Re: Caryatic

Matthais î gagarfa-ga:

> I know Andrew Sihler somewhat, having taught at the University of
Wisconsin
> for a year.  Although he was retired by that point, he took me out to
dinner
> a couple times.  I found him very warm and thoroughly charming.  Were
you a
> student and/or friend of his?  Did he ever respond to your postcard?
     If he was retired it must have been relatively recently. Too bad I
had no idea who you were at the time ;)
     I was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison classics department
from 96 to 98, at which point I got my M.A. I asked for a year off and
never ended up coming back officially, though I'm still around expending
my time on Ancient Egyptian and the like.
     While I was here I audited about one class by Sihler every
semester--I didn't take them officially because of my mean classics
teachers who always pressured me not to wander too far off the True
Path--one of the main reasons I quit.
     I wrote him this postcard after taking one of his comparative IE
classes. And no, he never really responded to that one. I did eventually
provide him with the translation, but I never wrote up a report on it (I
had planned to write an analysis in the style of his own handouts).
Although Sihler's _New Comparative Grammar of  Greek and Latin_  is a
wonderful resource for conlangers, he himself is not into constructed
languages. I once mentioned to him that someone I knew (specifically our
own Contrarian Conlanger Rakko) was constructing a new Romance Language,
he replied "Tell him to stop: we have too many already!" Consequently he
much prefered the next postcard I wrote him, which was in Old
Persian--he actually made an attempt at decyphering that one, but got
frustrated with the writing system and gave up.
     Anyway, if I had known abotu you I might have invited you to the
Mad Linguists' party I threw last summer. Professor Sihler did show, as
did Rakko (who was also the recipient of the second postcard in the
_Corupus Epistularum Caryaticarum_... I'll eventually post that too). I
served hors d'oeuvres made from genuine Ancient Roman recipes... no one
wanted to touch them ;)

-JDM

Reply