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“Prestigious Christmas gifts for only the dearest people!”
Hey, I want a prestigious Christmas gift! I’m stuck with lousy, disreputable gifts. I guess I’m not one of the elite “dearest.”
I was just reading a Wired article about the deaths of two AI researchers: Chris McKinstry and Pushpinder Singh. Both were working on strong AI (or at least, had the hope of it). Both committed suicide and did it within a month of each other. McKinstry claimed that his system would be aware in a short time. If GAC ever became aware, it has vanished into the cloud. So all very interesting and I recommend the article. Not if you want a serious read about the topics they researched, but it presents an interesting narrative of two lives with eerie parallels.
What inspired this post is a minor quibble about a word that many English speakers have surely heard: Wunderkind. In German, it literally means “wonder child” and is often applied in English to a child prodigy or a young person whose star is on the rise. Here is an excerpt from the Wired article:
Push, as everyone called him, had also taught himself to code — first on a VIC-20, then by making computer games for an Amiga and an Apple IIe. His father, Mahender, a topographer and mapmaker who had studied advanced mathematics, encouraged the wüenderkind. Singh was brilliant, ambitious, and strong-willed. In ninth grade, he had created his own sound digitizer and taught it to play a song he was supposed to be practicing for his piano lessons. “I don’t want to learn piano anymore, I want to learn this,” he said. [emphasis mine]
When you have a German vowel with an umlaut, it is rendered in English orthography as the vowel + e. So ü would be written in English as ue. Wunderkind has no umlaut in German, so this would not be necessary. Plus, you wouldn’t have to add the e anyway since they already included the umlaut. Shoddy editorial work, but it made me lol.
