Life — May 14, 1925 — page 9: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# "The Lost Language" by Robert Benchley This is primarily a linguistic article, not a political cartoon. The page discusses Professor Nunsen's theory about the "Semi-Huinty" language group—a hypothetical connection between ancient Hamitic languages and Northern European languages. The central diagram shows linguistic relationships between "Proto-Hamitic" and "Proto-Aryan" language families, tracing how root words (like "dish-towel" in English) appear across different language groups. Benchley's satire is gentle: he pokes fun at philologists' difficulty in proving whether truly "lost" languages ever existed, and how obscure linguistic theories can become. The humor lies in the scholarly pedantry required to make such connections plausible, rather than any specific political reference.