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LOYOLA.EDU>I would like to address the issue of "Who speaks languages?" It seems to me that this is a big problem. While linguists study structures of various kinds, language teachers study literature, and, if they're lucky, pedagogy (very few graduate schools offer any theoretical orientation to teaching to literature students, which is where most college language teachers come from). Thus many college language teachers must teach without background (and with resentment, for some) while they research in a different area entirely. When some linguists teach languages, they teach structures, not speaking. Thus, when taking an unusually-taught language under the auspices of a linguistics department, all we did was talk about structure, we never learned to speak it. Talking about language was thrown out many years ago as a way to learn to speak! Neither group, unhappy literature teachers nor structure-happy linguists, are likely to improve the image of language learning in this country. Leslie Morgan MORGANMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
brownvm.brown.edu>The folks concerned with speaking a lot of languages would include those directing the Mormon missionary effort and those who run the schools for diplomats (etc.) assigned to a variety of foreign postings. Such people are very clever at developing language skills in their students but in part because they are remorselessly practical (i.e. anti-theoretical). It strikes me that the popularity of language instruction by the intuitive method may explain in part why knowledge of grammar (any sort of rudimentary grammar) is no longer very common in the general population. Lots of people get a dose of English grammar in middle school, but I wonder if that sort of thing will stick when it simply seems to tell you (or even to misrepresent) what you know already. If only seventh-grade grammar teachers could convince their students that it is interesting to see how systematically you behave without knowing it! But this is the age at which one's children may raise their voices in protest if you seem to be lecturing them about an area in which they lay claim to adult competence.... -- RickMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
cs.umn.edu>In answer to Michael Sikillian's query: I like the analogy between linguists/language and statisticians/data. From a somewhat different, though related, point of view, here is another that I think is apt. Many people must do calculations of various kinds now and again (even given the mechanical aids we now have). There is a tendency among the laity to re- gard mathematicians as little more than skilled calculators; but mathema- ticians are not mere calculators -- rather thay are (to a degree) investi- gators of the underlying principles of, e.g., the number system (and hence of the methods of calculation). One particular respect in which I think the analogy is a good one is this. Many mathematicians, though not all, are highly adept at calculation. And many linguists, though not all, are (a) polyglots, and (b) more than routine- ly adept language learners. And the converse holds as well: there are goiod calculators who aren't much good at math and there are good language learners who can't fathom linguistics (I know whereof I speak, believe me!) I suspect, though I am not sure, that you could take this even further. My experience suggests that most linguists get interested in the field as the result of a second language learning experience -- or at least that such an experience has an important influence on them. And I suspect that it's also true that many mathematicians developed their interest in the beginning from thinking about what they were doing when they did addition, subtraction etc. Since this is advanced as an empirical claim (carefully hedged), data bearing on it is/are most welcome. Michael KacMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
garnet.berkeley.edu>About "who speaks languages": on the one hand I'm just as frustrated as most linguists with the question "how many languages do you speak", but on the other hand I think it's vastly incorrect to say "linguists are concerned only with formalized grammars and symbol systems". The fact that some of us *aren't* concerned primarily with these issues is why the recent discussion on rules is for us so baffling. There are still some of us who are concerned with VERY GOOD DESCRIPTION of languages and Language. Not that writing grammars or dictionaries will get us grad students jobs...but there are a good number of us who are both fluent in contemporary theory and comfortable with large amounts of detailed language data. Sometimes we speak one or more of the languages we're studying; often we learn *about* the languages such that we end up with a very different kind of working knowledge than the native speaker has. Many of us for whom careful data-gathering and analysis is a high priority can readily translate bits of the languages we work on, but wouldn't be much good in a conversation. I really feel that the two tasks are different -- I wouldn't make a very good simultaneous interpreter, and someone who would probably can't tell you the structural things that I can about the language in question. Perhaps this is obvious to the more experienced linguists out there...but it's been rattling around in my head after a couple of conferences where I met (1) great theoreticians who control very little data (2) great descrip- tivists who care very little about recent theoretical developments AND (3) a healthy number of people, especially grad students, who cared about both. It seems those in the latter category are trying to be BOTH collectors of raw data AND statisticians, in the analogy that's been offered. Any thoughts on this? Kathleen Hubbard U.C. BerkeleyMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
tamvm1.tamu.edu>I'd like to thank Mark Durie for bringing up the `mysterious' silence about linguistic work published before `modern times'. I think the answer lies in something he said himself - students are not being told to (or led to) read anything much these days which dates from before 1981. I am just completing a course in the history of linguistics where MA students are learning for the first time about Saussure, Bloomfield, Prague approaches, all of which might with legitimacy be taken up in so-called core courses in theory without any reduction in the value of these core courses. MargaretMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue