Projects and books

I decided not to take the Basketweave pullover; too much stuff to haul, and the likelihood of my working on it when I could take some other fascinating small projects is low. So instead, I have the two shawls (Hop Vines and Ostrich Fern) from that new book I was talking about, the Fishtail wristwarmer pattern and some lovely autumnal-colored yarn (half merino, half silk, probably too nice for socks anyway). And the socks-currently-in-progress (Well, the Alpine Glow socks and the Goldengroves socks...). And the yarn for that unicorn amigurumi I was talking about, and also for an extremely cute panda amigurumi. And I wound off a ball of yarn from Dragonfly fibers called Winter Twilight.

And at first, I was going to do a cabled sock of it, but then I thought of Lydia Bennet's Secret Stockings. This yarn sort of calls out for a lace pattern, and also, the idea of a horseshoe pattern with a yarn that has Twilight (though not Sparkle) in its name sort of appealed to me. (Never mind that I found Lydia Bennet a somewhat annoying character; I vastly preferred Jane, or, of course, Lizzie) Though actually, in the "backstory" of the sock pattern, it was Kitty who made them. (I love that a pattern can have a made-up backstory, but one that actually seems plausible in the context of the novel that inspired it).

I wonder - are they going to do any more "Jane Austen Knits" special issues, or do they think people are out of ideas? I'd buy another issue if one came out. I AM buying the Harry Potter Knits special issue that is coming out very soon; even if I never knit anything from it it will be fun to read and fun to look at the patterns. And it makes me wonder what other kinds of fandom-knits there could be. I'd love to see a Golden Era Mysteries knit issue, with some of Campion's slipover sweaters (he wears a nifty one with narrow cables in a couple of the episodes, and I think he has a Fair Isle one that is not unlike the one the man who would have been Edward VIII (were it not for Mrs. Simpson) was shown wearing in a Punch cartoon of him)....And there could be one of the things Miss Marple knit, and perhaps a mustache-cover (!) for Hercule Poirot (he is described in one of the books, I think, as wearing something rather like a hairnet over his mustaches at night, to keep them in order). Of course, another fandom I consider myself a bit of a part of (not as much a joiner as some, but) could have things like Rarity's striped scarf (from Dragonshy), and maybe a headband that mimics the little coronet Rainbow Dash has as part of her Grand Galloping Gala costume, and maybe even a sleep-shade that either has Rarity's eyes embroidered on it, or looks like DJ PON-3's glasses....I know there are already Pony themed patterns out there (and for more than just amigurumi). (Why, I myself made a pair of socks that were inspired by a certain light-blue Pegasus....)

I did also select the books to take with me. I am taking Dancers in Mourning (another Campion, and one I realized I had not read. I admit I will be sad when I run through these; Campion is one of my favorite recurring characters). And I found an Inspector Alleyn that I don't think I've read yet. (I don't remember the title, but then again, often the US printings have different titles than the book originally had).

I also re-started "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language" - I read most of this last year, then I bogged down and got busy and it wound up getting chucked under the bed and forgotten about. I pulled it back out the other night (after realizing that a hugacious Barry Cunliffe book that I wanted to read was way too heavy to take). Once again, I'm enjoying the first part - about the first half of the book is about the attempted reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European (the hypothesized "common ancestor" of nearly all the European languages, and also some of the Eastern and Middle Eastern languages). Part of it is that I just like linguistics - I took several classes in it for my Social Sciences requirement as a college student (and then took a couple more, as electives). I actually thought of majoring in linguistics at one point but then realized a degree in that field would mainly equip me to teach linguistics at the dwindling number of universities with a department of such. (I guess the heyday of "philology" - which is what I really would have loved - was the 1930s.). Also, it's more politicized (Chomsky and his detractors) than even ecology is, and I would not have enjoyed that. So I still enjoy learning about it, even if I am a biology professor. (One of the great things no one really tells you explicitly in school - once you're done with the "required" courses you can go on learning whatever you want, provided you can find either books in it or someone willing to teach you)

Anyway, a lot of the historical linguistics research uses some of the same logic and thought processes to tease out the evolution of language as biologists use to figure out biological evolution, so it's a familiar thought process and it makes sense to me. Also, it's just cool and sort  of numinous (weird and a bit spooky) to think that maybe, just maybe, we've hit on a word that an ancestor of ours some 7000 years removed would recognize (Wheel, for example, they think was originally something like *kwekwelos. (The asterisk shows it's not a "real" word, it's a reconstruction).

The author also talks about how language changes - merchants and traders and entertainers tend to have their usage change faster; the very rich and the very poor are more conservative about language and theirs changes more slowly. He maintains that two individuals speaking ostensibly the same language but separated by 1000 years would not be mutually understandable. (English, for example: the English of 1013 would not yet have been influenced by the Normans, and so a good percentage of the words English speakers use today would not have joined the language yet) I have read things like Old English renderings of the Lord's Prayer and I can see this - some of the words are still vaguely familiar, you can kind of get what's going on from the cadence and the position of words in the document. (Then again - years and years ago, traveling with my family in a very remote part of the Southwest, a Sunday morning, the only station we could pick up on the radio was broadcasting in Hopi, and we were kind of able to guess that it was a church service and even guess when they were saying the Lord's Prayer, even though none of us knew even a word of the language).

But anyway: fascinating to me, partly because it makes me wonder about life "back then." What would my life be like were I alive then? (I suppose, provided I survived the various childhood diseases and also stuff like childbirth, I'd probably be a grandmother. I am guessing that being unattached (how ever the ancients viewed marriage) and childless were considerably less of an option then than now). When did people first start building shelters to live in? When did furniture arise, and how? When did humans first start using what was recognizable as language? (All of that speculation comes before the time of the book I'm currently reading; the author refers to there having been "cities" and some of the time frames he talks about overlap with times when places like Ancient Israel would have existed....)