Linguistics and linguist: the investigation
The linguist and linguistics
A group
of linguists were caught because they have stolen a human language from the
language bank . The police is interrogating one of them.
The policeman: “Well, you claim that you are a
linguist. We have heard about you and your band before. Nobody knows what a
linguist does, but the police! Some linguists work for us too: they translate
documents, they interpret at the court. So, basically you are a translator, is
it true?”
The linguist: “No, I am a general linguist. I
study languages like Noam Chomsky. I study the language as a phenomenon. I
examine the functions of language in general, I analyze language form, language
meaning, and language in context.”
The policeman: “Hmm. But you know many
languages, don’t you?
The linguist: “I know the structure of many
languages, but I don’t speak them. I only speak English. For my profession it’s
not necessary to speak the languages that I work with. Some of my colleagues have specialized in particular
languages and they speak them too. “
The policeman: “Clear. Explain your working
methods to me! How do you analyze languages? Where do you work?
The linguist: “It’s complicated. I would need a
life sentence to explain everything. Well, firstly to analyze a language we
have to describe its sounds. Phonetics deals with speech and non-speech sounds.
We have to study the meaning of the elements of the language. The field which
studies it, is called semantics. Another very important part of the language is
the grammar which is the system of governing rules in a certain language. The
grammar has three big parts: phonology, morphology and syntax. Descriptive
linguistics deals with these elements of language. There are many other
branches of linguistics: structural linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics,
neurolinguistics, computational linguistics, historical and evolutionary
linguistics and so on. But if you want to know more about these fields, you
have to ask my colleagues because being a general linguist doesn’t mean knowing
everything about linguistics. Well, answering your question about our working
place/spot, I can say that the places can be very different: linguists can work
inside the academy or outside. So, we can be professors at a university, we can
work for research institutes outside the academy. We can decide to teach a
language, we can be translators or interpreters as you mentioned, or we can
work as a forensic linguists. As far as physical spots are concerned, academic
linguists can do their research in a library, but they can go to work in the
field to document research about a language.”
The policeman: “Now everything is clear! The
only thing that I don’t understand is why you study languages.”
The linguist: “It’s a passion. But of course,
there are some more practical reasons as well. For example, computational
linguists study human languages in order to reproduce them. They study how to teach languages to machines
or produce automatic translations.”
The policeman: “Aha! So, you steal human
languages in order to put them inside machines, so that machines will govern
humans. It’s a crime against mankind!”
So, the linguist was arrested and he had to
defend himself in court.
How would you defend him if you were his lawyer?
Tell me in a comment!