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Should a linguist be a polyglot? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes  Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 9 of 29 11 October 2012 at 3:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
Absolutely not. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5057 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 10 of 29 11 October 2012 at 3:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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But it is often the case.
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 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 29 11 October 2012 at 4:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
Most linguists would say no. A few might add something snarky, such as:
The linguist Mark Lieberman has a more reasonable discussion of this quote, and the overall issue. Personally, I'm an incompetent amateur in linguistics, and I occasionally read linguistics papers for fun. And the more papers I read, the more I'm convinced that the world needs a few more polyglot linguists. Let me give you three examples: Papers on the grammar of spoken French, written in English. Spoken French is a rather unusual Indo-European language, because it has hints of a topic/comment or comment/anti-topic structure. Because French is relatively accessible (and prestigious) for English speakers, there's a whole cottage industry of linguists who write papers about spoken French. Some of these papers are fascinating, but others feel "off"—the authors overlook really common counterexamples, or act confused over special cases when there's an elegant generalization lurking just around the corner. I argue that some of these papers would be better if their authors had a wider knowledge of French. Government and binding theory. I've recently been reading introductions to Chomsky's government and binding theory. Now, government and binding is part of the whole "universal grammar" program, and it's intended to describe all possible human languages. But in practice, there are some really baroque and overcomplicated parts of the theory that focus on relatively minor details of English syntax. And when I look at papers applying government and binding to other languages, it can be a very awkward fit. Again, I feel like these theories would be better if more of the researchers spoke another language at a very high level. Second language acquisition papers. Some of this research has clearly been done by people who've never learned a second language, or by people who care about language acquisition insofar as it supports their larger theoretical program. I want to be fair here: My claims are based on an amateur's intuition. Maybe all these papers and theories are perfectly fine. But the more I read, the more that I feel particular linguists are just missing the point. (Of course, I'm sure that many linguists feel the same way about certain colleagues. Academia is like that.) Edited by emk on 11 October 2012 at 6:08pm 11 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kugel Senior Member United States Joined 6539 days ago 497 posts - 555 votes Speaks: English* | Message 12 of 29 11 October 2012 at 6:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I was bored, so I went and did some googling on the Linguistics Profession. Can anyone comment on the following?
1. If you don't go to MIT, or if your department does not have MIT professors, then stay out of Linguistics if you want to make a career out of it. 2. It is one of the few sciences that doesn't require the Calc sequence or programming classes. I don't think that students will get very far by just doing the Major's requirements. I suppose these guys will go off to babysit at Korean ESL schools for 40K/year? Then again, every now and then I hear about English or Philosophy Majors getting hired for programming/management jobs and do fine. Go figure. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5131 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 13 of 29 11 October 2012 at 7:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
Linguistics is a huge area with many sub-fields. It's not all scientific, either. For example, if you get a Master's in Applied Linguistics (which, in turn, is huge in and of itself with many specialties), it'll be of the MA variety, not MS. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 14 of 29 11 October 2012 at 7:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
100% of Linguistics professors who don't work at MIT work in other institutions.
What you do with any degree is up to you, your determination, passion, ability, etc. With a Linguistics Honours degree, I was a teacher, a translator, an interpreter, a course designer... I work with languages, I love it, and I can't really see myself doing anything else. And I do much better than the babysitter you mention. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4829 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 15 of 29 11 October 2012 at 10:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
If we change the doctor quote to something like:
...is that slightly better? Of course a linguist could make a detailed study of a language without actually being able to speak or understand much of it, so perhaps the cases are still not really on all fours. 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 16 of 29 12 October 2012 at 4:02am | IP Logged | |||||
1 person has voted this message useful |
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