Snoqualmie

It took some time, but my dreams have been realized.

I've finally managed to convince my office that I'm a harmless lunatic. Apparently, and this is good to know, being vegan and tattooed and wearing capacitor bracelets is perfectly normal behavior but studying mostly-dead languages at one's desk for fun is not.

My effort to become obscurely multilingual, or at least multiliterate (which is much more likely given that this is me I'm talking about), began today thanks to the combined efforts of Amazon.com and the US Postal Service. With their powers combined, they will be... an entity engaged in the business of delivering to me a copy of William Dwight Whitney's Sanskrit Grammar, 5th edition, first published 1924.

I've had my grubby mitts on the text in question for four and a half hours as of this writing, and already I find myself plunged into a torrid and giddy love affair with the Devanagari alphabet. It's gorgeous. It's weird. The basic unit of the written language is not the letter, which changes form depending on the surrounding letters, nor the word, which is freely abused by the writing conventions of joining final consonants with the initial vowels of the following words and omitting all spacing between words, but the syllable. The book idly exhibits an example of a Vedic verse translated, transliterated and divided into syllables as it would be written, and written in its natural form. I've been picking through it trying to identify the syllables and their components, scribbling clumsy characters and excited notes on a sheet of scratch paper when I figure out that, for instance, that neat little loop under the upturned L is a letter that's a little like "v" and when it's written with a right-facing hook above it it's a syllable like "rva". The short "a" sound is implied, and that tiny hook is a diminished form of the graceful sway that is an "r" standing alone.

I'm in heaven. It's like learning a secret code, but the letters are either architectural or alive. A word is a row of lean-to roofs holding each other up with tails and antennae poking out above and below. The dipthong "ai" gives a word delicately protruding limbs, while a long "a" gives it stability. When I recognized the curly tail of a "d" without consulting the alphabet chart, I got so excited that my scribbles took up half of the next line on the page.

I would continue, but I can't rhapsodize properly when someone's arguing with me about my plants. Please hold; all calls will be answered in the order they were received.