#and talk about the adamic language and the tower of bable

[bookwyrminspiration]

AH QUIL i completely forgot i meant to respond to your response in entirety but the time has gotten away from me... genuinely did not mean to ignore it for so long haha! i appreciated it a lot!!! i love connecting with people through shared and similar experience!!!! (also i realize i thought i sent another ask or two but when i was writing it it was 3am and i have the vague memory of not sending at least one of them) and yeah! despite the differences it is weird and often difficult to look at all the places where your history has diverged from the root. it's so interesting to hear about your experiences with cultural connection and i mean it makes so much sense, too, in the context of the book: it's babel. i have been sitting around thinking about it since uhhh the day i sent that ask i think! i hadn't known a clue what it was about but now that i know it's about colonialism and language and translation etc etc.... it's a very fitting title like upon first look it took me a minute but then it kind of falls into context: colonialism and religion, the splitting of one language into hundreds of thousands of maybe-even-millions. it makes like absolute perfect sense dude i'm kind of like biting and growling about it. just a little. even though i haven't read the book yet! i was going to try to get ahold of it at the library but all the copies are checked out and there are over 30 holds T-T

No worries! I didn't even notice; I'm always forgetting to properly respond to things for embarrassing lengths of time.

I also love connecting with people, the solidarity and similarities that can be found even though the way we're affected is different. Like, you haven't been taught your language(s) by your parents (yet), mine doesn't know the language and so can't teach me, and yet the result is the same, which is that a language that otherwise would've been as natural to us as breathing is absent. And we can feel and grieve the absence.

It's very interesting to hear about your experiences as well--I know we're focusing on language, because it's Babel, but just in general. Your culture beyond language, both disconnect and what you are connected to. I love learning about others

And yes! The title is incredibly fitting! The dissection and tearing apart of language to its minutiae, the hubris. I must admit I don't know much about the story of Babel, just what I've anecdotally heard, so don't take my Tower of Babel commentary too deeply.

I've also been thinking of title in relation to babble. And the all to common comments on how other languages sound like "babble" and are ridiculous (read: foreign) and are therefore "lesser", and yet despite that belief (which is present in the story), it's so crucial to their world. It is a story about the power of that "babbling", how it's demeaned and condemned and yet their world quite literally cannot safely function without the language and translation powering it. It's a story about languages. That was actually the first connection I made with the title because i had completely forgotten the Tower of Babel was a mythologically important thing, so I figured I'd share. There is so much packed into that title!! Even just the word "babel" sans the additions (Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution)

I hope you can get your hands on a copy soon! If I could lend you my family's copy I would, but alas </3