Your letter has drawn me from the solitude in which I had shut myself up for nearly nine months, and from which I found it hard to stir. You will not guess what I have been about. I will tell you for such things do not happen every day. I have been making a list of from two to three hundred radical words of the Russian language, and have had them translated into as many languages and jargons as I could find. Their number exceeds already the second hundred. Every day I took one of these words and wrote it out in all the languages which I could collect. This has taught me that Celtic is like the Ostiakian: that what means sky in one language means cloud, fog, vault, in others; that the word God in certain dialects means Good, the Highest, in others, sun or fire…
- Letter from Catherine the Great, dated 9 May 1785, from Curious Versions of Modernity, D.l. Martin, MIT Press 2011
[as found @ Blind Pony Books]
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pleasebequietplease said:
i saw this on tumblr a few weeks ago and mysteriously bought it after taking ambien. it looks really cool.
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ars-moriendi posted this
