Department No. IX · Study room
A small room with eight chairs and no examinations. Admiration is permitted; showing off is not.
I. Reverence — these tongues are dead, few, or hopeful; behave accordingly. Handle the grammars with both hands. Do not lean on the Basque dictionary; it is load-bearing.
II. One tongue. One chair, one tongue, one hour. Those learning Icelandic while revising Greek will be asked to choose, kindly the first time.
III. Corrections in writing. Pronunciation may be corrected only in writing, on the slips provided, and deposited in the box. Imitations of the Icelandic r for comic effect count as a second offence.
IV. No showing off — reciting the Aeneid to impress the corridor is showing off. So is greeting the porter in Inuktitut syllabics unless the porter has greeted you first. The Steward's ruling on showing off is final and unappealable.
Which tongue to start, honestly, one paragraph each.
Shelf 01
Start here if you like rules that stay still. Latin lays grammar out on the table with the parts labelled: six cases, five declensions, four conjugations, no exceptions admitted without a footnote. The honest cost is stated plainly: there is no one to telephone, pronunciation is by agreement rather than evidence, and the ablative absolute will find you whether you revise it or not.
Shelf 02
Start here if Latin seemed too tidy and you own a second pencil. The alphabet is learned in a week and the verb takes a year; in between come the article, the middle voice, and the accents, which mark a music no one now hears. The honest cost is ongoing: particles without English equivalents, verbs with principal parts like luggage, and Plato, who rewards the effort and notices if you have skipped.
Shelf 03
Start here — the Season recommends it — if you like rules that are kept and a dictionary that invents rather than borrows. Schoolchildren can puzzle out the sagas, which is more than English schoolchildren can say of Beowulf. The honest cost is the declensions, the double ll, and a speech community largely on one windswept island.
Shelf 04
Start here if you want a living Celtic tongue with evening classes, broadcasting, and signage to practise on. Spelling is regular once the digraphs are accepted. The honest cost is the initial mutations, which change the beginnings of words by grammar, and the ll, which must be rehearsed out of earshot.
Shelf 05
Start here if you want a genuine isolate, unrelated to anything else on the shelf, with an ergative case and a verb that files a full report. The honest cost is vocabulary with no cognates to lean on and five dialects that notice which classroom you attended.
Shelf 06
Start here if you want pronunciation that does what it says, fifteen letters and long vowels marked fairly with macrons. Kōhanga reo materials are welcoming and the greetings work immediately. The honest cost is distance, if you live elsewhere, and the obligation to learn custom with the words, which is only right.
Shelf 07
Start here if you want one word to do the work of a sentence and a syllabary worth the week it takes. The honest cost is everything else: a dialect chain across the Arctic, scarce materials south of it, and no corridor in which to overhear it practised.
Shelf 08
Start here if you want the kindest slope on the shelf: regular spelling, no exceptions, and a congress willing to talk to you in week one. Sixteen rules and no irregular verbs. The honest cost is the remark at parties — that you learned the easy one — and the small matter of having nowhere strictly necessary to use it.