Or, more accurately, what is linguistics not?
[Warning: this is one of my more free-thought-association blogs, so if you are looking for a well-crafted blog post, look at some of my other ones. Well, okay.. maybe you ought to look for another blog entirely. But look at the pretty picture!]
A few years ago, right before I started at the University of Arizona, I attended a linguistics symposium by the name of Multilingual, 2.0 ? (Yeah, I was confused by the name too. They had some sort of elaborate explanation relating to the transcendent nature of change and and whether the changes occurring in the world’s simultaneously shrinking and expanding linguistic realms were really changes at all… or something like that).
At said symposium, there was a speaker/guest who gave a talk on a paper he’d written on constructed languages, specifically in one sci-fi book (series) where the alien race had an interesting linguistic capacity: they had two mouths or speech organs, and utilized them simultaneously in the production of speech. Which, made for an interesting dilemma for the humans who came into contact with them.
That talk on conlangs and that alien race has been stuck in my memory for a long time. I have long-lost the brochure for the symposium, and I couldn’t for the life of me remember the name of the speaker nor the book. I have been a life-long fan of Tolkien (let’s be honest, fan is too tame a word) and his constructed languages, so this wasn’t the first time I’d fallen in love with fake languages. Tolkien is the primary reason why I decided to study linguistics in the first place– he was always an eminent philologist in my mind, despite the face that he isn’t well known for it nowadays.
I just now have taken the trouble to hunt down that book after three years– searching for graduate research topics was the primary motivation. Anyway, I found out that the book I was searching for is Embassytown, by China Miéville. I have now procured it from the library, and I am super excited to read it.
Linguistics is a strange field. When people ask me, “what is linguistics?” I’m always at a loss as how to define it. Linguistics is the study of language, but we’re not quite sure what “language” actually means, or entails, or where the definition of “language” begins, or ends. People define it differently, and vary the definition even at different times. Perhaps one of the most alluring attributes of linguistics is it is as varied and undulating in its studies and applications as your attention and desire to probe language for its eccentricities and secrets.
Language, to me, is right up there with the mysteries of ontology, soteriology, and the infinite grace of God. We can define these things, we can discover concrete identifiers that prove specific data about its existence and necessity, but there always remains outliers and indefinable features, something wild and greater and more mysterious than we can imagine, no matter how many studies or papers or thought experiments we engage in. That’s why I like language and linguistics. It is a glimpse into the mystery, and incredible complexity of being, and the One who created existence as we know it.
Six Months Later 