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Bio |
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Arika Okrent was born in Chicago and became fascinated with languages at an
early age. She flitted from language to language in school, wondering why she
couldn't just settle down and commit to one, until she finally discovered a field
that would support and encourage her scandalous behavior: Linguistics. After
some lengthy affairs with Hungarian (she taught in Hungary after college) and
American Sign Language (she earned an M.A. in Linguistics from Gallaudet, the
world's only university for the deaf), she began a Ph.D. program at the
University of Chicago, where she fell hard for Psycholinguistics. She first
worked in a gesture research lab, and later took up with a brain research lab,
where she conducted the experiments that would earn her a degree in 2004. By
that time she had begun to spend long afternoons with the languages that even
linguists think they're too good for -- the artificial languages, losers like
Esperanto and Klingon. Initial feelings of pity and revulsion gave way to
fascination and affection, and she embarked on a whirlwind romance with the
history of invented languages. The love child of this passion is her book In the Land of Invented Languages. |
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