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Linguistics | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| sacha Triglot Newbie United States Joined 4528 days ago 22 posts - 60 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Quechua | Message 9 of 28 05 July 2012 at 11:23pm | IP Logged | ||
Well, the first thing you learn in Linguistics 101 is the difference between prescriptive grammar and descriptive grammar. To linguists, "correct grammar" means grammar that sounds correct to a native speaker. If I writing this way, sounding not for you right English, that is bad grammar. But to a linguist, "ain't" is not bad grammar, at least in the regions where it is customarily used. because good grammar by definition, in linguistics, is what sounds right to the ears of a native speakers. Of course, users of "ain't" will concede that it is "bad grammar," because they have been told that by people in authority. There is a whole field called sociolinguistics, which examines the connections between language and social class. What is taught as "good grammar" in school are the specific points of grammar that mark a person as being of an educated social class. "Ain't" is not bad grammar from a linguistics viewpoint -- rather, it is low prestige grammar. Anyway, from a linguistics standpoint, "they" as a neutral gender singular animate pronoun is correct grammar if it functions that way for native English speakers. English has needed such a pronoun, and that word has stepped in to fill the gap. So you may be right that the linguist was trying to make a point -- heck, I'm a linguist and I have done the same thing to make the same point! 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| sacha Triglot Newbie United States Joined 4528 days ago 22 posts - 60 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Quechua | Message 10 of 28 05 July 2012 at 11:24pm | IP Logged | ||
Chung, many thanks for posting all these links! It is good to have them in one place! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 11 of 28 05 July 2012 at 11:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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No problem, and there are many more that I could have listed.
By the way since you seem keen on field linguistics, here's something from a few months ago by Christopher Culver on fieldwork which you may find interesting. He's recently earned a MA in Finno-Ugric linguistics and I read his postings every now and then as they relate to Finno-Ugric languages.
Given that I'm about to start studying some Mari later this week, his experience is thought-provoking for me as well. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| mrhenrik Triglot Moderator Norway Joined 6080 days ago 482 posts - 658 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, French Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 28 06 July 2012 at 12:47am | IP Logged | ||
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I've been playing with the thought of studying linguistics for a while now. I'd want to do the whole "shebang" up to
PhD, and hopefully go into research afterwards. I won't begin for another 4-5 years or so in any case but I figured it can't hurt to begin thinking about it much earlier. As of now what I'd like to get into is either language acquisition or ancient languages - for the linguists/linguists-in- training, how feasible is a career in either? I'd presume language acquisition would be more likely, but I'm just guessing at this point. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sacha Triglot Newbie United States Joined 4528 days ago 22 posts - 60 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Quechua | Message 13 of 28 06 July 2012 at 1:11am | IP Logged | ||
Hello, mrhenrik. If you get a PhD and work at a university, you can get grants to do all kinds of research. That is the way to go if your main interest is something other than language teaching or computer linguistics. Wait -- I see you are in Europe. What I have said is only based on what I know in the United States. It could be different in different countries. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 14 of 28 06 July 2012 at 2:02am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm a student of applied linguistics. BTW in the Russian tradition, language teaching is not a part of it, so don't blame me for any stupid ideas language teachers might get :D
For me my field is, among other things, a way to indulge my interest in multiple languages, not just my native one or those I study at uni. Within this year, I've had assignments like "describe a dictionary and conduct an experiment with it", "make up a linguistic enigma and explain it" (not obligatory, to my surprise most people preferred to write a 20-page term paper), "record the numbers in a cool program that charts the intonation patterns" (ok this one was a mess, the prof just forgot to state the audio has to be in Russian so I had to do it again)... I've used Finnish, Polish and Portuguese respectively, which are my three most fluent unofficial languages. I'm actually almost scared of the perspective of not being able to use more than two languages at work. I suppose the only realistic situation for me is a requirement to use/speak Finnish, English and Swedish if I ever move to Finland. I'm currently in Vaasa so this feels possible. The downside is that most of what I was taught during my first and second year, I knew from my reading for fun (books, wiki) in high school, and most of what I've been taught after that, I know from my reading for fun during the first and second year :D And of course I was the only person in the comparative linguistics class who has an intermediate or higher knowledge of Italian, Portuguese, Spanish AND Latin. Not fun. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| viedums Hexaglot Senior Member Thailand Joined 4667 days ago 327 posts - 528 votes Speaks: Latvian, English*, German, Mandarin, Thai, French Studies: Vietnamese | Message 15 of 28 06 July 2012 at 7:18am | IP Logged | ||
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Chung, that sounds harsh. I think most of us non-linguists imagine fieldwork to be a romantic encounter with the unknown. On a more optimistic note, there’s a linguistics professor named Georg van Driem who is running a large documentation project for Himalayan languages at Leiden. Apparently he is sponsored by Rolex (not sure if he’s appeared in the ads or not.) Here’s something from their website:
“[V]an Driem leads by example: ‘Travelling to the Gongduk areas in central Bhutan on horseback for four days in the spring of 2001 with my freshly broken leg in a cast was not the most comfortable of journeys. At places the trail is as steep as a ladder, and I would have to dismount and be hoisted up. Despite the discomfort, I had to keep going: the language we had found has the most unusual lexicon from the comparative point of view — flamboyant conjugations, with the verb agreeing with both subject and object for person and number — and represents an entire branch unto itself within the language family.’ So would van Driem describe himself as the Indiana Jones of linguistic research? ‘No, more of an Odysseus. Discovering language is a kind of mental odyssey.’” Note that this project is going on at a European institution, not an American one. I doubt many American linguists do much fieldwork. The great Australian linguist Robert Dixon wrote in “The Rise and Fall of Languages” that there were only two American universities offering all-round training in field linguistics and typology – Oregon and UC Santa Barbara. By and large I was turned off by the linguistics courses I took in college – I would recommend studying anthropology or history with an area studies focus instead. The Dutch God of Language Edited by viedums on 06 July 2012 at 7:18am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| freakyaye Senior Member Australia Joined 4839 days ago 107 posts - 152 votes | Message 16 of 28 06 July 2012 at 7:38am | IP Logged | ||
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computer linguistics = CALL - Computer assisted language learning
as a linguistics major, I <3 linguistics! Edited by freakyaye on 06 July 2012 at 7:39am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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