* In an act of incredible academic generosity, they allowed this improved system to also be referred to as the Morse Code.
* A list of offences that Babel undergraduates had got away with in the past included public intoxication, brawling, cockfighting, and intentionally adding vulgarities to a recital of the Latin grace before dinner in hall.
* The character 爆 is composed of two radicals: 火 and 暴.
* Ramy was, though he did not know it, then at the centre of a debate between the Orientalists, including Sir Horace Wilson, who favoured teaching Sanskrit and Arabic to Indian students, and the Anglicists, including Mr Trevelyan, who believed Indian students of promise ought to be taught English.
This debate would come down firmly on the side of the Anglicists, best represented by Lord Thomas Macaulay’s infamous February 1835 ‘Minute on Education’: ‘We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern – a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.’
* Wilson’s election to this position had raised something of a controversy. He had been in heated competition with Reverend W.H. Mill for election, and Reverend Mill’s supporters spread the rumour that Wilson had insufficient character for the job, as he had eight illegitimate children. Wilson’s supporters defended him on the grounds that in fact, he had only two.
* ‘Goodbye; may God be your protector.’
* The proliferation of Britain’s railways had happened very quickly after the invention of silver-powered steam engines. The thirty-five-mile Liverpool-to-Manchester line, built in 1830, was the first railway built for general use, and nearly seven thousand miles of track had been laid around England since. The line from Oxford to London would have been built much sooner, but Oxford’s professors delayed it for nearly four years on the grounds that such easy access to the temptations of the capital would wreak moral havoc on the young, naive gentlemen left in their care. And because of the noise.
* Baynes ended up placing a cannon in front of the English Factory to keep the Chinese from seizing his wife, and it was all very exciting for a fortnight until the lady was at last peaceably persuaded to leave.
* This society, founded in November 1834, was created with the goal of inducing the Qing Empire to become more open to Western traders and missionaries through deploying ‘intellectual artillery’. It was inspired by the London Society, which generously elevated the poor and dissuaded political radicalism through the gift of education.
* Reverend Gützlaff indeed often went by the name Ai Han Zhe, which translates as ‘One who loves the Chinese’. This moniker was not ironic; Gützlaff really did see himself as the champion of the Chinese people, whom he referred to in correspondence as kind, friendly, open, and intellectually curious people who unfortunately happened to be under the ‘thralldom of Satan’. That he could reconcile this attitude with his support for the opium trade remains an interesting contradiction.
* 洋貨.
* 晴天, qīngtiān; qīng meaning ‘clear’, tiān meaning ‘the skies or heavens’.
* Guǐ (鬼) can mean ‘ghost’ or ‘demon’; in this context, it is most commonly translated as ‘foreign devil’.
* This was true, though Ramy did so only because he would not have been allowed to matriculate otherwise.
Religion had always been a point of contention between the four of them. Though they were all mandated by the college to attend Sunday services, only Letty and Victoire did so willingly; Ramy, of course, resented every minute, and Robin had been raised by Professor Lovell to be a devout atheist. ‘Christianity is barbaric,’ Professor Lovell opined. ‘It’s all self-flagellation, professed repression, and bloody, superstitious rituals as dress-up for doing whatever one wants. Go to church, if they make you, but take it as a chance to practise your recitations under your breath.’
* Horace, on the education of youths to ward off corruption. ‘A cask will long retain the flavour of that with which it was first filled.’
* From the Latin rabere: ‘to rave, to be mad’.
* 駟不及舌.
* Here Letty was referring to the establishment of humanitarian societies for the protection of Indigenous peoples in British territories, such as the evangelical authors of the 1837 ‘Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes’, which, though recognizing British presence had been a ‘source of many calamities to uncivilized nations’, recommended the continued expansion of white settlement and spread of British missionaries in Australia and New Zealand in the name of a holy ‘civilizing mission’. The Aborigines, they argued, would not suffer so greatly if only they learned to dress, talk, and behave like proper Christians. The great contradiction, of course, is that there is no such thing as humane colonization. The contribution of Babel to such a mission, meanwhile, was to supply English teaching materials to missionary schools and to translate English property laws to peoples displaced by colonial settlement.
* This is a great lie, and one that white Britons are happy to believe. Victoire’s following argument notwithstanding, slavery continued in India under the East India Company for a long time after. Indeed, slavery in India was specifically exempt from the Slave Emancipation Act of 1833. Despite early abolitionists’ belief that India under the EIC was a country of free labour, the EIC was complicit in, directly profited from, and in many cases encouraged a range of types of bondage, including forced plantation labour, domestic labour, and indentured servitude. The refusal to call such practices slavery simply because they did not match precisely the transatlantic plantation model of slavery was a profound act of semantic blindness.
But the British, after all, were astoundingly good at holding contradictions in their head. Sir William Jones, a virulent abolitionist, at the same time admitted of his own household, ‘I have slaves that I rescued from death and misery, but consider them as servants.’
* The poor Germanists always lost to the Romance linguists in these verbal spars, for they had to deal with hearing the words of their own King Frederick II of Prussia thrown back at them. Frederick was so cowed by the literary dominance of French that he wrote in 1780 an essay, in French, criticizing his native German for sounding half-barbarous, unrefined, and unpleasing to the ear. He then proposed to improve the sound of German by adding -a as the final syllable to a great quantity of verbs to make them sound more Italian.
* Gora – ‘white, pale’, in reference to skin colour. Sahib – a salutation of respect. Put together, with the right tone of sarcasm and vehemence, it means something else altogether. Let it not be forgotten that, though Jones professed a great love and admiration for Indian languages throughout his career, he initially turned his scholarly attentions to Sanskrit because he suspected indigenous translators of being dishonest and unreliable.