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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| sacha Triglot Newbie United States Joined 4315 days ago 22 posts - 60 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Quechua | Message 1 of 28 05 July 2012 at 1:20am | IP Logged |
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I am not really sure that this is the right place, but I wanted to start a thread about linguistics. Linguistics is the science of languages. Some people, when I said I was majoring in linguistics, would immediately ask "How many languages do you speak?" Well, I speak only English and Spanish, but I have studied dozens of languages to varying degrees, especially non-Indo-European languages when possible. But linguists don't have to be polyglots.
Linguistics is the science about language. It lies at the cusp between data-driven, hypothesis-testing hard science and touchy-feely squishy social sciences. It intersects with psychology, sociology, anthropology, computer science. and neurology. It is the only science in which intuition is considered to be scientific data -- that is to say, "native speaker intuition." Your sense as a native speaker of what sounds intuitively right is data, so in the field of linguistics you can go right into your own head for raw data. (That's pretty fun, trying to figure out how you know what you know about putting sentences together in your own language.) The main drawback about being a linguist is finding other people to talk to about it. As incomprehensible as it is, most people in the world seem to find linguistics a dull subject. They can barely stifle yawns when you start talking about things like the distinction between the unaspirated unvoiced stop consonants of Chinese and the voiced stop consonants of English (both written with the same letters b, d, g, etc). Sometimes telling them that Swahili has fifteen genders sparks a reaction, but the spark dies as soon as you let them know that "gender" in linguistics does not mean sex, but noun classes (which is the original meaning) -- only in certain languages, mainly Indo-European, do noun classes correspond with categories like "masculine" and "feminine." And they don't believe you that African-American Vernacular English, or AAVE, is a subject of serious study and respect by linguists. And what about the challenges of teaching computers to use natural language! The fact that, after fifty years and millions of man-hours trying to teach computers to use natural language, all the computers of the world do not have the language ability of a normal three-year-old? And what about the whole field of semantics? And historical/comparative linguistics, which can give insight into the history of different groups through language change. And how does language shape our way of viewing the world? The field of linguistics encompasses so many fascinating areas. Yet it is hard to find other people who are really interested in it. Even here in this forum, "lingustics" is in the most itty-bitty print in the search tags! But I think that here in this forum, there must be a lot of people who study languages purely for fun. People who instinctively like to compare languages and delight in finding out interesting things about them, interesting differences and similarities. Those are my fellow linguists, the people who are interested in language itself for its own sake! Languages are like art, languages are like biological species, generating infinite diversity yet with essential commonalities. So I would like to invite anyone to share something neat about any language or languages they know. Or talk about any aspect of linguistics! I hope that this is all right with the moderators and not outside the scope of this forum? Edited by sacha on 05 July 2012 at 1:46am 7 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Kyle Corrie Senior Member United States Joined 4617 days ago 175 posts - 464 votes | Message 2 of 28 05 July 2012 at 2:31am | IP Logged |
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As the saying goes: Be careful what you wish for. You might just get it.
Christoph Clugston's YouTube Channel Edited by Kyle Corrie on 05 July 2012 at 2:32am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6491 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 28 05 July 2012 at 12:29pm | IP Logged |
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I too find linguistics a fascinating study object, but when the term 'linguistics' pops up here it is mainly in a negative fashion because many people here object to the common practice of confusing polyglots and linguists. The truly linguistic threads here mostly deal with specific topics and mostly use examples culled from just one language. Broad theoretical discussions about how languages in general tick are rare here - it is much easier to make touchy-feely squishy polls about which languages you find ugly or unavoidable or difficult or whatever. Which may explain that the low number of 'linguistics' tags. After all, this place is full of language learners, but "language acquisition theory" is extremely rare, and "pedagogics" is not even a tag. Those terms are simply too wide.
Another explanation is that this is a site for language learners, and language learners tend to be suspicious of people who claim that they like languages so much that they study them, but don't even bother to try to learn them. Occasionally I have written about specific features in languages I can't speak, such as the morphology of adjectives in Old English, but unless I get far enough into a language to at the very least read it fluently, I am wary about trusting my own observations. Inversely I have enough background from my own study years (partly spent at an Institute for Romance philology) to know that you can be studying a language and secretly envy people who claim that they can go somewhere for a couple of months and pick up any foreign language. As if all the toil and tribulations of those who choose to acquire some theoretical knowledge about linguistics was totally irrelevant for language learning! But that feeling soon peters away because I constantly use the tools I got at the university (or to some extent before that) to analyze features in texts in the languages I learn, and my theoretical background helps me at lot when maneuvering around among a variety of new languages. So I can see that it definitely was worth learning for instance how to identify the elements in a sentence or to learn about sound shifts even though I didn't choose an academical career. But in spite of my linguistical background I still see it as bold bordering on risky to make sweeping statements about languages which you haven't learnt well enough yourself to know what's right and what's wrong - which mostly implies that you at least have got some passive skills. Edited by Iversen on 05 July 2012 at 6:45pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |
| mikonai Diglot Senior Member United States weirdnamewriting.bloRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4717 days ago 178 posts - 281 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Swahili, German | Message 4 of 28 05 July 2012 at 5:43pm | IP Logged |
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It's so cool to see this thread pop up!
