Thread: Hi Y'all Lets get some talk with Linguistics/Cognitive Science!

Hey guys and gals!,
I am Diego, a new member of this site. I am new to this site, and saw this as a link for new members to post in.

I am currently a student (senior, yay!) at the University of Delaware majoring in Linguistics. I came to this site hoping that there were some neat conversations I can get myself into and start up relating to Linguistics.

I noticed there was a debate about whether or not Linguistics should be a sub-board in regards to its relationship as a science and importance. As almost graduating with this degree, and on my way to a PhD (got invited to go to University of Florida yay!) in it, I thought it wouldn't hurt to bring this subject up.

This is not meant to be forward or bold in any such sense, but rather informative.

Here are some misconceptions that I think are appropriate to bring up. If people want a further elaboration of this, I will be more than happy to discuss this with you

• First, Linguistics IS a science . It uses scientific method and analytical procedures to explain how the world works. Although it used to be classified under the arts, recent studies and approaches with linguistics has transformed the subject to an analytical science as much as it is a social science.
• Linguistics IS a popular study, and is studied all around the world.
• Linguistics and English are different subjects with different approaches of study. When people put the two together, it makes us linguist-lovers very frustrated and angry
• English's and Linguistics' (pleeease mind my apostrophe mistake, if there is one ) definition of grammar is very different. Where English fans say that there is a right and wrong way to spek and write, we linguist do not use those terms and instead, focus on observing the rights and wrongs of speech and investigate why a person or a group of people talk that way.
• Linguistics and Foreign Languages are also different when dealing with their philosophical studies. Foreign Language study developing how to learn another language while Linguistics focuses on the science behind different languages.
• Linguistics is important to many different fields like biology, anthology, cognitive science, history, sociology, English, philosophy and even chemistry, physics, and neuroscience! (There are even more fields that linguistics works with too, but saying them all would be very repetitive in regards to my point.) Be that as it may, Linguistics is not any of those fields, but rather a subject of its own.

I really hope there is a board, or at least (that is, desperately speaking), a sub board. If there is a vote as for who should moderate this board, or if there is no one to moderate it, I would love to help out. I have experience in working with forums for over 10 years. If necessary, I can put up my resume for those who are interested in learning more about me.

That' it folks, and rake care!

Diego
--

"the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best."

Yep, it is pretty annoying when English majors try to correct different accents, slangs,.. "linguistics".

Yeah. It's understandable though. Linguistics is not a subject taught in high school, so if somebody has never taken it before, it is no surprise.

... and one would think that any school teaching a language, no matter if it's everyone's mother tongue, that the school would include at least one linguistics course.

I am familiar with Sapir, Whorf and Korzybski along with Color Naming, English Prime, Noun/Verb-Centered Languages, Language Evolution and PIE, etc. I consider myself a beginner.

Originally Posted by jrmonroe

... and one would think that any school teaching a language, no matter if it's everyone's mother tongue, that the school would include at least one linguistics course.

I am familiar with Sapir, Whorf and Korzybski along with Color Naming, English Prime, Noun/Verb-Centered Languages, Language Evolution and PIE, etc. I consider myself a beginner.

One would think, but I don't think Education Beaurocracy (USA) is not very informed on the subject. Then again. I am super bias toward linguistics, and I am unfamiliar with Educational Beaurocracy.

Those are wonderful steps toward learning more about linguistics! Keep working on it, and if you have a chance, take a class or two about it. You may also like Cognitive Science, as it is also correlates with Linguistics.

Welcome to the forum. I shall take this opportunity to give you a heads up: the physicists here consider geology a science so soft that they feel it is the preserve of persons, such as myself, for whom filling in colouring books is an appropriate remedial pastime. (We call them maps, but as K. said the map is not....etc). Anyway, I don't think linguistics will fare much better.

(A small aside. I think you mistyped anthropology)

That's quite a ... bold accusation as it is an opinion, but your opinion is, never-the-less, valued like all others.

There are many physicist majors that have taken phonology (study of sounds with language, pretty much) courses at my school and fails the course, so I guess every person has their strengths.

For some physicists like Bohm and Bohr, linguistics is an essential tool to convey accurately what is going on. Language has the abilility to obfuscate and cloud the central issues of physics. For example, noun oriented langauages that give form and 'permanence' to objects shroud those concepts which at their heart are frame dependant, systemic or stochastic in nature. For the physicists above, they would prefer the use of a scientific semantic language that more correctly describes what is going on. Otherwise the language of mathematics is the only tool at the disposal of physicists.

More here.

