Babel, or The Necessity of Violence

“That's the beauty of learning a new language. It should feel like an enormous undertaking. It ought to intimidate you. It makes you appreciate the complexity of the ones you know already.”

This book is a masterpiece, methinks. A Dark Academia game changer. It's masterfully crafted and it made me fall in love with linguistics more than I already do. It's a very thought-provoking and emotional story. I adored all the lessons about etymologies and the unique magical system.

“How strange,' said Ramy. ‘To love the stuff and the language, but to hate the country.”

“For how could there ever be an Adamic language? The thought now made him laugh. There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language; there was no candidate, not English, not French, that could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one. And translation – a necessary endeavour, however futile, to move between them.”