ESP Biography

DANIEL BRIGGS, MIT senior in math and a tutor. Likes languages.

Major: Mathematics

College/Employer: MIT

Year of Graduation: Not available.

Brief Biographical Sketch:

I grew up in Port Chester, New York, just north of the city. I knew I liked math since I was little, though at the time, I wanted to be an astronaut. When I was a freshman in high school, I realized I also thought it was a lot of fun to try to learn a bunch about all sorts of different languages. I started learning some Basque grammar and comparative linguistics. They should really have a class in comparative linguistics in high school, but they don't. In fact, they don't even have one at MIT. So I figured this summer I'd try to make that happen.

Past Classes

(Clicking a class title will bring you to the course's section of the corresponding course catalog)

H2428: Comparative Linguistics in HSSP Summer 2009 (Jul. 12, 2009)

Want to find out how the world's languages are related to each other? What do we mean when we say English is Germanic, Russian is Slavic, but they're both Indo-European? How can we prove it, and can we go any further? You'll find out if you take this class, and you'll also become an expert in the methods of linguistics. We'll go over everything from the International Phonetic Alphabet to semantic drift to Chomsky's language universals and Mark Baker's theory about language typology. Homework will mostly be in the form of puzzles.