Whale whisperer. Time traveler. Robot wrangler.
For Gašper Beguš, associate professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley, it’s all in a day’s work.
Beguš’ love of languages started early. In elementary school in Slovenia, his education included learning the language of his home country, of course. But it also offered a hearty helping of linguistics, the scientific study of words, their meanings, and their past lives. He remembers coming across an etymological dictionary as a teenager, enraptured by the hidden world revealed between its covers.
“By the time I was in high school, I already knew that I wanted to do linguistics,” said Beguš, who can speak more than a half-dozen modern languages, and has studied over 10 that are long extinct. “It’s one of those things you’re basically almost born with.”
That curiosity has sent Beguš on manifold journeys, from uncovering lost sounds of ancient Sanskrit to carefully examining the clicks and codas that marine mammals use to communicate. At the Berkeley Speech and Computation Lab, Beguš has led efforts to create realistic artificial intelligence models that provide rare insights into how babies learn a language.
We talked to Beguš about time travel, interspecies communication, the power of libraries, and what linguistics can reveal about the world around us.