The Babel Message: Updates, Mea Culpas, Errors and Corrections

Nicholas Al-Jeloo  provided translations into Eastern and Western variants of Classical Syriac and Modern Assyrian Aramaic:

I included the Western variants in the book, however, there was a mistake in my transcription. This will be corrected in the ebook and subsequent editions of the hard copy.

The list of languages on the Manuscript on page xxv in the hardback excludes Kazakh.

The Italian message on the cover should read ‘ATTENZIONE, leggere e conservare’ but the final ‘e’ has been left out in ‘conservare’. [Thanks to @terminologia on Twitter for pointing this out]

Ian Parri emailed me to point out what he called ‘a tiny mistake’ in the Welsh Message:

The second sentence should read: “Mae yna ddarnau bach y gellir eu mewnanadlu neu lyncu”. The “eu” refers to the plural possessive inferred in ‘ddarnau bach’ (small parts), while the “ei” in the book would be in the singular.

Of course this could simply be a typo introduced by me, rather than the original translator, Owen Shiers!

Ian also pointed out:

It is actually fairly common to see food and drink bearing labels wholly or partly in Welsh, and occasionally clothing, I’m glad to say. And as a translator, I recall being contracted to translate into Welsh one of those side-effects disclaimer sheets pharmaceutical companies insert into their packs of drugs. I’ve yet to be approached, however, by Ferrero!

That said, Ian did agree with me the products for sale across the UK or internationally rarely, if ever, carry Welsh.

Siôn Williams pointed out a tiny mistake in the middle sentence of The Message. It should read as follows:

Nid yw’r tegan yma yn addas ar gyfer plant plant o dan 3 blwydd oed.

Siôn also pointed out:

…you refer to Welsh being ‘commonly encountered in government websites.’ This, I believe is rather infelicitous terminology. There is a failure here to ascertain which government is being referred to – the UK Government indeed issues many documents (usually outsourced to, e.g. DVLA, TV Licensing etc) and provides websites in Welsh or bilingually (with English).

The Welsh Government of course, having now control on Welsh language policy (from 1999) and post de jure official status in 2011 has gone much further. Indeed, public bodies in Wales (or serving a Welsh speaking audience) are obliged to treat both languages equally and provide materials in the language of choice of the person requesting them. The Senedd is bilingual and the reports of e.g. proceedings of Plenary sessions as well as legislation (Acts, Statutory Instruments etc,) are printed in both languages. (The private sector is a little behind with this bilingualism, but e.g. banks provide brochures of their services and ATM instructions in both – and more – languages.)

A reader, ‘Emma C’, pointed out that the first word in the Czech Message in the book and on the cover should be UPOZORNĚNÍ, with an acute accent over the final ‘I’

In October 2022, an Amazon reviewer wrote:

Fun book, discursive, disquisitive, distracting and good stuff for a rainy day, but the author’s family nonsense word ‘compocorant’ (pp. 34-35) really does exist — it’s Latin, and means something like ‘they’ve arranged’. So grandad’s friend wasn’t being creative, just a bit punnishing.

I checked and it is true that ‘compocorant’ means ‘they have arranged’ in Latin. However a) it’s possible that the pronounciation and stress of the two compocorants are different and b) in my family story, the person who accused my grandfather of being compocorant is not the sort of person who would have known Latin and if he had would certainly not accuse my grandfather of being ‘they have arranged’, c) my family’s compocorant is an adjective whereas the Latin one is a verb.