In real life I am Andreas Wittenstein, a linguist and computer scientist specializing in speech recognition. Language and languages have always held a central attraction for me, for the sheer music of their sound, the poetry of the way they relate those sounds to meaning and structure the world; for the windows they open into different cultures, and the doors they open to different peoples. I've studied and forgotten more languages than I can keep track of, and along the way picked up degrees in linguistics from UCSB and UCLA.