On Friday January 23, 2015, The Guardian, along with Minna Sundberg, published an article titled “The Case For Language Learning”. Written by Holly Young with photographs of artwork by Minna Sundberg, this article included a gorgeous artistic rendition of the Indo-European language family tree. When I stumbled into a photo of this tree, not in fact as a seven year old, but in fact last spring, I fell in love. Come this fall, when I was deciding on a project, this stumbled into my mind, and alas, here came my project.

When I was starting to do research for my project, creating a larger language family tree connecting the Indo-European family to much more than the Uralic family, I realized that connecting every single language on the planet was a little (very) ambitious and decided to cool it. That’s when I stumbled upon the Nostratic Hypothesis, a hypothesis doing exactly what I had wanted to do..with exactly as much credibility as something I could pull off, but it worked.

This is when I began researching, truly researching. That took a while, and was one of those things that made a lot of sense when I was doing it, but I did not take good enough notes to have that sense of recall. Thankfully, that will all come back to me when I work on my final research paper solely dedicated to explaining my tree. So, while the first half of my research was solely dedicated to getting enough information to create my tree, when I do my second half, I will do the research for my research paper.

Come my second IP10 Week, I was working on my first of two products: a felt tree visually representing the connections between the six language families represented in the Nostratic Hypothesis. While this is a long process that may not be finished soon, I hope to make good progress over spring break, as well as getting a good start on my second product. This will be research paper esque except more of a short academic summary of all my research, which also remind of the connection between these languages before the symposium.