yole's journey in languages

When I was telling my colleagues that I was leaving JetBrains, some of them responded with something like “it’s great that you’ve now found your true calling”. I couldn’t really agree with this sentiment, because in fact I never lost it, and it’s not really more “true” than software development, to which I happily dedicated over 25 years of my life. It’s just that I felt that it’s the right time to set the other calling aside and to focus on linguistics. And now I’d like to talk for a bit about the very beginning of this journey.

My first encounter with linguistics was in my pre-school years, through a popular linguistics book by a Russian linguist Lev Uspensky. I was a voracious reader, and my parents had this book at home, so I read it – but I don’t remember that it made a significant impression back then.

The true introduction to the study of languages was in the gymnasium – the first (and, as far as I know, still the only) classical gymnasium of St.Petersburg. We studied Latin and English for six years, Ancient Greek for four, and German for three. And the most important part of the studies for me was not the specifics of each language (even though I still remember the Latin grammar quite well), but rather the understanding of how language works in general, and the appreciation of those structures.

Interestingly enough, even though we learned quite a few texts by heart (Caesar, Horace, Vergil and so on), the one thing that stuck in my memory the most was the Latin translation of a song from a Russian cartoon about Cheburashka – “Пусть бегут неуклюже…” I have no idea who or when did the translation, and I wasn’t able to find it online, so just for posterity I’ve published the text that I remember.

The second big influence at that time was Tolkien. The first complete Russian translations of “The Lord of the Rings” appeared during my first years in the gymnasium. We became huge fans, and soon after me and my friend Maria were able to borrow the books in English from our English teacher. We learned by heart all the poems – English, Russian, Elvish, we were happy with anything. Also, the Russian translation of “The Silmarillion” that we had included as an appendix “Etymologies” – a dictionary of Elvish roots which was never part of “The Silmarillion” itself but was published much later in “The Lost Road and Other Writings”. So we studied Elvish too, as much as we could.

This also inspired Maria to seriously get into conlanging. (We didn’t know the word back then, but at least we had the right idea of what was this about). She developed at least two languages to the point where she could write poetry in them, and a few more were in a less complete stage. Of course, I wanted my own language too, but I didn’t have as much patience (nor skill), so I abandoned mine much more quickly. But there’s one word from this language that still exists – “yole”, which I chose to identify myself on the Internet and keep using to this day.

(I wonder how many linguists of today were inspired by Tolkien. I found the list of publications of one of the researchers on whose papers I relied in my Lycian essay, and his first papers were on Dwarvish and The Black Speech.)

After school, Maria went on to study linguistics in the university, but I decided that it wasn’t an option for me – back then the entrance exams required me to write an essay about Russian literature, which I was really bad at, and I thought (most likely correctly) that I would fail the exams. So, from then until now, linguistics became my part-time hobby.