LINGUIST List 5.1176

Tue 25 Oct 1994

Disc: "linguistician"

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1. NAME William Marslen-Wilson, RE: 5.1157 "linguist"
2. Daniel Radzinski, -ician
3. , Linguistician / Phonetician

Message 1: RE: 5.1157 "linguist"

I have been following with some bafflement you LINGUIST
folk's soul-searching about whether you should ally yourselves with
the mortician element or with the Navy interpreters. I guess this is
an example of language change in progress - homophony is only a
problem when the contexts of use overlap unacceptably.

What you need is a modifier to help you disambiguate. Since
we all accept now that linguistics is a branch of cognitive
psychology, and since professional modesty prevents me from
suggesting "psycholinguist", surely the appropriate term would be
"cognitive linguist". I'm sure the current users of this term would be
willing to surrender it for the greater good.

William Marslen-Wilson
Centre for Speech and Language
Birkbeck College

In the current "linguistician" discussion, no one seems to have mentioned our
very own (hopefully not pretentious) "syntactician" among the -ician
professions. Hmm.

Daniel Radzinski Tovna Translation Machines Jerusalem, Israel drtovna.co.il

Am I the only phonetician who reads Linguist? Phoneticians I'm sure have
never felt that the -ician in their name makes them like morticians or
beauticians (i.e. in search of respectability/professional status). I
can assure fellow linguist(ician)s that we have no desire to become
phonists.

Martin J Ball, University of Ulster