Have you ever had the experience of reading something for the first time and then realizing that you had actually read it before and just forgotten?  There should be a name for that; there probably is, in German at least.

Last night I was reading George van Driem’s absolutely amazing two volume Languages of the Himalayas, a book I love for its eccentric encyclopedic breadth of knowledge.  (Eccentric because, for example, chapters are entitled “Kings of the Forest,” “Men of the Jungle”, and “Flotsam and Jetsam along the Southern Slopes.”  And because he has an idiosyncratic ‘symbolic theory of language.’  But encyclopedic because he somehow knows about all — and I mean all — Himalayan languages.)

Anyway, it’s not a book that you read from cover-to-cover but I was looking at the Burushaski section last night and wandered over to the Turkic section, getting more and more lost the whole time.  Eventually I got to this:

Also in [China’s] Gansu province live the ‘Yellow Uighur’, quite distinct from the Uighur proper, who speak a language closely related to Uzbek.  Yellow Uighur is now usually called Yugur, which actually does little to alleviate potential confusion, because the Yugur are a linguistically heterogeneous group.  The Western Yugur speak an Eastern Turkic language, and the Eastern Yugur speak a Mongolian language.  Some ‘Yellow Uighur’ even speak an Amdo dialect of Tibetan.  (pp. 1210-1211)

If you had asked me yesterday about it, I would have said that this — especially the fact that there are Tibetan-speaking Yellow Uighurs — was mindbendingly complicated and utterly new to me, but at some point in the past I had apparently had the exact same epiphany and scrawled “This finally and conclusively puts it over the top for me” in the margins.