ESP Biography



EVAN HOCHSTEIN, Yale sophomore majoring in linguistics




Major: Linguistics

College/Employer: Yale University student (Yale Splash affiliate)

Year of Graduation: 2023

Picture of Evan Hochstein

Brief Biographical Sketch:

Evan is from Austin, Texas. In high school, he participated in the North American Computational Linguistics Open/Olympiad (NACLO), which engaged his love of languages and puzzles. At Yale, Evan is a linguistics major, exploring the fundamental questions of language. He is taking hieroglyphic Egyptian and plans to study Mandarin Chinese. In his free time, Evan enjoys spending time with friends and crafting language puzzles of his own.



Past Classes

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

H14115: World Languages and Language Puzzles in HSSP Summer 2020 (Jul. 11, 2020)
How can you learn languages without any formal lessons? In this class, we will do exactly that, exploring some of the most widely spoken languages from around the world: Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, French, German, Hausa, Hindi/Urdu, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Yoruba! You will learn how to take sentences in a foreign language and translate them without initially knowing any of the words, read words in a writing system you don't know, and discover grammar rules that we don't have in English. No prior knowledge of languages is required — just analytical thinking! A quick example of the type of puzzle we might do: Yaqui is a language indigenous to North America. Here are some sentences in Yaqui: 1. Inepo enchi aniak 2. Aapo enchi vichak 3. Inepo enchi vichak 4. Empo nee aniak Here are their English translations, in random order: a. He saw you b. I saw you c. You helped me d. I helped you Match each sentence with its correct English translation. (Hint: the words don't go in the same order in Yaqui!) ɔ 'q 'ɐ 'p :sɹǝʍsu∀