Joyce tutored two young women in English, while living in Zurich. He read to them from Ulysses. He did this to demonstrate to the girls that English was also inadequate at times.
The girls asked him: Aren’t there enough words in English?
Joyce replied: “Yes, there are enough, but they aren’t the right ones.”
(It was this attitude which led him into the creation of a new language in Finnegans Wake.)
