Hi! I am Gabor. Welcome to my world of Palaeolinguistics!
|
| I spent my childhood of the fifties and sixties in a small town of 25,000. There is no place on this map which I did not visit with my bicycle, on the hot summer days, filled with a smell of breeze blowing gently from the corn and wheat fields. The tiny blue stream on the west is the Mostonga. Once in the past, it dominated the area by making the land marshy. The City was once a palisade fortress built on one of the islands, which name was long lost in time. Today the only remains are the outlines of the streets, still following the routes of the ancient ditches. |
 |
|
Here, with the help of this map, that I got from my dad, and the Révai Lexikons (something equivalent to the Encyclopaedia Britannica), I developed my first love for ancient mysteries: when was all this created? How did it look like? What people did live here? Who made those ditches, hillforts, who left the golden treasures buried in the graves, still to be found occasionally? What did they see, think or feel, standing on the same place, where I stood?
|
The Mostonga, how it looked like in winter 1971,
when I was a second year University student. |
This geographical feature was created at the end of the Pleistocene (Ice Age) by the Danube's biblical floods, which devastated the area. The scars of those events still can be seen 40 kms from the Danube, but today you need keen eyes, full of imagination (and a good map) to be able to recognize them.
The melioration of the endless marshes took place about 1793-1802. The impression of standing on the shores, must have been greatly changed since 3,000 years ago, when the Celtic-Gallo-Wallach people lived here.
The name Mostonga is still of obscure etymology. We don't know even which language is it coming from.
|
|
During long school holidays, when other children kicked the ball on the streets, I was browsing the books, drawing maps and daydreaming. At one stage I even wanted to study archaeology, but the life brings different destinies.
Now, I am far away where I started from, living down-under in a new country (on the title picture you can see me with the Sydney plain behind, on a beautiful lookout in the Blue Mountains). Everything is different here, still, this is where I returned to my first passion: to ancient mysteries - but this time from a linguistic point of view. Here is where I understood, that the mystery does exist only if there is no available way to explore it. But, when a new method comes forth, the old mystery goes away. For me this is a great joy, but a moment of sadness too, the same time. I wish I could share with you the love for it.
|
Picture credit: many thanks to the author and owner of the above picture
Richard Bator ©1998 Sydney e-mail: bator@enternet.com.au |
  FastCounter by bCentral |
|