So, I was talking with my one (Chinese-American) coworker at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, and I was saying that I was a bit nervous that someone will come across my one major major major ancient language discovery before I have a chance to sufficiently gather up all the loose ends and debut the idea, even though this is completely new in the research history of this one language and it hasn't happened yet ever in the entire history of research, so it's not likely to happen now, apart from me.
"But what kind of work did you have to put in to get this far?", he was like.
And so, I then listed off how I had to learn all the language phases and scripts, and how I've been gatheriing observations out of this one phase that no-one pays much attention to, and on top of that I had to read a gigantic encyclopedic linguistics book that people probably consult but don't plough through, and then I also have been reading comprehensive language grammars cover-to-cover for ideas, and just in general I've had to engage in multiple years of open-ended thinking that no-one really has the leisure for, keeping bits of ideas and observations in a notebook all the while.
And, this is rethinking of a major thing that people don't even recognize as a problem, it's so settled and unquestioned in basic grammars and recent scholarship, and it involves like assembling multiple, multiple overlapping pieces, some with slight shifts, and others wholly new, in addition to my having recently studied the history of one branch of this well-recorded and well-researched entirely different language family, that's given me a point of comparison where I have different and higher expectations for what can be known, than other researchers in the area.
"Yeah, it sounds like your brain isn't accurately assessing the situation, you're probably fine," he was like, using therapy-speak.
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