For the next week, I am going to be away attending a workshop and there is apparently no internet access there. I am sure I will go through withdrawal, but I’ll look forward to posting upon my return.
Here are a few articles for you to read in the meantime.
This article is about learning specialized vocabulary and includes the following quote: “Sailing is just one more thing I’ve taken up as an adult but wish I’d begun doing as a child. The reason for wishing that isn’t just the experience that would have accrued by now. It’s the innateness you feel for things you have been doing a long, long time, the utter lack of self-consciousness with which you inhabit a language that seems outlandish to newcomers.”
The next piece is a review of Indo-European Poetry and Myth by M.L. West and it discusses the language of asterisks, i.e. the ur-Indo-European language:
“West reconstructs the Indo-European world on increasingly complex levels: first language (grammar and vocabulary); then poetry; then myth. Poetry, with some of the formal solidity of language and some of the inspirational idiosyncrasies of myth, mediates between them. The poetic parallels can be quite striking, and West makes the most of them. Of a certain pattern of three proper names, for instance, he says: ‘It is hard to avoid the inference that this was a traditional formula from the common poetic inheritance. Here we seem to find a remnant of the Indo-European storyteller’s building work: a recognisable structural component, with the lineaments of its verbal patterning still in place.’”
Finally, this article discusses a way of writing that might become popular in the future. Here is the man who wrote 200,000 books!
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