Loving languages is (not) enough
Posted by lchowe on July 29, 2009
In a recent Language Log post, Prof. Mark Liberman discusses a NYT article written by Emily Finn, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Linguistics.” The article chronicles Emily’s academic journey that led to an undergraduate degree in linguistics at Yale (and, presumably, to subsequent entrance into graduate school). Prof. Liberman uses Emily’s story as a point of departure for describing his own process of linguistic discovery, having started, as many future linguists do, with the intention of majoring in math. The comments following the post provide an equally compelling view of the diversity of backgrounds that can lead one to studying linguistics.
For the past several days, I’ve been surrounded by some of the world’s most accomplished linguists who have been participating in the 2009 Linguistic Institute and the Eighth Biennial Conference for the Association for Linguistic Typology. Equally as impressive are the students attending these events, all of whom provide consistently coherent and insightful comments during talks and lectures. Clearly, linguistics attracts the best and brightest. Perhaps this is because, as a discipline, linguistics has tended to have a rather large canopy, accommodating a range of academic interests. Prof. Liberman notes that
“[a]s a “linguist”, you can work in areas that span the disciplinary spectrum: mathematics, natural science, social science, humanities, medicine, public policy, engineering…”
The LSA Summer Institute is quite possibly one of the most striking displays of this diversity (especially for someone like me who is used to working with “well-studied” languages). Thus far, the most significant take-home message from this experience has been that while being a language enthusiast, at some level, is a necessary condition for being a linguist it is most certainly not a sufficient condition.
This is a crucial lesson for would-be majors: Linguistics is a proper discipline with a rigorously defined set of theoretical and applied approaches and a constantly evolving and sophisticated range of methodologies. This observation is of course old hat for the majority of students and faculty both here at UC-Berkeley and in linguistics departments/programs around the world. Nevertheless, for me, as a practitioner and promoter of the discipline, I have to make sure that I don’t take this for granted.
[I should point out that I've borrowed the title of this post (with permission) from a book, Loving Trees is not Enough: Communication Skills for Natural Resourse Professionals, written a friend of mine, Dr. Brooks C. Mendell, who has also recently published a book that chronicles his final season on the M.I.T. baseball team, Beaverball: A (Winning) Season with the M.I.T. Baseball Team. Both are worth a read.]
