The Linguists' Club!

[LordRetard]

I guess it's just me, no one gives a damn about my major. Anyone want to talk about phonotactics?

[smiley_cow]

Everything I know about linguistics I know from studying French Grammar. Which means I know the names for gramatical thingies, like noun and Compliment of the Direct Object, but not much past that. Sorry.

[Signious]

I didnt know that their was a dedicated degree in Linguistics, it would make for an interesting four years none the less

[Lethal Interjection]

I know nothing about linguistics. I once took an expository writing class and did very poorly. The teacher was a complete idiot. I learned absolutely nothing, and frankly, I'm not sure she knew anything to teach. We learned some of those grammar and structure things, but I didn't understand the necessity. My major problem was when she gave one guy a better grade than me for one of the worst pieces of university writing I have ever, ever seen. His structure was terrible, his arguments atrocious, and it was just grating to read. I wrote a good essay, but I guess it wasn't the best example of the style she was looking for (which is not even true) and gave me a letter grade lower than the guy. It was a fun class because of the people I was with, but that was about it. To give a better idea... She marked one of my friends essays as perfect, or flawless or something similar. And only gave him an A rather than an A+. Well done, teach.

[Cirtur]

I have a practised knowledge of what a pronoun is.

[mountainmage]

I think my favorite grammar term is gerund.

[astasia]

I guess it's just me, no one gives a damn about my major. Anyone want to talk about phonotactics?

I had a semester in linguistic anthropology.

It was interesting, but I could not do it as a profession.

Edit: Also, this is 100 posts. I'm good at typing words out on the internet.

[LordRetard]

My linguistics anthro professor once said that he liked the anthro side, because he could really just do whatever he wanted.

My own work is much more technical, but I prefer it that way.

[CasualFriday]

I took two years of high-school level Spanish while I was in middle school. The teacher was mediocre, but I was very interested in the concept of language itself. It fascinates me to know that people can communicate by making noises that sound like gibberish to others. I dabbled in Spanish a bit further, and would have become fluent if I had increased my vocabulary, but it kind of fell out of my favor once I reached high school.

Though I had already fulfilled my two-credit language requirement, I took two years of Latin in high school and absolutely loved it. The teacher was (and still is) an absolutely brilliant man who is completely fluent in seven languages and can give you the date of almost any occurrence in ancient history. I'm going to be attending the University of South Florida in spring of 2010 and I plan to take a lot of Latin while there.

Latin really brought linguistics to life for me because it feels like the beginning, where language started. I guess I can't gain a true appreciation until I learn some obscure Indo-European precursor.

[Lethal Interjection]

The closest interest I have in linguistics would probably be the enjoyment I get from reading Hobbes and others from that time span.
The strange spellings of familiar words, and what was acceptable sentence structure at the time.
It can make reading their work difficult, but it is still quite interesting to me.

[astasia]

My linguistics anthro professor once said that he liked the anthro side, because he could really just do whatever he wanted.

My own work is much more technical, but I prefer it that way.

Can I ask what you do?

[LordRetard]

Latin really brought linguistics to life for me because it feels like the beginning, where language started. I guess I can't gain a true appreciation until I learn some obscure Indo-European precursor.

Latin isn't obscure. What you SHOULD be learning is Sanskrit, which was around LONGER than Latin, and has been preserved much better (and is, if you are unaware, part of the Indo-European family, which surprises some people, such as myself, even though it's in the goddamn name). I don't really have time to study it right now but as I understand it has EVEN MORE CASES. A friend of mine said that I should learn Hindi first, I guess so that if I wanted to invest a huge amount of time into something that is a passing novelty for me.

Anyway I'm in first year so I do practically NOTHING. I'm taking an intro course and it is a waste of time but it's a prereq for the rest. Anyway I'll list the things I studied this year and explain them a bit.