PS ....and welcome to the forum Diego :-)

Thanks Implicate Order, and thank you for your input!

Originally Posted by DiegoJZelaya

That's quite a ... bold accusation as it is an opinion, but your opinion is, never-the-less, valued like all others.

I am not entirely sure of the relationship between linguistics and semantics, but I think you will find I have made a substantiated assertion, rather than a bold accusation.

An accusation would require an intended element of negativity.
Boldness would require a belief that a van de Graaff generator is more powerful than a geologist's hammer.

An assertion is a confident and forceful statement of fact or belief.
The substantiation is present within the posts in the forum.

Physicists on the forum are free to challenge the assertion. If it takes off, I can split the related posts into a separate thread.

(I generally preface my opinions with phrases such as I think, It seems to me, Perhaps, Does it not seem to be the case that.)

I am already getting left behind but I do find the areas of semantics and linguistics fascinating . I also welcome clarity and correctness in written communication regardless.

It would be great if there was a sub forum along those lines but I wonder if there would be enough interest or input here to make it worthwhile?

Originally Posted by geordief

It would be great if there was a sub forum along those lines but I wonder if there would be enough interest or input here to make it worthwhile?

That is the issue. Although you could argue along the line of Kevin Costner's Field of Dreams.

*whispers* go the distance.........

John,
I misread your post. Apologies. You are right with what you said. I should have written this earlier, but forgot.

But 'physicists' commonly mistake what intelligence consist of. It is unfair to say that geology is way easier than physics. Your state of mind determines your intelligence, and state of mind varies among everyone. That is all I wanted to say.

Originally Posted by John Galt

Originally Posted by DiegoJZelaya

That's quite a ... bold accusation as it is an opinion, but your opinion is, never-the-less, valued like all others.

I am not entirely sure of the relationship between linguistics and semantics, but I think you will find I have made a substantiated assertion, rather than a bold accusation.

An accusation would require an intended element of negativity.
Boldness would require a belief that a van de Graaff generator is more powerful than a geologist's hammer.

An assertion is a confident and forceful statement of fact or belief.
The substantiation is present within the posts in the forum.

Physicists on the forum are free to challenge the assertion. If it takes off, I can split the related posts into a separate thread.

(I generally preface my opinions with phrases such as I think, It seems to me, Perhaps, Does it not seem to be the case that.)

Originally Posted by DiegoJZelaya

John,
I misread your post. Apologies. You are right with what you said. I should have written this earlier, but forgot.

But 'physicists' commonly mistake what intelligence consist of. It is unfair to say that geology is way easier than physics. Your state of mind determines your intelligence, and state of mind varies among everyone. That is all I wanted to say.

I don't think anybody said physicists question the intelligence of geologists or linguists. The question is whether they consider those disciplines to be science.

Oh, lol. Sorry for the confusion.

Are you a phys? I would be interested in hearing in more detail why do they not think it is a science. It does have a lot of analytical and its own scientific approaches. There are many 'laws' that linguistics use to investigate language. I just can't see why someone would say Linguistics isn't, and I don't understand how someone could make such a judgment when (assuming that this is true) they really do not know what linguistics is about or its methods.

Originally Posted by Harold14370

Originally Posted by DiegoJZelaya

John,
I misread your post. Apologies. You are right with what you said. I should have written this earlier, but forgot.

But 'physicists' commonly mistake what intelligence consist of. It is unfair to say that geology is way easier than physics. Your state of mind determines your intelligence, and state of mind varies among everyone. That is all I wanted to say.

I don't think anybody said physicists question the intelligence of geologists or linguists. The question is whether they consider those disciplines to be science.

Originally Posted by DiegoJZelaya

Oh, lol. Sorry for the confusion.

Are you a phys? I would be interested in hearing in more detail why do they not think it is a science. It does have a lot of analytical and its own scientific approaches. There are many 'laws' that linguistics use to investigate language. I just can't see why someone would say Linguistics isn't, and I don't understand how someone could make such a judgment when (assuming that this is true) they really do not know what linguistics is about or its methods.

I've had some training in physics, but no I'm an engineer. I'm not one of those who says it isn't science. Perhaps you can show why it is science, for those of us who are not familiar. I.e., how close does it follow the classical definition - observation, hypothesis, experimentation, etc.?

