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Linguists, polyglots and "scriptivism" | ||
Tags: Linguistics | Polyglot | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6392 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 1 of 4 22 September 2010 at 4:30am | IP Logged |
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It is my impression that people who study linguistics are largely descriptivists whereas people who study foreign languages are largely prescriptivists. By this I mean that when they hear someone say "I don't study no languages" the linguist will say "Fascinating! Would you say the double negative is a product of your dialect or sociolect?" whereas the polyglot will say "You mean you don't study any languages."
Does this agree with your impressions? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5657 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 4 22 September 2010 at 7:52am | IP Logged |
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This is an excellent example to explain the difference between a linguist and a polyglot. There are people who are both a linguist and a polyglot like Iversen and Glossika for example. But this occurs rather seldom as most linguists are not polyglots and most polyglots are not linguists.
Fasulye 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5734 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 3 of 4 01 October 2010 at 11:59pm | IP Logged |
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Yes, I get the same impressions. I believe language teachers are even more prescriptivist, and when I was growing up I often heard "'Ain't' ain't a word", which is a contradictory statement that only reinforces the use of "ain't" since the word is used twice. Nevermind the fact that "ain't" was, at one time, an accepted contraction of "am not" or "are not", some teachers didn't like "ain't" and declared it improper.
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| Journeyer Triglot Senior Member United States tristan85.blogspot.c Joined 6678 days ago 946 posts - 1110 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German Studies: Sign Language | Message 4 of 4 03 October 2010 at 10:15pm | IP Logged |
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I've been interested in linguistics and for a long time considered becoming one. The more I learned about the field, however, the more I decided that I probably wouldn't enjoy it much. I'm more interested in learning languages for fun.
I do have a dash of linguist in me, though. I quite prefer descriptive linguistics to prescriptive. I think that the latter tends to create a false idea of what the language is. I've always believed that a language is alive and breathes and moves and changes, and that a standard form is only a small aspect of the language, not the language in itself. I've quite comfortable with dialect words, and other things that prescriptive linguistics frown upon. I think that people often don't understand that usually "incorrect" language X is also spoken consistently; it has it's on variation of the standard grammar Remember, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, French, and so forth are just "incorrectly" spoken and used Latin. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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