Thoughts......

I sat in the class listening to the teacher talk about Rorschach Tests, as well as the method of showing a picture and then asking the patient to tell a story based on the picture. The idea is to let the person's subconscious thoughts and feelings influence the response, to give a window into what they are really thinking or feeling, what is going on behind the facade that they put up. It didn't make sense to me. It still doesn't. I raised my hand and asked a question. To the best of my recollection, it was something like this. "How do you deal with people who are self conscious enough to guess, or know, the purpose of the exercise and, rather than give a raw and unedited answer, would be wondering at what they were inadvertently revealing with their answer and thus self edit?" To me, this seemed like a no-brainer. I wasn't about to reveal to someone else things that I wasn't even sure of myself. I would be self-reflecting at my answers, trying to determ...

       So I’ve written in the past about the evolution of language and how linguistics attempts to make sense of all this. What I’d like to do now is to explain how a dead language- a language no one speaks today (and hasn’t for the past 3,000 years!); a language that was not written down or preserved for us in any form- can be resurrected from across the lost millennia. The process itself is fascinating, like a mystery where every clue contributes to the ultimate answer. It also provides insight into the migration patterns of these ancient peoples and their descendants. But more than that, once those descendants have been identified and the mother language has been reconstructed, its culture, and even some of its mythology, can be retrieved from the mists of time. To me, this is the most fascinating aspect of historical linguistics, the ability peer deep into the past and catch a glimpse of an ancient people whose only legacy is in the daughter languages and cultu...