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From: Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@parhasard.net>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Thomas Young died (10-5-1829)
Date: Sun, 12 May 2024 21:01:27 +0100
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 Ar an t-aonú lá déag de mí Bealtaine, scríobh Ross Clark: 

 > "Polymath...made notable contributions to the fields of vision, light, solid
 > mechanics, energy, physiology, language, musical harmony, and Egyptology."
 > 
 > Some of you probably know the other stuff, but it's the last that's most
 > familiar here. I believe PTD was of the opinion that Young deserved at least as
 > much credit as Champollion for the decipherment of hieroglyphics, if not more.
 > 
 > More detail at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Young_(scientist)
 > 
 > And that ain't all. Crystal points out that Young coined the term
 > "Indo-european" (in an 1814 review of Adelung's _Mithridates_).
 > 
 > AND
 > Here's a nice statement by Young (from the same review) about the
 > "language/dialect" business that has been a perennial on sci.lang and a.u.e.:
 > 
 > "It is ... absolutely impossible to fix a correct and positive criterion of the
 > degree of variation which is to constitute...a distinct language: for instance,
 > whether Danish and Swedish are two languages or two dialects of one...."
 > 
 > AND
 > "In an appendix to his 1796 Göttingen dissertation De corporis hvmani viribvs
 > conservatricibvs there are four pages added proposing a universal phonetic
 > alphabet (so as 'not to leave these pages blank'; lit.: "Ne vacuae starent hae
 > paginae, libuit e praelectione ante disputationem habenda tabellam literarum
 > vniuersalem raptim describere"). It includes 16 "pure" vowel symbols, nasal
 > vowels, various consonants, and examples of these, drawn primarily from French
 > and English." (Wiki)

Very impressive!

I’m attempting to learn Latin at the moment chiefly for the more recent
literature (of that vintage), good to have a text I would have interest in.

  “His words were not those in familiar use, and the arrangement of his ideas
  seldom the same as those he conversed with. He was therefore worse calculated
  than any man I ever knew for the communication of knowledge.”

An unusual thing to say about a (from the looks of things) successful
physician, the job involves explaining specialised things all day every day to
laypeople who don’t know the jargon and have a normal enough “arrangement of
ideas.”

-- 
‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out /
How your man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stout’
(C. Moore)