I'm going to major in Lingustics in college (I'll get to take my first few actual linguistic classes come August), but unfortunately I don't really know that much about it. I run into the same problem as Sacha, though, when I tell people what I'm majoring in. They ask: "How many languages do you have to learn for that?" Well, I do have to pass their proficiency requirement on one foreign language, but that's no different from any other Bachelor of the Arts degree at my University. So then I have to explain that Linguistics is the science of languages, and to be a Linguist you're perfectly fine being monolingual. Unfortunately I can't say I know a whole lot about the subject. I don't know what jobs are in Linguistics, even though that's almost always the next question they ask. I didn't really look into it before making my decision. I've had people tell me there are good jobs to be had in the field, which is good, I guess. I'll get to that when I get to it. I guess some people go to college for the sake of getting a degree and the job they want, but I haven't been able to think so far ahead. What little I know of Linguistics absolutely fascinates me: what language is, how it changes over time, what people think about it, all the structure and everything. I wasn't hardly aware of it until I looked at constructed languages and realized there are so many possibilities of sounds and structure and vocabulary for a language to have. So why not spend some college years learning about it? All that to say I look forward to following this topic for a little enlightenment! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6944 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 5 of 28 05 July 2012 at 5:44pm | IP Logged |
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I am quite interested in comparative linguistics and where appropriate have put up some posts on the subject (especially for Uralic and Balto-Slavonic languages). However Iversen is right in that this is a forum for non-specialist language learning and so dominated by people who are indifferent or even wary of linguistics. Ari makes a neat observation about this division in this thread.
Here are a few of my favourite threads here pertaining to some aspect of linguisics: Accusative marker Agglutinative to fusional to analytic... Gender articles for nouns - why? Is there any evidence of (pre)proto-IE? Languages without Gender? List of things you cannot do with English Polysynthesis vs. agglutination Why didn’t Korean and Japanese become tonal? Words to the wise from Holland Would it be even possible to lose cases? You may be able to find some relevant discussion by also looking under the tags "Linguistic relationships", "Gender", "Agglutinative languages", "Morphology", "Grammar", "Phonetics", "Syntax", "Verbs/Conjugation" You may have better luck rooting through sites such as the following: Lingua Frankly Linguistics & Natlangs (sub-forum of New CBB which is meant for conlangs) Linguist List - Mailing Lists Index Lingforum The Lousy Linguist Ryan's Linguistics Blog 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6491 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 28 05 July 2012 at 6:50pm | IP Logged |
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I found this at the entertaining Lousylinguist site:
"Asking a linguist how many languages they speak is like asking a doctor how many diseases they have." ---Lynne Murphy (aka lynneguist) PS: I still get a shock every time I see a genderless human entity in the singular referred to with the plural pronoun "they". But maybe this linguist just wanted to prove something. Edited by Iversen on 05 July 2012 at 6:59pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| SamD Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6447 days ago 823 posts - 987 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 7 of 28 05 July 2012 at 10:13pm | IP Logged |
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I have a master of arts degree in English. One of the requirements was at least one linguistics class.
Bear in mind that my bachelor's degree is in French and I had studied Spanish as well before graduate school. When I took that first linguistics class, I was constantly having the experience of thinking "Oh, that's what you call that!" I think that anyone who studies multiple languages develops some inner sense of linguistics. You probably won't know the words for everything. You don't realize there's a word for something, but you know that it exists. Because of my experience, I think at least one linguistics class (I went on to take a few more) is very helpful to anyone who wants to get serious about a language or multiple languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sacha Triglot Newbie United States Joined 4315 days ago 22 posts - 60 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Quechua | Message 8 of 28 05 July 2012 at 11:02pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks for all the great responses, guys! I'll respond to different people in different posts, that should be more readable.
Mikonai, as far as what kinds of job opportunities there are for linguists. I should say that my main reason for going into the field, besides just personal fascination, was that I wanted to become a field linguist and help to save endangered languages. What I found was that, right at the moment where languages are being lost at a record rate that far exceeds the extinction rate of biological species (and there is a strong correlation demonstrated between linguistic diversity and biological diversity in regions of the world) the field of linguistics has practically forgotten the idea of documenting language diversity (much less helping save it). Research on tribal and minority languages is all almost entirely the work of missionaries translating the Bible. Most of my fellow linguistics students were going into teaching English as a Second Language. A linguistics degree is invaluable for helping you teach your native language to non-native speakers (and to native speakers, for that matter) and if you want to live abroad and teach English, it guarantees you the most elite jobs. Linguistics makes you aware of your own linguistic processes in your own language. Teaching a computer an exchange like "Where did he go?" "He went to the store" turns out to be an astoundingly complex task. Your insights into your own native language can be greatly enhanced by learning linguistics. University linguistics programs seem to be all focused on the following: - Teaching English as a second language, and research on the process of second language acquisition - Research on children's first language acquisition - Computer linguistics If you are interested in some other area, the option is to get a PhD in linguistics so you can teach at a university and research what you want. Myself, I ended up teaching math to special education students, and my training in linguistics was invaluable. I took a linguistic (Chomskyan) approach to teaching math, to cultivating an intuitive sense of what is right and makes sense, rather than memorizing rules without comprehension. It was extremely successful. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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