Phonetics: Essentially the study of sounds ("phones" or "segments") producible in language. The most important part of what I had to do was memorise the International Phonetic Alphabet, as well as how every sound is articulated (the "features" of the phones, that is). Kind of boring. Next year I'll probably have to study acoustic phonetics, which is the study of the sounds produced with physics and eh wot, which will probably be hellish and grueling, I hope. It's the closest thing we have to actual science, excepting neurolinguistics.

Phonology: Almost completely unrelated to phonetics, which will confuse the hell out of most people when they don't study it and therefore only have near-identical explanations to read. Anyway, while phonetics is concerned with the sounds in and of themselves, phonology is concerned with how they are used. I think. I can't really explain it very well, so just pretend that they're identical. One of the things we had to do was build syllable trees and identify whether segments belonged to the beginning or end of the syllable.

Morphology: The study of the smallest "units" of language, and how words are broken up into "bound" and "free" morphemes. We had to build trees once again to show where the morphemes are attached. ex. "antidisestablishmentarianism"- everything but "establish" is bound, since that's the only indivisible unit that can act on its own. Grammatical parts are also bound morphemes, such as the past-tense "-ed". Irregular changes are also included, ex. "gave" for "give", where the morpheme is replaced.

Morphophonemics: How morphology causes phonological processes. I won't even try to explain this one, but I'll leave an example. ex. the English suffix (clitic to be more precise, for some reason) "s", that is the plural s, has three allophones. If it comes after a voiced segment (ex. b, g, or a vowel), it is [-z]. If it comes after a voiceless consonant (ex. p, k) it is [-s]. If it comes after a sibilant (they didn't even bother telling us what a sibilant is, but it's produced by a groove in the tongue; ex. s, z, sh, ch, j, the french j) then it's [-əz]. See? Simple!

Language Typology: How language families are related. In general, they are "genetically related" i.e. all come from the same parent language, or "geographically related" (wrong term, too lazy to look it up) i.e. through local factors, or "typologically related" (also the wrong term) where they have similar characteristics. For instance, all of the indo-european languages are related genetically, they're typologically related because they all have ex. extensive case systems, and they're geographically related because most of them have just been bumming around in Europe for thousands of years.

Syntax: BORING. Basically word order. We spent four weeks on this and it sucked, 'specially because it does not take that long to learn the ridiculous syntax structure they taught us. It didn't make any sense at all, you see. But I can't really explain what I mean with my resources.

Semantics: Basically how language is interpreted, and what it means to people. I think it's pretty self-explanatory, although there are some technical aspects related to syntax.

Historical Linguistics: The study of language change over time. This includes "etymology" if you are familiar with it.

First Language Acquisition: Guess. How babies learn language. I missed this week, anyway.

Psycho- & Neuro-linguistics: I also missed this, but I've read a lot about it. Basically it's how language is interpreted in the brain and such. If you've taken any psychology courses before (who hasn't?) you're probably already familiar with much of this, and how experiments are conducted.

We haven't covered "Language in Social Contexts" (sociolinguistics, I guess?) or Writing and Language (probably orthography, which interests me tremendously).

tl;dr linguistics is hella ridiculous.

[smiley_cow]

Historical Linguistics sounds the most interesting of those to me. Then again I am currently studying history, so my opinion might be a little bias. Language Typology sounded interesting too, though maybe only because I already know a little bit about it because of History (Latin vs Germanic language groups in Medieval Europe for example, or different language groupings of North American aboriginal languages are brought up sometimes, since genetically some of them varied very significantly despite the fact some of the tribes lived very close to each other).

[ChooChooTrain]

Latin really brought linguistics to life for me because it feels like the beginning, where language started. I guess I can't gain a true appreciation until I learn some obscure Indo-European precursor.

Latin isn't obscure. What you SHOULD be learning is Sanskrit, which was around LONGER than Latin, and has been preserved much better (and is, if you are unaware, part of the Indo-European family, which surprises some people, such as myself, even though it's in the goddamn name). I don't really have time to study it right now but as I understand it has EVEN MORE CASES. A friend of mine said that I should learn Hindi first, I guess so that if I wanted to invest a huge amount of time into something that is a passing novelty for me.

