Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - Demo - (Page 28)

Hooked on Ling by Rebecca Jacobs I t all started with Steven Pinker’s book The Language Instinct. I was 13 and interested in cognitive science, but I had no idea what linguistics was until this book opened my mind to the incredible complexity of language. When I finished it, I spent hours reading about linguistics on websites like Language Log and Wikipedia and, later, in linguistics textbooks. After a while, my family’s dinner conversations turned to interesting features of different languages. For instance, Ubykh, a recently extinct language spoken in the Caucasus, has 84 different consonants (more than any other language) and only two vowels (the smallest possible number), while Rotokas, spoken in Papua New Guinea, has only six consonants and five vowels, the smallest number of sounds in any language. I was fascinated that languages could express essentially the same concepts in such vastly different ways. Linguistics—which I discovered is not an attempt to learn many languages, but rather a scientific study of the structures of languages—was engrossing and challenging. I was hooked. Olympic Dreams In my sophomore year of high school, I read announcements on Language Log and the Art of Problem Solving forums that a North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO) would be held in the spring. The top four students would travel to Russia to represent the U.S. at the fifth International Linguistics Olympiad. It would be the first time the U.S. sent a team to the ILO. Determined to do as well as possible at NACLO, I solved all the practice problems I could find online. On the official NACLO testing day in March, I logged on for the five-hour, eight-problem test. The first problem required determining whether several invented English adjectives described good or bad qualities, using sentences like “Strungy and struffy, Diane’s performance was a pleasure to watch” and “Carla is blitty but struffy.” The problems in the first half got progressively harder but still were manageable. The second half had more of a computational or theoretical linguistics focus. One problem required considering errors in three sets of English text, characterizing the nature of those errors, and explaining how a computer program might fix them. Once the exam was over, I took a deep breath and began the month-long wait for the results. U.S. 2007 ILO competitors Michael Gottlieb, Rebecca Jacobs, Adam Hesterberg, Josh Falk, and Jeffrey Lim pose with coach Dragomir Radev. Adam Hesterberg won the top award in the individual competition. Where There’s a Will The summer before my sophomore year, I attended the six-week Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics (HCSSiM)—a fun and intense experience that I wanted to replicate the next summer, but in a linguistics program. I was excited to discover the Linguistics Society of America’s four-week summer institute, held at Stanford that year, which promised a variety of courses taught by some of the nation’s top linguists. I promptly joined the LSA and registered for the institute. A few days later, the coordinators e-mailed to ask if I was a teacher at the high school I had listed as my affiliation. I told them that I was a student and that I would be 15 during the summer. The reply was, “We need to talk to your parents.” Over spring break, we traveled to Stanford to meet with Peter Sells, the program director. I spent a good part of the meeting talking with Dr. Sells about linguistics books, invented languages, and other linguistics topics. Then he and my parents discussed how a rising high school junior could participate in a program designed for graduate students. Permission granted, I eagerly began to register for courses: Intro to Computational Linguistics, Intro to Morphology, Intro to Phonology, and Intro to Semantics. And then the results from the North American March/April 2008 28 imagine Dragomir Radev

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - Demo

Imagine Magazine - March/April 2008 Contents Letters Big Problems Big Picture In My Own Words Putting E-Waste in Its Place Big Juice Making Waves What Does "Green" Mean? Into the Woods Swimming with Whale Sharks Crash Course in Costa Rica Selected Opportunities & Resources Hooked on Logistics Off the Shelf Word Wise Middle Ground One Step Ahead Exploring Career Options Planning Ahead for College Students Review Creative Minds Imagine Sudoku Knossos Games

Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - Demo

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