An Acquaintance with Linguistics
An Acquaintance with Linguistics
An Acquaintance with Linguistics
Linguistics: An Acquaintance
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It is not the study of one particular language but of all the human languages in general. In other words, Linguistics is the science of language, requiring and precipitating the study of human languages and speech with their origins. Knowledge of linguistics, however, is different from knowledge of a language. Just as a person is able to drive a car without understanding the inner workings of the engine, so, too, a speaker can use a language without any conscious knowledge of its internal structure. And conversely, a linguist can know and understand the internal structure of a language without actually speaking it. According to Robins (1985), "Linguistics is concerned with human language as a universal and recognizable part of human behaviour and of the human faculties perhaps one of the most essential to human life as we know it, and one of the most far-reaching of human capabilities in relation to the whole span of mankind."
As the purpose of language is to communicate, any study of communication is a study in linguistics by nature whether so asserted or not. Verbal as well as non-verbal communications are parts of linguistics. A facial tick is not linguistics but a purposed wink or a smile from one to another is linguistics. Because it is intended to communicate something, whether or not it is as accurately or definitely communicated as a language of words is, it is linguistics. Linguistics, as a science has two primary branches. In simple terms one branch covers the study of languages themselves while the other covers the effects of language on the world around us.
The study of Linguistics can help you reason out how and why children, nations and peoples adopt certain languages and what can happen in their development. This can help you to understand and appreciate your own language to gain confidence and personal strength in clarification. It can help you to better understand other peoples and how you are and are not alike. It can help you to help your children get it when it comes to your own language and to understand other kids with other unique languages. Linguistics can help you to answer an infinite number of questions about the world you live in. Why, you may ask? Because Linguistics is a science, that is tied in so many ways to so many other areas of study. Languages speak of the culture of the people and are the means of communication of most every science within that culture as well. Here are some examples of the types of questions the study of Linguistics can give you the joy of answering. Questions like why computers can't use a language other than math and whether in fact math is a language? Aren't computer languages accepted as fulfilling college language requirements now? If computers can only use languages that are based on math, doesn't that make math a language as well as an independent science? Could we process useful thought without language? Are pictures a form of language? Some of the questions more closely related to Linguistics are questions like how do we understand one another? How do we learn our native tongues without a teacher? What causes languages to evolve?
The study of Linguistics is inherently also a developer of several talents. These talents include the use and discipline of personal logic, analytical and critical thought as well as skills of organized debate. Linguistics also enhances one's traits of objectivity and creative insightfulness.
A linguist is a person who has mastery over language in all its aspects. He may or may not know several languages but tries to analyze "the sign system called language, the nature of its arbitrariness, the various types of relationships found in the system and the various functions performed by them." (Dr. Ravi S. Verma 1998)
Linguistics and Science
When linguists became able to examine critically and scientifically a large number of languages of widely different patterns, their base of reference was expanded; they experienced an interruption of phenomena hitherto held universal, and a whole new order of significances came into their ken. It was found that the background linguistic system (in other words, the grammar) of each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for people's mental activity, for their analysis of impressions, for their synthesis of their mental stock in trade. Formulation of ideas is not an independent process, strictly rational in the old sense, but is part of a particular grammar and differs, from slightly to greatly, among different grammars. We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this wayan agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees.
This fact is very significant for modern science for it means that no individuals are free to describe nature with absolute impartiality but are constrained to certain modes of interpretation even while they think themselves most free. The person most nearly free in such respects would be a linguist familiar with very many widely different linguistic systems. As yet no linguist is in any such position. We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated.
This rather startling conclusion is not so apparent if we compare only our modern European languages, with perhaps Latin and Greek thrown in for good measure. Among these tongues there is unanimity of major pattern which at first seems to bear out natural logic. But this unanimity exists only because these tongues are all Indo-European dialects cut to the same basic plan being historically transmitted from what was long ago one speech community; because the modern dialects have long shared in building up a common culture; and because much of this culture on the more intellectual side, is derived from the linguistic backgrounds of Latin and Greek. Thus this group of languages satisfies the special case of the clause beginning "unless" in the statement of the linguistic relativity principle at the end of the preceding paragraph. From this condition follows the unanimity of description of the world in the community of modern scientists. But it must be emphasized that "all modern Indo-European-speaking observers" is not the same thing as "all observers." That modern Chinese or Turkish scientists describe the world in the same terms as Western scientists means, of course, only that they have taken over bodily the entire Western system of rationalizations, not that they have corroborated that system from their native posts of observation.
