After first-year exams, the cohort disperse for summer immersion: Ramy to Madrid, Letty to Frankfurt, Victoire to Strasbourg, and Robin to a strict missionary college in Malacca. Reuniting in Oxford, they gain access to silver-working theory. In an eighth-floor seminar, Professor Playfair lectures on untranslatability, snaps at Letty for touching Evie Brooke’s desk, and demonstrates match-pairs: kárabos/caravel (better catches), triacle/treacle (antidote), and idiótes/idiot (induced forgetting). He stresses limits, dependence on fluent speakers, endurance, and maintenance—admitting Babel profits by “touch-ups.” He then engraves a translation match-pair; the bar convulses and shatters, proving such pairs are catastrophically self-destructive.

At the Buttery, Anthony Ribben describes the grind of discovering match-pairs, lack of royalties, and why only ~1,200 are in use: as languages intermingle, semantic distortions weaken. He bluntly frames colonial languages as a prized resource; Robin notes China’s fear of teaching Mandarin to foreigners.

Professor Lovell’s Etymology course reframes language as history, illustrating with knave and typhoon, and explaining methods for reconstructing change. The cohort’s speech and thought evolve as they trace borrowings through English. For their additional language, Letty and Ramy study Proto-Indo-European; Victoire is pushed to Spanish; Robin takes Sanskrit with Professor Chakravarti, who links Buddhist transmission to Chinese and drills him from the alphabet upward. The workload is crushing, but their friendships deepen; Robin rows, the girls fence, and they skate in winter. Robin longs to preserve this equilibrium.

Late in Michaelmas, Daguerre brings a prototype camera. Babel launches a competition; Anthony solves the problem and earns a share of the patent. The device becomes a sensation. The four friends sit for a portrait: Letty is delighted, Ramy unsettled, and Robin concludes the image, like translation, flattens and impoverishes what it captures.