Talk:Linguistics

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[edit] External links

I removed the following external links from the article. I'll give a motivation below each.

— mark ✎ 20:53, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

--- I removed the following external link:

  • LingForum
    • I can't see why this site is particularly important as opposed to others; there are very few postings on it and it was created in June 2006.

--Svenonius 08:44, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Su Cheng Zhong"

Wikipedia is not a place for new ideas, like these by "Su Cheng Zhong." If your idea is so obscure that you need to supply an e-mail address to legitimate it, it doesn't belong here. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Grick (talk • contribs) 23:42, 27 January 2005

See also No original research and Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mark Dingemanse (talk • contribs) 04:46, 28 January 2005

[edit] Examples

An extreme version of prescriptivism can be found among censors, whose personal mission is to eradicate words and structures they consider to be destructive to civilization.

As examples, 1984's Newspeak, the French Academy, "political correctness," and opposition to use of Black English Vernacular could be mentioned. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.198.235.145 (talk) 12:41, 10 February 2005

If you feel a change is needed, feel free to make it yourself! Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone (yourself included) can edit any article by following the Edit this page link. You don't even need to log in, although there are several reasons why you might want to. Wikipedia convention is to be bold and not be afraid of making mistakes. If you're not sure how editing works, have a look at How to edit a page, or try out the Sandbox to test your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome. — mark ✎ 10:40, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] COTW candidate, maybe?

Hi, I think one should put Edward Sapir sowewhere between Saussure Bloomfield and Harris under Important linguists and schools of thought. Is there any reason for excluding him? --Joelemaltais 10:06, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

kind of just a list of links right now. Maybe just request for expansion... Lockeownzj00 13:42, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I agree that Sapir would seem to deserve a mention, but I wonder where to stop. In fact, the section, "Important linguists and schools of thought" ends with a list of people which does not strike me (as a professional linguist) as particularly representative of "important linguists and schools" but rather idiosyncratic; for example, nobody from HPSG, LFG, or Categorial Grammar is mentioned, no phonologists, no semanticists, not Hale or Cinque or Rizzi or Kayne, etc. On the other hand, this is a bit of a contentious topic and I don't have a handy objective metric for who should be in or out so I am hesitant to start changing things. --Svenonius 11:58, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

I finally went ahead and changed the paragraph that mentioned lots of specific people from California (Langacker, Goldberg, Fillmore, etc.) to one that tries to mention schools of thought (HPSG/LFG as being concerned with formal rigor, OT as stressing the violability of rules, Functionalist strains as stressing the non-autonomy of linguistic knowledge and the non-universality of linguistic properties). --Svenonius 09:08, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] There is no such thing as "prescriptive linguistics"

The text in this article (and a number of other related ones) has often in the past entailed that there is such a thing as "prescriptive linguistics" or "prescriptive linguists." If we are talking about the academic discipline of linguistics (and what else could we be talking about in this article?), then I insist that there is no such thing.

I urge anybody who disagrees with this claim to apply the following standard: provide lists like the following:

  • "prescriptive linguists" that currently hold positions in linguistics departments in English speaking countries;
  • academic journals dedicated to supposedly "prescriptive linguistics," and whose editorial board is made almost entirely of people who hold academic positions in linguistics.

As preliminary evidence of my claim, the article mentions a number of 20th century "descriptive" linguists (scare quotes because of the redundancy), but not a single example of that mythical creature, the "prescriptive linguist." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.204.188.184 (talk) 22:36, 30 May 2005

You're absolutely right, and I'm glad that you fixed it. Thanks! — mark ✎ 06:12, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
I would suggest that prescriptive linguists may be found among the ranks of English teachers the world over. :) Cbdorsett 22:08, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
But aren't those the last ones we would want to call linguists :P ? — mark ✎ 00:49, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Before declaring that "there is no such thing as 'prescriptive linguistics,' I suggest you do more research. A good start would be Bryan Garner's essay "Making Peace in the Language Wars," in Garner's Modern American Usage (2d ed. 2003). Garner is neither a linguistics professor nor an English professor, and he does not serve on the editorial board of any academic journal devoted to linguistics. He is, however, internationally recognised and acknowledged as an expert on American English, even by avowed descriptivist linguists. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.30.80.162 (talk) 11:54, 12 September 2005
How about members of language academies the world over? The Academie Francaise for starters? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.133.197.223 (talk) 08:42, 20 December 2005

dude- I'm gonn get myself into trouble here but many linguistices have various ways of treating the social dimensions and implications of various uses of various you name it- varieties, dialects, -isms, terminology. words have cultural connotations. "prescriptive linguistics" as a term is a bit problematic. admittedly, "prescriptive linguist(ics)" is almost never seriously attributed or self-applied, but are y'all saying linguistic prescription doesn't happen in some form? Ka-zizzl 03:25, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

