When you attend a happening where people with the same interest and passion come together, you can expect that discussions will go very much into detail or that people start using special terms of this field of interest etc. And to people not so much involved in this hobby/topic/passion, such things could appear pretty… odd. And of course, the same happens at a Polyglot Gathering, where it’s all about languages.
Not that the Gathering appeared odd to me – not at all! But at several occasions I thought, Oh my god, this is now really freaky and nerdy 
After having spoken with several participants who felt the same way, I decided it might be funny to remember some of these situations in a blog post.
Note: I use the word nerdy in a very appreciative way in this post and it was a great experience to meet so many like-minded people. So I hope nobody feels offended by this term
birds, Vögel, pájaros,…
Lesson learned #1 at the Gathering: It’s not funny to play language games with polyglots. Cesco and his friends organized a game night for the participants but I assume they would have never expected what happened then during the first game. The rules were pretty simple: form a team of 8 people and try to find translations of a given in as many languages as possible. Then the first team gives one translation, this language is out then and the next team needs to give a translation in any other language. Sounds easy, no?
The first given word was “bird” and the teams started easy with Vogel (German), oiseau (French) etc. To fast forward: We stopped after 50+ languages (incl. Klingon!) and tried then to continue with the more difficult word hiccup!!! Now you could think, wow, this by itself sounds really nerdy. No! What made the situation so freaky were the discussions around the game:
- Are Nynorsk and Bokmal (2 versions of Norwegian) counted as one or two languages?
- How do you express hiccup in Toki Pona?
- Are dialects allowed in the game + what is considered a dialect in this game? ( I brought a dictionary for Tyrolean – so this one counted :))
- Is Schnagglstoßen a legitimate Austrian German word for hiccup? I was sure it wasn’t and started a little fight with Robert over it. Unfortunately, he was able to find the word in a dictionary and I lost this battle L
- What means bird in Alsatian and is the team able to find an online dictionary to proof their translation?
Script geek
The second game of the evening was something like “identify and read the script”. The idea was to present ten English words in different scripts and the participants should try to identify as many words as possible. I skipped this game because the only foreign alphabet I know was Cyrillic and that was far too little knowledge for this game
So when the hosts were about to present the solutions, I was sure the winner could read 5, max. 6 languages. But hey, it’s a Polyglot Gathering. André could read ALL 10 of the scripts. 10 SCRIPTS?!?!?! And then it turned out that André can read even many more scripts!!!!
If I suffered from low self-esteem this would have been a good time to start crying…
Language juggling
On Monday right before lunch time I attended the talk “language juggling” given by Caeyric. I didn’t know what to expect but I was flashed. Caeyric started talking in at least 10 different languages, switching every few sentences. People loved it and the audience started to participate and contribute other languages. We heard a discussion in Finnish and Sami (I think it was Northern Sami) and a contribution in Romanian.
If I did that at home with my friends … no chance. After five words they would kick me out of the house. But at the Polyglot Gathering people were enjoying the mix of known and unknown sounds and motivated the speakers to use even more different languages. This is definitely only possible at such an event.
At the end we even sang songs in Arabic and Hebrew together. I don’t speak Arabic and Hebrew and I hat singing – but I was so excited that I had to sing along
Esperanto? Neniu problemo!
During the lightning talks (short, spontaneous talks – about 5 minutes) André (the script geek) explained to us the ergative case. Yes, right question, what is an ergative case? The topic by itself is really nerdy but … André spontaneously decided to give the talk in Esperanto!!! And more fascinating – nobody vetoed
I don’t speak Esperanto but guess what, I understood everything André explained. Ok, I cheated, because I already knew what an ergative case was (yes, I’m one of these nerds!) but I also understood many words and sentences. Awesome!
But this was not the only spontaneous talk André gave; I heard that he also did an introduction to Klingon! Unfortunately, I missed this one, but I heard only great things about it. But tell me, how many people outside this crazy little world do you know that would be interested in learning more about Klingon or even be able to speak about it????
Up to now, you found Andrés name quite often in this list. He and his contributions were definitely one of my highlights of the Gathering. So on the last day I told him that for me he was the nerd of the nerds. He replied with a pleased laughter, so I thought it would be ok to share this anecdote here and I think he definitely deserves the title. I think I haven’t met anybody at the conference with a broader and more profound knowledge of languages. Respect!
The thing with Toki Pona
This is my favourite anecdotes of all – I think it’s the nerdiest thing I’ve ever participated in! Imagine the following scene: You’re sitting a small room. It’s incredibly hot and stuffy and there are far too many people in the room. You’re listening to a guy named Chris speaking about Toki Pona, a constructed language. A language consisting of 120 words only. People are getting really excited. They start contributing and asking questions. People are getting even more excited. Newbies are discussing with experts. People are sharing their opinion about how to express something with 120 words. The air gets even stuffier. We’re fighting over meanings and whether we are food or swallowing. And suddenly somebody raises his hand and says: And why don’t you do it like in Esperanto?????
Your turn
I would love to hear about your neardiest moments from the Polyglot Gathering and or other neardy moments you witnessed or participated in!
