A group of linguists was 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 deals with 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 deal with these elements.
There are many other branches of linguistics:
structural linguistics, sociolinguistics,
psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, computational
linguistics, evolutionary and historical 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
location, 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 linguist.
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
aspects of 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?
Write your answer in the comments!