I agree with the OP, there's no such thing as prescriptive linguisitcs. The vast majority of prescriptivists, even if they hold academic positions, would not identify themselves as linguists. Cadr 17:28, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

    • the vast majority of top gov't officialz wouldn't identify them selves as obscurantists, obfuscators or misrepresenters, but that doesn't mean they aren't or shouldn't. kzz* 19:28, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
  • I strive as hard as anyone to avoid prescriptivism (sometimes it's hard, ya gotta admit), and I agree that I've never heard anyone with a degree in linguistics describe themselves as a presriptivist, but I think maybe some people here are being a bit too exacting with the term 'linguist.' Does no one else see any hypocrisy in someone that tries really hard never to utter an ounce of prescriptivism, yet feels very comfortable saying that only people with degrees can be considered 'linguists?' It's kind of like a self-fulfilling definition isn't it? Lingustics is by it's nature entirely objective and is never value-laden (I don't agree, but let's assume for a second), therefore anyone who values any one type of speech over another in any circumstance is therefor not a linguist. How about William Safire? He has some strong opinions, so I guess most everyone here would contend that he's not a linguist. --Hraefen 19:57, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
In other disciplines it's generally accepted that someone without a proper qualification in X isn't an Xist. Can you name any contemporary examples of people generally referred to as "physicists" who don't have a formal physics qualification, and who do not publish in peer-reviewed physics journals? Linguistics is no exception. Also, being a descriptivist isn't totally incompatible with value judgements about language. You can still belive, say, that Shakespeare was a better writer than Jeffrey Archer. You can also believe that there is a fairly standard menaing for "linguist", and that the word ought to be used with this meaning on Wikipedia. It's the more formal aspects of language (i.e. grammar) which descriptivists think should be immune from value judgements. Cadr 22:31, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

I have a B.A. in linguistics from UC Berkeley and my mother has a PhD in linguistics from a Europeam university. She is a fine scholar and a preeminent germanist, but her views about the hierarchy of languages and propriety of grammar certainly puts her (and I would guess her colleagues in her circle) in the prescriptivist camp. There IS such a thing as prescriptivist linguistics and it tends to be an old-world kind of view. Linguists like my mom don't see themselves as scientists as much as philologists. It's just a different perspective, and not necessarily less valid, as some people here seem to be suggesting. Fraea 00:12, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

This war of words has something to do with the fields of meaning of the word family lingu-, and in particular, I think, two definitions (there are others) of 'linguist'. It blurs the debate about 'linguistics'. Those who are not professionals in the field of linguistics use the adjective linguistic to mean 'having to do with the study of language/languages/a language. OED defines linguistic (adj) as "Of or pertaining to the knowledge or study of languages. Also used for: Of or pertaining to language or languages; = LINGUAL 4b. ["b. Pertaining to language or languages"] The latter use is hardly justifiable etymologically; it has arisen because lingual suggests irrelevant associations.": so perhaps 'lingual' would be a better word for this - only no-one uses it! My concern is that there is a completely legitimate area of teaching a language, including mother-tongue, in which standards are conveyed. This starts with the primary school child who is shown that there is a right way to form a letter, and how to develop a legible hand. It continues with the child learning the skills of punctuation, anhd goes on to University, where the undergraduate and indeed postgrad is liable to be told that her/his style 'is not acceptable'. Such teaching is not, I think, what linguistics professionals tend to call prescriptive in the fullest (shocking!/shocked) way. I would like to call it pedagogic linguistics, although this term appears ambiguous: see [[1]] for another teacher's use of the term to mean 'the [watered-down] use of knowledge from the field of linguistics to inform the training of teachers of language'. Wikipedia is not the place to publish anything new, so I won't propose this dewfinition here; but if anyone can tell me of any better term than 'pedagogic linguistics' I'd be glad to hear it - and then introduce it into this article. It seems to me (a schoolteacher, of English as mother-tongue in secondary education for over 30 years) that someone like Henry Watson Fowler, though not a professional in linguistics, has a great claim to be considered a prescriptivist - but that 'pedagogic linguistics' would be a better description of the field of his book Fowler's Modern English Usage. MacAuslan 05:33, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Broadly conceived

"Broadly conceived, ..." is a portentous way to begin a page on a subject which is about communication. It is what is known as throat-clearing. Please might the author remove it? www.danon.co.uk —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.189.194.219 (talk) 14:10, 1 June 2005

Wikipedia articles have no one author. If you feel a change is needed, feel free to make it yourself! Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone (yourself included) can edit any article by following the Edit this page link. You don't even need to log in, although there are several reasons why you might want to. Wikipedia convention is to be bold and not be afraid of making mistakes. If you're not sure how editing works, have a look at How to edit a page, or try out the Sandbox to test your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome. — mark ✎ 20:06, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Sure, but this is discussion. Thanks. www.danon.co.uk —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.189.232.228 (talk) 13:10, 8 June 2005

