bragging about my children, or yet ANOTHER freebie Esperanto can get you...

I have frequently told the story of how I became interested in Esperanto when my 8-year old son, who was already becoming interested in languages and communication, came to me with his idea for making up a new language of his own. We searched together on the internet to learn about planned languages and discovered Esperanto (among other things) -- he soon learned enough about it for his purposes and was off, littering the house with scraps of paper filled with his own proto-alphabet/syllabary and budding vocabulary and grammar -- but I was taken by the simplicity, functionality and, sure, beauty of Esperanto -- with just a few days, I was reading stories and newsgroups in a foreign language! I had never had that experience before.

Anyway, over the last six or seven years I've puttered a bit with Esperanto, buying books now and again, and occasionally going to groups to listen and speak -- but I'm not very active with it. Maybe it would be unfair to call me an eterna komencanto, I think of myself as more of an eterna progresanto. No matter, it's fun!

But -- the point of this message -- for my son, his exposure to Esperanto came at a key moment in his early stages of interest in languages, which has continued and deepened dramatically over the years and has now led him to making the US linguistics team that will compete in Bulgaria this summer at the Interantional Linguistics Olympiad ! I didn't even know there were linguistics olympiads, but, in fact, in Russia and eastern europe, there is a 40 year history of local linguistics competitions , the annual international competition began in 2003, and, as of last year, the US participates! (Here's the link to last year's competition , held in St. Petersburg.

It might be a stretch to say Morris's success in competitive computational linguistics was due to Esperanto -- but it WAS very helpful and inspiring to him at a key time when he was starting to think more abstractly about languages. And, I noticed that in the emailed introductions the students on the US team have sent to each other (they'll meet in Skype later this month, and in person in late July), at least one other student mentions knowing Esperanto.