When Semitic, Chinese, Tibetan, or African languages are contrasted with our own, the divergence in analysis of the world becomes more apparent; and, when we bring in the native languages of the Americas, where speech communities for many millenniums have gone their ways independently of each other and of the Old World, the fact that languages dissect nature in many different ways becomes patent. The relativity of all conceptual systems, ours included, and their dependence upon language stand revealed. That American Indians speaking only their native tongues are never called upon to act as scientific observers is in no wise to the point. To exclude the evidence which their languages offer as to what the human mind can do is like expecting botanists to study nothing but food plants and hothouse roses and then tell us what the plant world is like'
Let us consider a few examples. In English we divide most of our words into two classes which have different grammatical and logical properties. Class 1 we call nouns, for example, house, man; class 2, verbs, for instance, hit, run. Many words of one class can act secondarily as of the other class, for example, "a hit," "a run," or "to man (the boat)," but on the primary level, the division between the classes is absolute. Our language thus gives us a bipolar division of nature. But nature herself is not thus polarized. If it be said that strike, turn, and run are verbs because they denote temporary or short-lasting events, that is, actions, why then isist a noun? It also is a temporary event. Why are lightning, spark, wave, eddy, pulsation ,flame, storm, phase, cycle, spasm, noise, and emotion nouns? They are temporary events. If man and house are nouns because they are long-lasting and stable events, that is, things, what then are keep, adhere, extend, project, continue, persist, grow, dwell, and so on doing among the verbs? If it be objected that possess and adhere are verbs because they are stable relationships rather than stable percepts, why then should equilibrium, pressure, current, peace, group, nation, society, tribe, sister, or any kinship term be among the nouns? It will be found that an "event" to us means "what our language classes as a verb,' or something analogized there from. And it will be found that it is not possible to define event, thing, object, relationship, and so on from nature, but that to define them always involves a circuitous return to the grammatical categories of the definer's language.
In the Hopi language, lightning, wave, flame, meteor, and pulsation are verbsevents of necessarily brief duration cannot be anything but verbs. Cloud and storm are at about the lower limit of duration for nouns. Hopi, you see, actually has a classification of events (or linguistic isolates) by duration type, something strange to our modes of thought. On the other hand, in Nootka, a language of Vancouver Island, all words seem to us to be verbs, but really there are no classes I and 2; we have, as it were, a monistic view of nature that gives us only one class of word for all kinds of events. "A house occurs" or "it houses" is the way of saying house, exactly like "a flame occurs" or "it burns." These terms seem to us like verbs because they are inflected for durational and temporal nuances, so that the suffixes of the word for house event make it mean "long-lasting house," "temporary house," "future house," "house that used to be," "what started out to be a house," and so on.
Hopi has one noun that covers every thing or being that flies, with the exception of birds, whose class is denoted by another noun. The former noun may be said to denote the class (FC-B) flying class minus bird. The Hopi actually call insect, airplane, and aviator all by the same word and feel no difficulty about it. The situation, of course, decides any possible confusion among very disparate members of a broad linguistic class, such as this class (FC-B). This class seems to us too large and inclusive, but so would our class snow to an Eskimo. We have the same word for falling snow, snow on the ground, snow packed hard like ice, slushy snow, wind-driven flying snowwhatever the situation may be. To an Eskimo, this all-inclusive word would be almost unthinkable; he would say that falling snow, slushy snow, and so on are sensuously and operationally different, different things to contend with; he uses different words for them and for other kinds of snow. The Aztecs go even further than we in the opposite direction, with cold, ice, and snow all represented by the same basic word with different terminations; ice is the noun form; cold, the adjectival form; and for snow, "ice mist."
Scope of Linguistics in India
The scope of Linguistics is not only the ambit of teaching and studies. It has a big world beyond a layperson's imagination. This single discipline opens-up multidimensional career avenues ranging from the glory of national/international interpreter, pride of preparing dictionary, attractive tourism, responsible task of unearthing historical mysteries, noble work of developing artificial speech for the deaf and dumb and so on. According to Professor Sharma "India is a linguistically rich country and every Indian is largely bilingual unlike the Europeans. Our country boasts of five families of languages including Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, Austro-Asiatic and those of other assorted groups like the ones spoken by the aborigines of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. So, there is a great need to translate written texts from one Indian language to another. Linguistics is not a popular subject among students as most of them are drawn towards 'market-oriented' courses. However, academics see good scope in the field.
Linguistics finds direct applications in many other disciplines including Sociology, Anthropology and Psychology. A student of Psychology will study it from a different point of view whereas a student of Economics can view it from another perspective. Likewise, in Sociology, you can take up projects to examine social stratification. Linguists can also find work in organizations like the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, the Central Hindi Training Institute, New Delhi and the Anthropological Survey of India. Those trained in linguistics have the options of imparting training in related courses to students in B. Ed. and M.Ed. programmes or teaching foreign or second languages. Job opportunities for linguists are available in the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, Institute of Hindi Language, New Delhi and Anthropological Survey of India. A linguist can also get jobs in hospitals as speech therapists, join as speech trainers in the call centers or be recruited in the field of medical transcription. Job opportunities are also available in the fields of advertisement, journalism, business and corporate communication for those with degrees in Linguistic Courses in India.
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