[edit] Category

Category:Linguistics has more than 150 articles in the main category. Many of these should be taken out and put in subcategories. But I don't know much about the subject. Can anyone help with this? Thanks. Maurreen 15:12, 27 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Historical linguistics

Hi, I'm concerned why Historical Linguistics is listed as an area of Theoretical Linguistics, when the article itself says, that it's method is diachronic and not synchronic. How does this fit in? --Trickstar 20:44, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

Diachronic linguistics is the same as historical linguistics. Diachronic simply refers to the analysis of two speech varieties for the purpose of establishing a possible history. It is therefore completely theoretical, in as much as it uses the same tools as phonology, morphology, syntax, etc. --Straughn


Both Pannini's work as well as the Tolkappiyam should be mentioned. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 60.49.106.230 (talk) 16:19, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Why Dichotomies??

Why is the word "Dichotomies" used to designate what are pretty clearly conceived of as gradations with endpoints? To me, and, I suspect, to many, a "Dichotomy" implies sharp cutoff points and completely disjoint categories.

--Lavintzin 05:49, 18 September 2005 (UTC)


[edit] Bibliography is getting long

The bibliography section is getting too long and unselective. Comprehensive bibliographies, especially of general reference books, don't belong in Wikipedia unless there is some added value, e.g. annotation. I don't know what the reader is supposed to do with a list of a dozen encyclopedias of language and/or linguistics. --Macrakis 14:44, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

  • Are bibliography sections ever given their own pages? That way you could leave the most important ones and put the rest in Linguistics: Further bibliography--Hraefen 22:38, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Linguistic competence

include it here. Also: linguistic performance. Cheers! --Suspekt 22:57, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] publication

would you like to publish this article? -- Zondor 22:25, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] linguistician

Some linguists call themselves linguisticians to distinguish themselves from polyglots. Can this be reflected at the head of the article? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.219.238.105 (talk) 13:57, 20 December 2005

According to the list of linguists, this is uncommon and disliked by most linguists. --Cromwellt|Talk 18:20, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
Maybe, but the term 'linguist' is commonly used to describe a student or scholar of languages as opposed to linguistic theory.217.43.173.159 (talk) 23:38, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed WikiProject Theoretical Linguistics

We're trying to start a project on theoretical linguistics. Anyone interested can stop by Wikipedia:WikiProject Theoretical Linguistics to see the proposed project and, hopefully, sign up. -- Dalbury(Talk) 01:53, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] stylistics

I find it bizarre that stylistics is classified here as part of theoretical linguistics. --Pfold 14:27, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

In all my time in grad school for linguistics, I have yet to hear anything about stylistics. As far as I know, it's not a concern of linguists. On a similar note, discourse analysis is fuzzy as to its classification. It draws strongly from both social and theoretical realms. --Straughn

[edit] Mixed referencing

There is one stated reference within the article, and this is numerologically referenced. The references section at the end contains a list of Harvard-style references. As there is no direct attribution to these references, they are as much use there as a chocolate fireguard.

Could someone who knows the references (or is willing to venture back into the history) perhaps 'connect-the-dots'? -- Sasuke Sarutobi 13:24, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

I was also interested in talking about the references section. While the length of this section is probably not a problem, as long as the references are actually referenced in the article, the style of the section is problematic. This section should be entirely replaced by the new references formatting, where the references section is directly bound to the citations in the page. Unfortunately, I have not yet familiarized myself with exactly how this works, or I'd do it myself. Additionally, the bold on author names should either be removed completely (my recommendation), used on the entire name of the author(s), or used only on the last name. This inconsistency looks silly and unprofessional. --Cromwellt|Talk 18:20, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

On most other pages, the names of authors referenced are usually not in bold, so I will go through and change those that are in bold. If this seems wrong to anyone, it can always be changed back. Also, should the dates that are in these references (I'm assuming they're the publishing dates) be placed after the text title? --JNF Tveit 16:46, 14 October 2006

[edit] what do you call it when one word is contained in another word but

not "intact" within the larger word? hehehe. I guess there wouldn't be a term for it. and in this case it's names, so- not quite as notable as if it weren't names. I recently noticed that the word "josh" is contained in th word "josiah". any west wing fans? I don't know name etymologies but could they be from the same origin? I kinda doubt it. anyway there are probly tons of other sets of words that meet this description but I wondered if anyone knew of or could come up w/ a nice term for this. yaa. on a quasi-related note- is joshua related to th name jesus? in this aramaic-lang film I saw once- it sounded pretty similar. KzzRzzKnocker 03:02, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

K 'pparently there's no term for it or no one cares. that's cool, I'll just have to take sole credit when I invent it. Ka-zizzl 02:57, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

