Were they speaking Spanish? I thought so initially, but my ear for languages is atrocious

I thought it was Latin. It wasn't Spanish as far as I could hear - but then my Spanish is basic.

Reading up on the game of senet. It's thought to be the ancestor of backgammon. Huh.

I'm pretty sure it was Latin. Or, at least, it was supposed to be Latin, though some of the pronunciation might have been dubious.

Latin was a lingua franca for a long time, too. "CJ" could have been around since ancient days, and had it for her native language, until Claudia was shipwrecked in more modern times....

(My roommate's uncle, a nice Irish Catholic boy from Boston, was with a lost patrol in WWII Algeria, and was able to get aid & directions from a small mission of native Catholic nuns... the only language they had in common was Church Latin.)

they were speaking Latin before switching to English...i can only assume for our ease in understanding. Or maybe that was when the realized they both spoke and understood the same language? Up till the last century everyone with an education learned Latin as a base, so educated folks from all over the world could communicate to an extent via Latin even if they didn't share a spoken language.

Claudia's garment and hair were pretty darned Hellenistic, so i'd buy 400BC for Jacob's birth-era.

eta: heh, maybe i should have read all the comments. Bit of an overlap.

There's discussion in Lightbulbs about setting an end date for this thread. Go and discuss if you have an opinion (maybe even if you don't).

If Allison Janney really did leave the Senet board for the kid to find

I assumed she just said that because she didn't want the boys to know that any other humans existed.

Per Mark Pellegrino, at least part of the episode takes place in 43 A.D. From other things I've read (that I've absorbed but not noted), Claudia landed on the island about 1 A.D. I explain this in the recap (which has been filed and should be up tomorrow).

Latin was the lingua franca of the western provinces. Koine Greek was the lingua franca of the eastern ones. There's a whole other bunch of stuff, too. I don't think the episode meant to give specific answers about it, though. This is an origin myth. It tells you what it tells you, but it never intends to tell you everything.

Seska, the episode grew on me as I wrote it up (which is unusual -- usually I hate the best of episodes by the time I'm done). I'l link to the recap, tomorrow. It's a long one, though.

Thanks, Cindy. I wish I enjoyed the show as much as I enjoy your recaps.

Ha. Today's Woot shirt has an awesome summary of the show:

Scared survivors of a plane crash. First they all fought each other. Then they had to organize against the mysterious forces of nature outside. Then they all fought each other. Then the Others showed up from outside. Then they all fought each other. Then they kinda all teamed up against the people in the rest of the plane who came from outside. Then they all fought each other. Then everybody that was left teamed up against a crazy guy in a boat who came from outside. Then they all fought each other. Then there were two groups of people fighting with each other, one group off the island and one group in the past, while still pretending to happily fit in among their relative outsiders. Then things went bad and they all fought each other openly. Then they slowly regrouped and fought each other a little, but mostly just stood together against the forces outside. Finally everybody was in one place and they decided fight together against the big evil monster who came from outside, and we just learned this whole thing started when two guys, standing together against outside forces, decided to fight each other because of the way their mother decided to fight against the outside forces to teach them to stand together. So we’re thinking that this week, there’s either going to be one last round of all fighting each other or maybe everyone will decide to stand against a previously unknown outside force, which they will then have to all join together to fight. Should be a good one, right?

Oh, and if that recap offends you, please keep in mind that, within the sentences, we’ve hidden the names of three Chinese authors, five obscure American pop songs, two noted German philosophers and the names of every member of the 1978 Harlem Globetrotters. So maybe now you’ll like it a little bit more.

Oh, thank you, Laura.

That's funny, Sunil. Is it just me, or is it hard to read, though?

My recap is up at TWoP. [link]

Here's a teaser:

Moral: There's this tantalizing glow. Its name and origin are both a big question mark, so I'll call it XX. Now there's some of this inside of man (let's call man XY), but once man is exposed to the glowing, warm, wet passageway leading to the XX source, he loses all restraint. Armed with only his tiny but mighty X, he tries to take the glowing, warm, wet XX and...

eta... Okay, is quoted text wider now than it used to be? Something looks different to me -- not just in P-C's post, but in mine, too.