Anyway I'm in first year so I do practically NOTHING. I'm taking an intro course and it is a waste of time but it's a prereq for the rest. Anyway I'll list the things I studied this year and explain them a bit.

Phonetics: Essentially the study of sounds ("phones" or "segments") producible in language. The most important part of what I had to do was memorise the International Phonetic Alphabet, as well as how every sound is articulated (the "features" of the phones, that is). Kind of boring. Next year I'll probably have to study acoustic phonetics, which is the study of the sounds produced with physics and eh wot, which will probably be hellish and grueling, I hope. It's the closest thing we have to actual science, excepting neurolinguistics.

Phonology: Almost completely unrelated to phonetics, which will confuse the hell out of most people when they don't study it and therefore only have near-identical explanations to read. Anyway, while phonetics is concerned with the sounds in and of themselves, phonology is concerned with how they are used. I think. I can't really explain it very well, so just pretend that they're identical. One of the things we had to do was build syllable trees and identify whether segments belonged to the beginning or end of the syllable.

Morphology: The study of the smallest "units" of language, and how words are broken up into "bound" and "free" morphemes. We had to build trees once again to show where the morphemes are attached. ex. "antidisestablishmentarianism"- everything but "establish" is bound, since that's the only indivisible unit that can act on its own. Grammatical parts are also bound morphemes, such as the past-tense "-ed". Irregular changes are also included, ex. "gave" for "give", where the morpheme is replaced.

Morphophonemics: How morphology causes phonological processes. I won't even try to explain this one, but I'll leave an example. ex. the English suffix (clitic to be more precise, for some reason) "s", that is the plural s, has three allophones. If it comes after a voiced segment (ex. b, g, or a vowel), it is [-z]. If it comes after a voiceless consonant (ex. p, k) it is [-s]. If it comes after a sibilant (they didn't even bother telling us what a sibilant is, but it's produced by a groove in the tongue; ex. s, z, sh, ch, j, the french j) then it's [-əz]. See? Simple!

Language Typology: How language families are related. In general, they are "genetically related" i.e. all come from the same parent language, or "geographically related" (wrong term, too lazy to look it up) i.e. through local factors, or "typologically related" (also the wrong term) where they have similar characteristics. For instance, all of the indo-european languages are related genetically, they're typologically related because they all have ex. extensive case systems, and they're geographically related because most of them have just been bumming around in Europe for thousands of years.

Syntax: BORING. Basically word order. We spent four weeks on this and it sucked, 'specially because it does not take that long to learn the ridiculous syntax structure they taught us. It didn't make any sense at all, you see. But I can't really explain what I mean with my resources.

Semantics: Basically how language is interpreted, and what it means to people. I think it's pretty self-explanatory, although there are some technical aspects related to syntax.

Historical Linguistics: The study of language change over time. This includes "etymology" if you are familiar with it.

First Language Acquisition: Guess. How babies learn language. I missed this week, anyway.

Psycho- & Neuro-linguistics: I also missed this, but I've read a lot about it. Basically it's how language is interpreted in the brain and such. If you've taken any psychology courses before (who hasn't?) you're probably already familiar with much of this, and how experiments are conducted.

We haven't covered "Language in Social Contexts" (sociolinguistics, I guess?) or Writing and Language (probably orthography, which interests me tremendously).

tl;dr linguistics is hella ridiculous.

Linguistics sounds complicated as hell.

[CasualFriday]

Latin isn't obscure. What you SHOULD be learning is Sanskrit, which was around LONGER than Latin, and has been preserved much better (and is, if you are unaware, part of the Indo-European family, which surprises some people, such as myself, even though it's in the goddamn name). I don't really have time to study it right now but as I understand it has EVEN MORE CASES. A friend of mine said that I should learn Hindi first, I guess so that if I wanted to invest a huge amount of time into something that is a passing novelty for me.

I don't think Latin is obscure; I was just saying that it feels like the beginning because so many other languages came from it. I'd consider learning other, older, languages, but Latin is the one available to me and is really the one that I enjoy the most.