14. I Am Not Yet So Lost In Lexicography (look it up!)

I have to state that Philology, both Comparative and special, has been my favorite pursuit during the whole of my life, and that I possess a general acquaintance with the languages & literature of the Aryan and Syro-Arabic classes – not to say that I am familiar with all or nearly all of these, but that I possess that general lexical and structural knowledge which makes the intimate knowledge only a matter of a little application.

I was going to quote the whole – I guess today we'd call it a “cover letter” – James Murray wrote when applying for a position with the British Museum in 1867, but no. The fact that he was thirty years old and rattling off his proficiency in SO MANY LANGUAGES (heck, I thought my Progeny Cycle's character Iris was a polyglot, but she's only fluent in seven!) and he STILL didn't get hired … that's just crazy. But – say that with a very long “u” – if Murray had been hired, he would likely have never started or organized what would become the greatest conceivable reference word of the English-speaking world, the Oxford English Dictionary. Yes, it would ultimately take seventy-one years to complete, and I still remember these giant black-colored volumes you can find in any reference section detailing not only the meaning of the word but also how it's been used, when it was first used, etc.

[Heck, I've got space, I will quote the whole.] With several I have a more intimate acquaintance as with the Romance tongues, Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, Latin & in a less degree Portuguese, Vaudois, Provenḉal and various dialects.

In the hands of a lesser author, this story could be as exciting as watching paint dry. But in the hands of Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman (ISBN 006099486X) makes magic. If the title doesn't catch your attention, perhaps the subtitle will: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. One of the major contributors and researchers for the Dictionary which pretty much redefined what dictionaries are meant to do – define words and give examples of their varieties of usage, and this wasn't quite formulated by the mid-19^th century – was a Civil War veteran, a surgeon who had access to a vast personal library. When Murray finally decided to pay him a visit some decades after the OED (“the mother of dictionaries” now being known by that acronym) was underway to thank him for all his help; there was always a reason the ex-surgeon couldn't come himself, and when Murray went to visit him, he found out why.

In the Teutonic branch, I am tolerably familiar with Dutch (having at my place of business correspondence to read in Dutch, German, French & occasionally other languages), Flemish, German, Danish.

William Minor had for the last three decades been an inmate in an asylum for the criminally insane. Drop. And the other major book I've read and finished this past week, I was surprised I enjoyed: Yann Martel's Life of Pi (ISBN 0156027321), about a young boy from India in a family that owned a zoo there. (It's also got some interesting arguments about keeping animals in a zoo as opposed to letting them run wild. ) Piscine Patel – I'll let you figure out why he shortened it to the nickname “Pi” – and a Bengal tiger end up in a lifeboat after the vessel transporting all the other animals and Pi's family capsized and sunk. Again, this sounds like fodder in the hands of a lesser author, BUT this work narrated by a much older Pi of his two-hundred-day sojourn drifting in the Pacific and surviving on whatever he could (sounds like the much older story of Noah and the ark, minus population) works.

In Anglo-Saxon and Moeso-Gothic my studies have been much closer, I having prepared some works for publication upon these languages.

Got the kids to Bible camp at Bethany for their third day, and I saw them getting started by playing “Watermelon Patch” with the Camp Metigoshe counselors leading the program. Sarah's REALLY good at this, the idea being to stay completely still and resist the farmers' – the players who are walking around – efforts to get them to smile or laugh or otherwise move, and as I left they were shifting to “Tomato Patch” and among others it was Sarah's turn to be a farmer. Jeffrey … do not ask him to defuse a bomb, let's put it that way. Twenty-five kids are there now that I know of, and before we left this morning Jeffrey in his lucid moments during playing Mario Kart on the Nintendo DS and goading while being goaded by his sister said sadly how he was going to miss Bible camp when it was, when it will be, over this Friday. I expect the eldest child will too.

I know a little of the Celtic, and am present engaged with the Sclavonic [sp.], having obtained a useful knowledge of the Russian.

I'm glad to know Mr. Murray did not let grass grow under his feet … anyway, after work I got home for dinner last night, where Martha had made two boxes of macaroni and cheese which the four of us actually all got through, no leftovers. Usually we're notorious about leftovers, sometimes to the point where they grow their own civilizations, wink wink nudge nudge. And we're eating more on our now-cleaned off AND IT WILL STAY CLEAN (quoth the Martha) dining room table, which is great because we get to face each other at night and not – from my point of view – get all our impressions filtered through an iPad, laptop, Nook, or DS. Right now the only major extra-gathering spots on the first floor of our house are in front of (and on) my bookshelf in the corner of the dining room beside the bathroom and in front of the dryer itself, but the latter's mostly blankets. The bookshelf's a lottery!

In the Persian, Achaemenian Cuneiform, & Sanscrit [sp.] branches, I know for the purposes of Comparative Philology.

I remember reading that if you know Lithuanian, you can write and have a conversation in simple Sanskrit. Unfortunately, all my Sanskrit-fluent friends are unavailable for conversation. Ah well, back to the English … last night after dinner we set up a game of Farkle. That's the dice game where you want to get three of a kind and keep in play with at least a new one and a new five, accumulating points with every roll unless you “farkle” by not getting a one or five to keep in play. So do you want to keep your points or risk it all? That confronts you every time you survey your roll. And we're supposed to continue the game after dinner tonight, but anything can happen in the Alvin household! Considering the nature of much of what is not real, it's better that way. (Borrowed that one from Alan Dean Foster's novel Into The Out Of; I think it suits me, don't you?)

I have sufficient knowledge of Hebrew and Syriac branches to read at sight the Old Testament and Peshito; to a less degree I know Aramaic Arabic, Coptic and Phoenician to the point where it was left by Genesius.

I will settle for sufficient wisdom, David