Saturday, 28 June 2008

Jackie and I did some gardening and were visited by friends and family.

Today I read Harold Bayley’s classic The Lost Language of Symbolism: An Inquiry into the Origin of Certain Letters, Words, Names, Fairy Tales, Folklore, and Mythologies. Or at least I read the second volume in its original 1936 clothbound edition. Harold Bayley’s theories were eccentric bordering on dangerous: that the human race (or sometimes the Aryan race) originated in Atlantis and then spread across the world with a shared language and culture. If his theories were eccentric, his "scientific method" was hilarious: simply asserting that some sounds have common meanings across all the world’s languages regardless of any and all evidence to the contrary. I think I strained Jackie’s patience reading aloud the funny bits.