Sunday, July 30, 2023

Some mild optimism.

I've been increasingly optimistic about my research on that one dead language that I've been working on a for a number of years, now.

I had already brought with me necessary knowledge around the most modern stage, and now -- much faster than I ever anticipated! -- I've developed some baseline competency in the necessary scripts.

My last research project has also helped me realize major categories of flaws in current scholarship, whereas I used to be a lot more trusting with it, like there was a "there there" when something was difficult to understand.

Really, from here on out it seems like it's more cake, where you just keep up script knowledge and memorize words and read around in scholarship and different texts of different eras, and wait until you have ideas.

Like, I have around 4-6 major questions right now around stuff that doesn't seem to make sense, although I don't have any answers for any of it, yet.

To some extent this stuff is unpredictable, like when I'll have a major insight that I can move forward on, but I've already done a huge amount of the skills-building to have a foundation where I can do that work.

It really is like a linguist friend said to me once, it takes you five years before you can say anything.

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