Joshua, Josiah and Jesus are all very closely linked and have the same etymological background. A tip one of my lecturers told me - vowels are interchangable, ie. they're more likely to change than consonants between related languages. Hope this helps. --Mcr hxc 06:51, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

I suggest you look at Triliteral --Pfold 12:45, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] a letter

(—Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.211.202.164 (talk • contribs) moved from talk page)

:) Dlohcierekim 10:55, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Style problems in linguistics

I am not a linguist and have had no training in the field. So I make this observation as a layman: the linguistics group of articles tends to contain far too much jargon, and is very difficult to understand for your average reader. This conflicts with Wikipedia's mission, which is to be a universally-accessible encyclopedia (universally accessible both in the sense that anyone can get hold of its articles for free, and in the sense that anyone should be able to understand every article fairly easily). It also conflicts with the style guide. For example, I searched up the term 'Fricative' today to see what it meant. The first sentence reads,

  • Fricatives (or spirants) are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together.

Immediately I was lost because I did not know what an "articulator" was, and the article did not very clearly explain what it might be. So I searched up "articulator". The opening of the appropriate page reads,

Not so bad, but thrown into the last word of that (very short) paragraph is "homorganic consonants", a mysterious phrase which gets no explanation and hyperlinks to an article that doesn't immediately explain what it means. So if you want to understand what something means in linguistics on a very basic level, you end up cycling through several articles so that you can find the definition of the definition of the definition of the original term!

Fortunately this hyperlinking ended well for me, at the Place of articulation article, which is unusually understandable for a linguistics article. And I didn't have to do too much work to understand the article, in the end. But it was still an unreasonable amount to do, and many linguistics articles are much worse. Something really needs to be done generally, and by Wikipedians who already have a basic understanding of linguistics, so that it can be done fairly easily and speedily. I hope this plea is heard by someone willing and able!

PS, the philosophy group of articles is much worse for this kind of thing. Just try finding something out about anything vaguely obscure and you'll see what I mean! 212.57.231.147 02:30, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

    • I trained as a linguist (PhD) and one of the first things I remember about graduate school is how quickly my readings went from interesting (the first month or so) to completely inaccessible. The first few years of classes I just took excellent notes, whether they made sense or not, and over the years things gradually fell into place and started to be meaningful. My point is that linguistics is one of these fields that seems like part of the humanities, and you expect it to be accessible to an intelligent, educated person; in fact, it is very technical, and once you've skimmed the shallow surface, you can't say anything interesting with using a very specific vocabulary. 69.130.19.44 21:11, 29 May 2007 (UTC)Elizabeth
Yes, having taught undergraduate tutorials in linguistics, I think that the idea that the study of language forms part of the humanities misleads many people. Students expect an arts subject and get confronted with a science. Well, to be fair, linguistics has a foot in both of the two cultures: semantics, for example, often feels like a sub-branch of philosophy, while acoustic phonetics is clearly a matter of physics. But I agree that the vocabulary is necessarily technical. Still, accessibility is a worthwhile aim, and it's not too hard to produce glosses for most things that point the layman in the right direction, like: "Homorganic consonants (consonants pronounced using the same parts of the mouth)...". garik 21:20, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
I agree that some of the vocabulary is technical and that there is merit to making posts a bit more transparent to readers. However, I completely disagree that you can not say anything interesting with a particular vocabulary. What about math? What about chemistry? What about physics? In phonetics (my discipline), one can not talk about acoustic events in speech without some sophisticated vocabulary. One doesn't find complaints about any of these disciplines' use of technical vocabulary. Language is complex and it has complex processes that are unique. Insofar as new words are necessary for the description of phenomena, they should be defined, but such words are created for the purpose of contrasting meaning. I think that perhaps there should be a statement in this page about how non-linguists can not hope to understand the details of the complexity of language without some vocabulary.Lingboy (talk) 02:30, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] axes

How do you conduct something along two axes, then? I fear this is a reader-unfriendly way to open a description of the subject. pauldanon

Agreed! The beginning of the article needs much adjustment. I'm racking my brains to think of a way of rephrasing it.Polocrunch 12:43, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
OK, here's a start to rewriting the beginning of the article: stealing the introductions to other encyclopedias' articles and synthesising them:
    • Please do not put copyvio material in the talk section, or propose it as an alternative for what to replace our text with **
I'm not sure where to put this section, but I have no idea how to fit it nicely into the introduction, so I'm leaving it here:

* Autonomous vs. Contextual (note: these terms are not well-established): Autonomous linguistics studies what Saussure called langue or what Chomsky calls [Internal]-language: the nature of language abstracting away from many aspects of its day-to-day usage. Contextual linguistics is concerned with what Saussure called parole or what Chomsky calls E[xternal]-language, namely how language fits into the world: its social function, or its use in the broader context of human behavior.

Given these distinctions, scholars who call themselves simply linguists or theoretical linguists, with no further qualification, tend to be concerned with autonomous, theoretical synchronic linguistics, which is acknowledged as the core of the discipline. Polocrunch 13:04, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm concerned with our intro now. You put in that copyvio information on this talk page, how much did they influence the intro that you replaced our original with? Should we simply revert to the last version you hadn't touched, and then restart without copyvio taint? --Puellanivis 15:43, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
What does copyvio mean? And no, I really don't think we should revert. Anything is better than what was before, really; the previous intro was impenetrable, lacking in important information and misleading (it gave too much prominence to autonomous linguistics and contextual linguistics). If you'd like to make further changes, certainly do so, but let's not go back.Polocrunch 15:59, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
Also, is there any way of rewriting the following sentence, so that it is in plainer English?

In the study of semantics, autonomous linguistics explores the nature of language abstracted away from the many aspects of its day-to-day usage Polocrunch 16:05, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I just worked out what copyvio means. I'm not much of a man for jargon! I don't think I made the Wikipedia introduction so similar to the other encyclopedia's introductions that there is cause to worry. I apologise for saying we should steal other introductions - this was actually a joke! - but I still don't think it was necessary to delete that material from a Talk page. Since we aren't trying to take credit for it as our own on Talk pages, there's no need to maintain Wikipedia's usual level of restrictiveness.
I'm also thinking that we should take out that quote at the end of the introduction. It doesn't add anything factual to the article, humorous though it is. ALL academic fields are 'hotly contested', and all academics are probably inclined to think that their field is the worst for that kind of thing. The sentence leading into the quote is not very useful for the same reason. Polocrunch 16:24, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

It's necessary to remove the copyvio material from the Talk page because it's a copyright violation. It's not grey, like "well, we're using it as a reference", no, we're straight copying their text and placing it in or talk page. If someone comes along, and sees that material here, it just raises questions about the legitimacy of our article. Copyvio is prohibited on Wikipedia not because there's some sort of standards guideline, but because there is legal precident against it. I examined the three article starts that you posted against your change first thing, in order to determine if you had indeed violated copyright. Coming to the determination that you hadn't, I did not revert the whole edit in the first place under the big "copyvio" hammer.

Please do not plop all that stuff into a single paragraph again. As I split it up, each paragraph deals with something different. Having them all in the same paragraph is unwise and against typical recommendations for style, as you cannot simply skip from one idea to the next by skipping to the next paragraph, but rather would need to skip to somewhere within the same paragraph. If you don't like how short they are, then please feel free to expand each of the paragraphs. If you want them all in the same paragraph, could you reword them so that they are all talking about the same thing? (Which is kind of impossible) --Puellanivis 16:56, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Need some editing review

I've done a big cleanup of Register, which contains pointers to several linguistics articles. Since I don't know much about the subject, I'm not sure I didn't break anything. Could somebody please look at Register and check my work. Thanks. -- RoySmith (talk) 22:05, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Siberian Wikipedia

Editors of this article may be interested in the proposal for closing the Siberian Wikipedia, on which a vote is currently being held in Meta. Please, take the "Addressing sockpuppetry" warning into consideration. - Best regards, Evv 04:40, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] NPOV

The History of Linguistics section seems to have a notable Chomskian bias. Apofisu


[edit] HOw do i update the template

How do i update the linguistic template, it needs to be made better--HalaTruth(ሀላካሕ) 19:49, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Descriptive Linguistics

I think many linguists will be puzzled by the claim that all linguistics is either theoretical or applied. Whatever happended to descriptive linguistics? Very little work on historical linguistics or sociolinguistics could be described as theoretical. --Pfold 12:06, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed merge: Receptive language

Someone has suggested that the content of the article Receptive language be merged into this article. Receptive language has also been nominated for trans-wiki removal into Wiktionary.

It seems to me that it belongs in a glossary list. The Linguistics main article is primarily comprised of summaries of major linguistics-related topics, not definitions of individual terms. If we start creating a glossary here, this page will mushroom into a monster. Is there a suitable list that this term could go on?

As for the proposed merge, I oppose it, at least until I see a rational reason for it. Cbdorsett 07:52, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Since the article has now been moved to Wiktionary, the proposal is moot. I have removed the tag. --Pfold 11:52, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] major edits 8 February 2007

I saw that an anonymous user had made huge edits on this page, so I stopped in to take a look. It looks like a great deal of care was taken in making the edits, and I did not have time to evaluate each change. However, I did see that the anonymous editor had monkeyed around with the list of cross-language links. The changes were of two types: changing the spelling (which forced a redirect in the target language) or outright deletion. There were no justifiable changes to this list at all. The major edits in the main text give rise to concern. Large blocks of text were moved around and others were deleted. Headings were added. References were edited or deleted. ISBN numbers had their hyphens removed. Now I see that Puellanivis simply reverted the text, saying (more or less) that it appears like an old version of the text coming back from the dead. So maybe the edit I saw was a crafty form of vandalism after all. I wonder ... In any event, by now users who log in anonymously must surely realize the risk they take if they engage in heavy editing: it could result in summary reversion. I'm writing this note to let the anonymous editor know that if the changes are in fact good faith serious efforts to improve the article, the history page contains all the "improved" text. However, this time, please sign in, and also explain your changes on the talk page. It will make editing a much more enjoyable experience for all. Cbdorsett 04:56, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Basically I was concerned that the version was old, because of the changes to the interwiki links. Changes like that just aren't normal in a typical copy-edit, or even a heavy edit. I saw that there was no summary, and I looked in the Talk page to see if they had mentioned anything, and there was nothing.� Just the nature of the edits raised too many red flags. --Puellanivis 05:07, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Citizendium version

The Citizendium article is based on this one (see here if you have a login); take a look if you want to see how 'experts' are changing the page. (Actually, there are as yet no linguistics editors on CZ, so jump in without fear of someone else pulling rank.) If you want to see a version of the introductory paragraphs without signing up, go here. Jsteph 07:53, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Help with linguistics-related article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konglish I believe this needs some help with cleaning up... I know it's not under this articles' direct jurisdiction, but it seriously needs help from someone who knows what they are talking about and wikifying back to this article (in the correct places). However since I haven't taken the course yet I don't know what category Konglish goes under (dialect, register, etc). If someone could help out, I'd appreciate it. If anyone knows enough to give references, I'd be grateful. --Hitsuji Kinno 02:08, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Hi Hitsuji, I know a little about this one. I'll have a good research first. Lingorama 15:22, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] list of Departments and Summer schools

I've pulled the lists of Departments of linguistics and of Summer schools of linguistics from the article. These do not belong in the article. The list of departments, in particular, is open-ended, and would be more or less impossible to maintain. Moreover, Wikipedia is not a directory.

== Departments of linguistics ==
== Summer schools of linguistics ==
  • {{flagcountry|Croatia}}: Empirical and Computational Linguistics - Zadar (2006) [15]
  • {{flagcountry|EU}}: Logic, Language and Information - Dublin (2007) [16] · Language and Speech Communication - Hamburg (2006) [17]
  • {{flagcountry|Germany}}: Computational Linguistics - Potsdam (2007) [18]
  • {{flagcountry|Netherlands}}: Indo-European Linguistics - Leiden (2007) [19]
  • {{flagcountry|Russia}}: General, Applied and Turkic Linguistics - Abakan (2006) [20]
  • {{flagcountry|Spain}}: Minority Languages - Bilbao (2007) [21]
  • {{flagcountry|US}}: Empirical Foundations for Theories of Language - Stanford (2007) [22]

-- Donald Albury 21:45, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I would certainly agree that this is not appropriate for this article. What article it would be appropriate to is "List of departments of linguistics" or something like that. --Puellanivis 05:09, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
Ok but then we should delete such lists also from other disciplines that already have them, for example Indo-European studies has one. However, I don't think it's impossible to create a list of departments, there are not that many. --Greg-si 14:17, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
I am not a regular editor of that article... but I would agree with any edit that would remove it. It should be noted that actually linguistics departments are growing quite quickly. I do know that TU Chemnitz has a linguistics department, is that on your list? You also don't list any departments in the USA... it should be noted that Noam Chomsky teaches in the linguistics department at UCLA... why have you excluded that group?
The list will grow too rapidly, as linguistics is beginning to be a widely adopted, and studied field. --Puellanivis 19:59, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
If I can join in the debate, first: one user is not meant to make a full list of anything - that's why we have Wikipedia after all; and to be precise, there actually is one US department up there. Second, I certainly support creating a list of linguistics departments - we have for example lists of all destinations you can fly to from each airport, so why not those 100 or so departments. (The above unsigned post was from User:JTri)
This is true, we do have a list of all destinations that one can fly to. But Seattle-Tacoma_International_Airport does not list in its own article what these destinations are. The same as it is inappropriate for a list this long in this article. If there are 100 entires, then that certainly qualifies for a [[List of departments of linguistics]] article or other such relevantly named article. It does not however mean that we should spam the linguistics article with near a hundred lines of tangent information. --Puellanivis 00:34, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
In the article you refer to, there actually is a precise list of the destinations: Seattle-Tacoma_International_Airport#Terminals, airlines, and destinations. But I agree that it should be in a separate article, so someone should create it. --JTri 01:21, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

I created two new articles: List of departments of linguistics, List of summer schools of linguistics and added links to them under lists in the main article. Just quick replies, User:Dalbury: I put the lists in the main article just to start with, I did not insist they should be there permanently; most articles are open-ended and handling this is the advantage of Wikipedia. User:Puellanivis: I wrote just entries that I'm familiar with, you are welcome to add others; your statements are often incorrect, Chomsky is not at UCLA but at MIT. User:JTri: lists of departments are in better position than lists of airports' destinations - once a new department is established it will probably last for years, while a new destination can be cancelled in few months. --Greg-si 11:33, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

It's not "often incorrect" to make a mistake about where Noam Chomsky teaches. I was being confused from the College episode of Penn and Teller. Despite being "often incorrect", you still took my suggestion of making seperate articles for these lists... so... what is it? "often incorrect" or "her ideas are useful, even if some details are misinformed." --Puellanivis 17:06, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
'Often' because in these replies you made 3 mistakes: one for Chomsky, one for saying there are no US departments on the list, and one for saying there are no lists of destinations in airports articles, as User:JTri has pointed out. So just read more closely. I created seperate articles because majority seem to support that. However, this forum is to discuss technical things, so I'm not going to reply to such non-sense on personal level anymore. --Greg-si 17:56, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
So, your response to me being upset about a personal attack is "I'm not going to talk about it"? Please, read more carefully what I wrote: "You also don't list any departments in the USA..." (emphasis added) Looking at the historícal version of your edit... Oh, look, there's an American Summer Schools of Linguistics entry, but no American departments of linguistics are listed. "Majority seem to support that." Well, yes 2 out of 3 certainly is a majority, but it's hardly a majority of editors. Neither is Wikipedia a democracy. Rather, the best reason to give for implementing someone's suggestion is, "They made a convincing argument, and I agreed with them." I've already admitted to my mistakes on Chomsky and the SeaTac airport. Chomsky because of a simple lapse of memory, and SeaTac because the list is presented in a format that I would not have recognized unless it were pointed out to me. WP:NPA is a very serious policy. You should never attack someone and say they're "often incorrect". You don't know anything about me, you just have three (sorry, two) examples of me being misinformed in the duration of a short discussion to back up your statement, and this can easily be a very non-representative situation of my over all correctness and debate skills. You have no basis but a presumed pattern from a limited sample to make your statement. --Puellanivis 18:58, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

I have added many of the Lingustics Departments (and Programs) in New England to the List of departments of linguistics. As I put this together, I became less and less sure of its purpose or definition. Should it include linguistics programs which aren't stand-alone "departments"? (MIT has probably the most famous linguistics department in the world, but it is combined with Philosophy) Should it include strictly undergraduate programs? etc. etc. --Macrakis 18:41, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

I personally know in particular of New Mexico State University, which offers linguistics courses, and has linguistics teachers but these teachers are under the foreign language department. And while they do not offer a degree and major exclusively in linguistics, you can get into a program where you get another degree in something else plus a co-degree (better than a major, but not a full degree... it's weird) in linguistics. Often "departments" are always hard to deliniate... especially in a field like linguistics that is so (relatively) new. --Puellanivis 19:09, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
Education systems differ around the world and many universities offer combined programs, as it seems to be the case with New Mexico SU. I also don't see a particular reason to exclude combined departments as MIT or to limit to undergraduate programs (some institutions have undergraduate and graduate programs, while others only one of both). Anyway, I suggest further discussion to be moved to the appropriate talk page. --Greg-si 19:37, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Quantum Linguistics?

I have not found any reference to Quantum Linguistics anywhere on wikipedia... If I knew more on the field I'd try contributing, but I just started looking it up. I'm just hoping someone with more experience in both contributing to wikipedia and quantum linguistics will see this and pick it up (if not, I think I'll have a go at it, after some weeks of research and sandbox experiments) --195.12.52.198 08:44, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

Yes this seems to be a dubious subject. I'll look into it though. Jelly Roal (talk) 02:53, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Le français ne vient pas du latin

Does anyone know what this book contains? The person who added it into the article did the same at the corresponding articles in other Wikipedias, but didn't make any comment as to why this book is relevant in this subject. — AdiJapan ☎ 09:14, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

Correction: not just this article in other languages but also other articles at en.wp, such as Etymology, Vulgar Latin, and most probably others. — AdiJapan ☎ 09:22, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Question

If humans have an innate ability to learn human language, why wouldn't this extend to the learning of animal communication? Pendragon39 19:02, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