Sometimes conversations here get started in the strangest of places. Mathematicians study pattern and relationship, and are not necessarily restricted to number, hence certain linguistics topics could be discussed in the math fora. Also linguistics could be discussed within the framework of psychology and neuroscience, we have fora for those. Perhaps there are some applications of information theory to linguistics? Why shouldn't a linguist take an interest in studying an abstract language like computer programming? There is another fora for a linguistics oriented thread. Certainly language is an aspect of art and culture. Or there is anthropology, can we extrapolate the probable vocal range of human ancestors? There is an "education" fora, the differences between the science of linguistics and algorithmic methods of grammar education could be expounded on.
I suspect that the presence and general participation in a range of linguistically oriented threads might lead to the canonization of a "Language and Linguistics" fora.

Linguistics do touch a number of fields such as Anthropology, Neuroscience, psychology, and computer science too. Computational Linguistics is more of a computer science and mathematic relationship to linguistics and has been studied for a while, I think.

Linguistics does follow the classical methods for experimenting for a science. You only need to look into academic papers to see this (particularly in Phonetics and Semantics, and in subjects such as Historical Linguistics (the study of change in language). There are detailed laws that are followed for phonetics. You can take the IPA for instance. In the IPA, every symbol has a particular sound and only that sound alone. Many people ask why we don't just use the English alphabet instead of just learning the IPA. Two reasons are 1.) English letters can contain multiple sounds (such as 'c' can be pronounced differently according to the words, "Ceasar"and "Cat". 2.) English letters does not nearly contain all the sounds in the world.

Classification of rules goes much deeper than that. When one studies language change, there are many rules that we have to follow in order to produce accurate data. Here are some rules that may seem helpful.

Grassman's Law
Verner's Law
Umlat

These are only a few laws that have been discovered by Linguistics/phoneticians. These laws were found with careful precision of the language and dialect people speak, and is only the beginning of Phonetics Research (classified under linguistics).

Hope this helps!

To what extent are these true laws, rather than elegant summaries of observations? How rigorous are they mathematically? For example, in the case of Grassman's Law if there are two aspirated consonants, does the first one always lose aspiration in ancient Greek and Sanskrit? If not, how frequently does this not happen? What governs the 'oversight'? If it is universal, how was this determined?

I confess I am rather confused by the thought of calling such an observation a law. Mind you, I have little time for Laws in the rest of science. I think it is an unfortunate term, conveying the wrong meaning and inherited from a time when science was more absolute.

Yeah, those seem more like the "I before e except after c (except when it isn't) rule." As far as the IPA is concerned, that is just a conventional way to record pronunciation.

On a side note, I started out to learn IPA once so I could figure out the pronunciations in Wikipedia. After a while I decided it was more trouble than it was worth. How bad did I really need to know how things are pronounced? Not bad enough, apparently.

There are certain rules that the phonemic changes happen always within their environment of all the words that contain that sound within the language (environment, meaning the other sounds within the word itself, and sometimes, other words around them). There are also sounds that occur in a change from one word to another that don't always change in all words. This is very complicated to elaborate, because you may need a larger understanding of phonetic features and how they relate and contrast with each other. However, it is safe to say that these changes are supported through logic, mathematical reasoning/equations, and biology (neuroscience/and anatomy and physiology) without knowing too much about the subject.

I am not sure how to really describe it in accordance to 'observation' and 'law'. I could try my best.

Linguist listen closely to the language in various ways. In phonetics, we 'observe' how sounds are different from each other, and through these observations we have been able to make a 'law' called a 'sound law' to state that a specific sound change occurs always within a specific environment. These laws can be applied to other observations much like how one can use formulas for other sorts of equations. However, this 'law' never changes, meaning that it is always consistent to the rules it follows.

Linguist also uses the 'white coat and gloves' mentality in order to sweep away biases that can occur. For example, many people feel that there is a standard English in our language. Linguist most certainly do not agree to this. They feel that no dialect is better or worse than the other, and that the common person who does not study linguistics only feels that way because of social pressures that they have grown up with. By carefully understanding this, we can practice language as a science like any other.

I hope 'double posting' is considered o.k... If not, I can edit it. Just thought it would be appropriate so you know that I am addressing your question with this answer

IPA is a wonderful tool to use, and it is very common for people to think it is not worth it. However, if I were to ask you to pronounce a word in 'click', how would you know how to pronounce it? The IPA gives us the power to properly pronounce sounds that languages produce around the world, especially those languages you do not know how to pronounce.

Also, even the smallest detail can affect meaning of a word. the sound of R as it 'Round' is changed to a 'B' it would make the word 'Bound'. Changes of sounds can get even more precise in regards to the change of meaning in a word. For instance, in Punjabi, a change from a sound to an aspirated sound can completely change the meaning of a word. Although this does not occur in English (and consequently doesn't matter in English) it is very important in Punjabi. The lack of aspiration changing the allophone of a word in a language makes our consciousness unable to identify the differences in those sounds. Being able or not able to identify the aspiration makes learning English or Pujabi (in order) as a second language really difficult.

