I’ve started learning (modern) Greek, and I caught my first sentence in the wild this weekend. It was “I want a (cup of) tea” (θέλω ένα τσάι).

What’s that to be excited about, and what is “in the wild”? Well, it means it was

  • spoken by someone I don’t know well,
  • in a context where many different sentences could have been expected, and
  • understood compositionally, word-by-word, not by pattern matching on things I recognise.

Which means it’s happening! Rock it with the language faculty!