Just returned from over a week in Pittsburgh yesterday afternoon. Sitting here, back in the comfort of my apartment, only one thing really stands out from that competition:
Those kids were really talented.
The American team holding court in first place.
I’m inspired. I can’t tell you how many teenage polyglots I met at CMU who spoke, variously, Icelandic, or Nahuatl, or Basque, or Kutchi, or barcode. An eighteen year old Russo-Canadian who spoke nine languages fluently; an eighteen year old Israeli-American who spoke Inuit, Basque, and dreamed in code; an eighteen year old from Pittsburgh who graduated high school at sixteen and is now interning at CMU, writing a pan-Bantu morphological analyzer. It’s hard not to be intimidated by prodigies like these, the smartest high schoolers in the world, and yet, here, now, I’m just inspired.
There was a long time in high school when, in retrospect, I was debilitatingly awkward and depressed and poured all of my angst into languages. I used to desperately live linguistics. Recently, over the last couple of years, I’ve hit a groove, and I think I got lazy, and I stopped being hungry. The teenage linguists at CMU reconnected me with that curiosity, and I’m ready to learn again.
Going to put this acrtlie to good use now.
First time here. Nice blog and super post. Well done.
Fantastic post. Some great points you mention in there.