UC San Diego: Academic interest (PIQ 6)

My grandmother says certain things only make sense in Armenian. For years I thought that was nostalgia. Then in an AP Statistics class, of all places, I learned the word for a claim you cannot prove with data, and I realized she was describing something real about how language carries meaning that does not survive translation.¹That became my obsession: linguistics, the study of how language actually works under the hood. Inside the classroom, I pushed it where I could. In English, I wrote my research paper on why Armenian has no gendered pronouns and what that does to translated novels.In Spanish, I started keeping a notebook of constructions that exist in one of my languages but not the others, like the Armenian middle voice, which is neither active nor passive, a verb that something happens to you through.²But classrooms ran out of room fast, so I went outside them. I taught myself the International Phonetic Alphabet from a library textbook and used it to transcribe my grandmother's pronunciation, which preserves sounds the modern dialect has dropped.³I enrolled in a free university course on phonetics online and emailed the professor a question about how diaspora dialects drift. He wrote back four paragraphs. I have read them more times than I will admit.Last summer I started a small podcast where I interview older relatives of friends, mapping how their heritage languages changed across the ocean. It has eleven listeners. I do not care. Each episode is a tiny field study.⁴At UC San Diego, I want to study computational linguistics, to turn what I do by hand and intuition into something rigorous. My grandmother was right. Some things only make sense in Armenian. I want to spend my life understanding exactly why.