Word were so innate and unambiguous, there’d be less debate about its contents.’ He shook his head. ‘There are those who think that the Adamic language might be English – might become English – purely because the English language has enough military might and power behind it to credibly crowd out competitors, but then we must also remember that it was barely a century ago that Voltaire declared that French was the universal language. That was, of course, before Waterloo. Webb and Leibniz once speculated that Chinese might, in fact, have once been universally intelligible due to its ideogrammatic nature, but Percy debunks this by arguing Chinese is a derivative of Egyptian hieroglyphs. My point being, these things are contingent. Dominant languages might keep a little staying power even after their armies decline – Portuguese, for instance, has far outstayed its welcome – but they always fade from relevance eventually. But I do think there is a pure realm of meaning – a language in between, where all concepts are perfectly expressed, which we have not been able to approximate. There is a sense, a feeling of when we have got it right.’
‘Like Voltaire,’ Robin said, emboldened by his wine and rather excited that he could remember the relevant quote. ‘Like what he writes in his preface to his translation of Shakespeare. I have tried to soar with the author where he soars.’
‘Quite right,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘But how does Frere put it? The language of translation ought, we think, as far as possible, to be a pure, impalpable, and invisible element, the medium of thought and feeling, and nothing more. But what do we know of thought and feeling except as expressed through language?’
‘Is that what powers the silver bars?’ Robin asked. This conversation was starting to get away from him; he sensed a depth to Professor Lovell’s theorizing into which he wasn’t prepared to follow, and he needed to bring things back to the material before he got lost. ‘Do they work by capturing that pure meaning – whatever gets lost when we invoke it through crude approximations?’
Professor Lovell nodded. ‘It is as close to a theoretical explanation as we can get. But I also think that as languages evolve, as their speakers become more worldly and sophisticated, as they gorge on other concepts and swell and morph to encompass more over time – we approach something close to that language. There’s less room for misunderstanding. And we’ve only begun to work out what that means for silver-working.’
‘I suppose that means the Romanticists might eventually run out of things to say,’ said Robin.
He was only joking, but Professor Lovell nodded vigorously at this. ‘You’re quite right. French, Italian, and Spanish dominate the faculty, but their new contributions to the silver-working ledgers dwindle by the year. There’s simply too much communication across the continent. Too many loanwords. Connotations change and converge as French and Spanish grow closer to English, and vice versa. Decades from now, the silver bars we use from Romance languages might no longer have any effect. No, if we want to innovate, then we must look to the East. We need languages that aren’t spoken in Europe.’
‘That’s why you specialize in Chinese,’ said Robin.
‘Precisely.’ Professor Lovell nodded. ‘China, I’m quite sure, is the future.’
‘And that’s why you and Professor Chakravarti have been trying to diversify the cohorts?’
‘Who’s been gossiping to you about departmental politics?’ Professor Lovell chuckled. ‘Yes, there are hurt feelings this year because we only took one Classicist, and a woman at that. But that’s how it has to be. The cohort above you are going to have a tough time finding jobs.’
‘If we’re talking about the spread of language, I wanted to ask...’ Robin cleared his throat. ‘Where do all those bars go? I mean, who buys them?’
Professor Lovell gave him a curious look. ‘To those who can afford them, of course.’
‘But Britain is the only place where I’ve ever seen silver bars in wide use,’ said Robin. ‘They’re not nearly so popular in Canton, or, I’ve heard, in Calcutta. And it strikes me – I don’t know, it seems a bit strange that the British are the only ones who get to use them when the Chinese and Indians are contributing the crucial components of their functioning.’
‘But that’s simple economics,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘It takes a great deal of cash to purchase what we create. The British happen to be able to afford it. We have deals with Chinese and Indian merchants too, but they’re often less able to pay the export fees.’
‘But we have silver bars in charities and hospitals and orphanages here,’ said Robin. ‘We have bars that can help people who need them most. None of that exists anywhere else in the world.’
He was playing a dangerous game, he knew. But he had to seek clarity. He could not construct Professor Lovell and all his colleagues as the enemy in his mind, could not wholly buy into Griffin’s damning assessment of Babel, without some confirmation.