On a side note, I started out to learn IPA once so I could figure out the pronunciations in Wikipedia. After a while I decided it was more trouble than it was worth. How bad did I really need to know how things are pronounced? Not bad enough, apparently.

In the "sound law" are the sound elements considered abstractly, without reference to any intended meaning?

Originally Posted by GiantEvil

In the "sound law" are the sound elements considered abstractly, without reference to any intended meaning?

No. Sound Laws suffer no exceptions

Wait....you're from Delaware and say "y'all" ? What's up with that? I thought you damn Yankees used "you guys" for the second person plural.

Originally Posted by MacGyver1968

Wait....you're from Delaware and say "y'all" ? What's up with that? I thought you damn Yankees used "you guys" for the second person plural.

Haha, another linguistic question! My family is from Argentina, and my dad uses the 'Vosotros' form heavily because of where he is from. He translated Vosotros as 'Ya'll' and this concept has been passed down to me.

Ya'll isn't used so much in Delaware except for southern Delaware (which has a very different accent than northern Delaware does. However, I am not sure how much they use it really. never really sat down and thought deeply on it.

The "redneck" has become an American archetype. Y'all has become ubiquitous even up here in Cascadia.

Yeah...I just think the rest of the world is finally acknowledging that we southerners are right. I reckon.

Seriously though...it's just a weakness in the English language that the second person singular "you", and the second person plural is also "you"...so there are regional differences on how to differentiate between the two.

I suspect it was mostly a function of FOX entertainment television

Originally Posted by MacGyver1968

Wait....you're from Delaware and say "y'all" ? What's up with that? I thought you damn Yankees used "you guys" for the second person plural.

Here in the Pittsburgh area we say (or used to say - it's going out of style) "you'ns" or if you are too lazy to pronounce both syllables, "yuns" or "yinz." That's why Pittsburghers, especially the less educated among us, are known as "yinzers."

Here in the North East of England "youse" (pronounced like the plural of female sheep) is quite common in this context...

Originally Posted by DiegoJZelaya

There are certain rules ........etc. plus the following post.

So, one could say your an ethologist studying the specific human behaviour of vocal communication?

Eh, I don't think so. I thought ethnologist all animals that conduct behavior except for humans.

If you are studying vocal communication, you are a linguist, because you are studying how language is produced (language is a unique trait only found in humans.) Its also not really studying 'behavior', like a psychologist (unless you are uncluding psycholinguistics). Phonologist really don't study the behaviors people have when producing a sound or about to produce a sound, but rather how the sound itself is produced through the Anatomy and Physiology of various aspects that deals with sound producing.

Originally Posted by Harold14370

Originally Posted by MacGyver1968

Wait....you're from Delaware and say "y'all" ? What's up with that? I thought you damn Yankees used "you guys" for the second person plural.

Here in the Pittsburgh area we say (or used to say - it's going out of style) "you'ns" or if you are too lazy to pronounce both syllables, "yuns" or "yinz." That's why Pittsburghers, especially the less educated among us, are known as "yinzers."

Yeah, I never understood that one.

It has its own Wikipedia page.
Yinz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Originally Posted by Harold14370

It has its own Wikipedia page.
Yinz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

>>Yinz is the most recent derivation from the original Scots-Irish form you ones, which is probably the result of contact between Irish and English.

Interesting. Also popular in much of Appalachia is/was young'uns for young ones, which is also apparently from the British Ilses, though suspiciously a lot like the German word for youth (Jugend). The "Scotch-Irish" made up at least half of most Appalachia and around 25% German, which in sheer speculation could have sealed the deal historically as a mutual bond in the many mixed communities.

Im working on my linguistic bonding theory. Im mainly focusing on russian, tamil, chinese and sierra popoluca, especially the latter two seem to be a "different kind of thing" ..

very often verbs is taking some kind of "central" role and somewhat cater to subjects.. but in ergative languages verbs conjugate according to objects. why ?

Originally Posted by ninuno888

very often verbs is taking some kind of "central" role and somewhat cater to subjects.. but in ergative languages verbs conjugate according to objects. why ?

chomsky never answered why ergative languages conjugate to objects or why verbs are somewhat central as in minimalist programs.

How small the atoms can be ?

Drink
Intake [liquid]

Eat
Intake [solid]

Intake
[Inward] [motion] [associated with digestion and absorption]


How smaller can it be ?

Ya pomnyu chudnoe mgnovenye