Before I came down with COVID, I'd been casting about for new ideas about the one ancient language that I've been studying intensively for the past few years, and I had arrived at a new strategy for getting them:
1) Intensively read through texts from different eras and think about how A connects to B;
2) Read through bit by bit this new edition of a big fat book of patterns of how sh*t changes in the world's languages; and
3) Find big fat comprehensive grammars of different stages of the language I'd been studying, in order to read through them and see what clues people had missed, in relation to unanswered questions I'd had.
Often, too, I'd look sh*t up in normal dictionaries and etymological dictionaries and whatnot, and very frequently I'd just kind of stare off into space, and muse.
Also, kind of randomly I'd been reading a historical handbook of a modern language of scholarship for which we have the ancient counterpart, and that gave me a sense of what is potentially knowable for the language I've been studying, and that only served to confirm for me once again just how f*cked so much of scholarship in that area is.
Anyhow, I'm only like a third of the way through the first grammar of the language I've been studying, and just by doing that a half hour a day, I've been turning up new "obvious in retrospect" sh*t just left and right.
It's kind of insane.
Heck, while I was stuck at home for a few weeks with COVID, I came up with 3-5 fun and sexy and memorable idea alone during that time, one perhaps major major.
No comments:
Post a Comment