Tidbits from a (Russian) linguist friend.

Last month I got together with a (Russian) linguist friend to catch up and to ask him some questions on my Egyptian research, and it was a trip.

He's such a nice and affable person, with the odd combination of being both sharp and incredibly humble, in a really sincere and authentic way.

At one point, he said that in his research he finds a lot that past scholars just erect these giant "edifices" on very little evidence, and that when you go back to the evidence, there's very little there at all, even though everyone else just keeps repeating and accepting the findings endlessly.

After we had been drinking some - I had brought mead, and we sat outside on a park bench at an appropriate distance apart as we talked - I kind of gave him this crazy idea I had about how hieroglyphics maybe work based on what I'd seen in later stages of the language, and I was like, "Isn't that kind of f*cked up?", and he just kind of was like "meh" and was like, "Writing systems are imperfect."

Later, too, I told him about this book that came out this year from a major university press by a major scholar who's given a recent keynote address at a linguistics convention, and that the book keeps mixing up historical change with phonology when it lays out the stages of the language.

"That's not good," he was like, but in a really simple and direct way, without being mean-spirited.