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What linguistics is and why we ignore it

Many years ago the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said: The aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. In other words, why should we have a special interest in something that we know and manipulate so easily and naturally such as language? In a very interesting article appeared in the section Art&Life of Ohmy News on 13th June 2006, David Shariatmadari argues that it is time for every global citizen of the 21st century "to get to grips with linguistics", because this discipline has been regarded "with mistrust, resentment and xenophobia" for too much time. It is necessary to get rid of many bias  and false myths about language, it is necessary to surpass the idea that linguistics does not serve any purpose, that it is purely speculative and practically useless. "Linguistics" is a serious area of study and research. Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of modern linguistics, is no less important than Albert Einstein, the father of modern physics. Therefore, quoting David Shariatmadari:

So what can we do? It's hard to change attitudes, but it's possible to broaden minds and let people draw their own conclusions. At the moment, linguistics is far from accessible. It's very rarely taught in schools. Even in higher education it's a minority subject. For some reason, it’s perceived, when it's perceived at all, as obscure.

But language and communication touch every aspect of our lives. Do people assume it's too difficult, too technical a subject to be introduced to children? No more difficult than mathematics, and no more technical than biology. Put some linguistics on the curriculum, make de Saussure and Labov and household names. You might be surprised at the results. In countries where a number of languages are spoken, countries where language divisions reflect sectarian divisions, countries like Turkey, Spain and Russia it could be a powerful tool for teaching people that we're all basically the same. But then, what country wouldn't benefit from a bit of linguistic mythbusting? In a world where communities are in contact like never before, this is one subject with a lot to offer.

In order to encourage English and international students to choose a degree programme in linguistics, the UCL (University College London) has provided a very interesting list of the most important applications of linguistics studies in real life. Here are some of them:

• The spell-checker on your PC and the grammar checker
• Synthetic speech on your telephone, including convincing intonation
• Any modern dictionary, whether monolingual or bilingual
• Low-level automatic translation systems that are already in use
• Methods that may have been used to teach you to read and write in primary school, to write decent prose in secondary school, or to speak foreign languages
• The treatments that you will need in later life if you are unfortunate enough to have a stroke
• The treatments available for children with various kinds of language impairment such as dyslexia.
• Explanations of how dialects develop and change
• The story of English
• Ideas about whether (and how) our language affects the way we think
• Theories about how children learn to speak
• Arguments about how all the parts of language fit together
• Experiments to find the bit of our brain which holds our irregular verbs
• Facts about wildly exotic languages where a whole sentence consists of a single very
  complicated word, or where words occur in the reverse of their English order
• Speculations about how language evolved.

USEFUL LINKS

For a general introduction to linguistics visit the following sites:

http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/3920/#ling

http://www.indiana.edu/~hlw/index.html

General introduction to linguistics

http://mockingbird.creighton.edu/english/fajardo/teaching/eng520/intro-lang.htm

Precious glossaries of linguistic and rhetorical terms:

http://www.rinkworks.com/words/linguistics.shtml

http://www.rinkworks.com/words/funwords.shtml

http://www.uky.edu/AS/Classics/rhetoric.html

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