Why would it? You might as well ask, if humans have an innate ability to learn to walk, why wouldn't this extend to the learning of flying like birds? The issue of innateness in language acquisition is complex and much disputed, but don't forget that the greater the innate component in language acquisition, the less easy it would be to learn non-human language. garik 13:51, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
Humans cannot learn to fly because of physical limitations. Perhaps the answer is there - limitations in human hearing and inability to achieve equivalent vocalization prevents them from acquiring an animal 'language'. Yet Helen Keller was said to have learned a language despite her physical limitations... However intrinsic language acquisition may be, it remains an impressive non-cognitive ability. I'm sorry if you feel this question was absurd, but I keep imagining AI researchers asking similar things Pendragon39 16:23, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
Oh, I think the question of whether human beings can acquire the communication systems of other animals is interesting, though very little research has been devoted to it (most research concentrates on how animals, including humans, learn their own communication systems). As I say, the more genetically defined (i.e. innate) language acquisition is, the less easy it should be to acquire non-human communication systems – so one would expect in any case. And, as you say, the physical difficulties in producing the sounds of other species is another factor. By the way, what do you mean "non-cognitive"? garik 16:40, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Messy word. Non-cognitive as in automatically acquired, universally expressed, yet restricted. The advantage of actual 'learning' is you can choose your poison and there are fewer restrictions on the outcome Pendragon39 17:28, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Would you say language acquisition is primarily a mental task? Pendragon39 17:33, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

I think I would, yes. I think it's a primarily cognitive task regardless of how genetically specified it is. That's not to say that non-cognitive processes are not also involved and important, of course. garik 18:18, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
It is not evident to me why the cognitive aspect would present part of the barrier. You don't have wings, you can't fly, that much is clear. But language is consistent in terms of symbolic representation for various phenomena. In other words, there is a common paradigm(?) to the structure and use of language. In the stricter sense of cognition, humans are more or less able to interpret animal languages, through careful observation of behavior Pendragon39 23:09, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
Upon further reflection, the above is invalid. Language acquisition requires both components, therefore analyzing them separately serves no real purpose/porpoise Pendragon39 01:11, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
I'm still not quite sure what you were getting at in the bit you struck out though: "But language is consistent in terms of symbolic representation for various phenomena. In other words, there is a common paradigm(?) to the structure and use of language". What has this got to do with learning the communication systems of other animals? And what are the two components you mean? garik 12:01, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
Anyway, this isn't really the place for discussions of this sort. garik 12:05, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] make it clear

i fond of linguistics but there are many complicated issues.i think it is better to make it more clear.it is no need to name them hardly in order to not to be understandable.as a student of linguistics,i really like to study amusement part of it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.185.37.3 (talk) 11:19, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

is not better to have a collection of languages for everyday talk? consider you know alittle French and German but you know nothing in Russian language.you want to find out what they say when they see each other. i ask from many peopel.they all agree with me. for example: Hello: Russuian:izdirast viti Armenian:barrevjez Urdu:Sono persian:Salaam Turkish:salam Arabic:Salamon Alaikom it is obvious that in Muslem countries there is one word for Hello. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.185.37.3 (talk) 11:39, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Speech science?

I have removed the reference to "speech science" as another name for linguistics, and I have changed the redirect to Speech and language pathology.

  • Most, if not all, ghits for "speech science" are related to applied linguistics in reference to speech pathology. Perhaps every speech scientist is a linguist to some extent, but not every linguist is a speech scientist, just as not every person who has studied psychology is a psychiatrist.
  • I hold a BA in linguistics, and my professors never once referred to this field as "speech science".

Further discussion is welcomed. szyslak 18:39, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] in Variations:

What does this actually mean?

"Of course, similarities and differences between languages may also be substantially more or less than is readily apparent."

--AkselGerner (talk) 23:51, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

If there's no answer I'm going to take it out. It's so vague that it's not even false.--AkselGerner (talk) 20:54, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
And it's gone.--AkselGerner (talk) 21:12, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Linguistic Terminology & Glossary

I find myself in need of a good glossary of standard linguistic (English) terms in Spanish. At the same time, I notice that the use of linguistic terms in Spanish does not see to be as codified as in English. I wonder if Wikipedia is a place for such a glossary? If so, I wonder if it couldn't be linked from this page, and I would be happy to start it and contribute. Thanks for your thoughts. Blillehaugen (talk) 20:41, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Metaphysical and post-structuralist linguistics?

The main paragraph beginning this page seems to assert that semiotics plays a big role in linguistic theory. It doesn't really. What exactly is "metaphysical" linguistics? I've never heard of it and I've been studying linguistics for 11 years (PhD this year). I would have thought that with all the courses I've taken on every major linguistic subfield I would have at least come across it. I haven't.

As far as post-structuralism goes, I agree that modern theories of semantics and discourse have incorporated more contextualization. However, this just doesn't hold for other areas of the field. How exactly could one contextualize segments? aspiration? How about phonological conditions on morphology? Each of these concepts exists in the usage of language by speakers. However, surprise surprise, English speakers remarkably treat aspiration as a cue to voiceless stops. There aren't exceptions. This perception is not tied to some social context. It is completely a-contextual. Acontextuality (or non-indexicality) is an important aspect of language precisely because it allows us to understand each other regardless of contextual effects. At some level, there are invariant components to speech. English speakers also know that uglily sounds bad. It's not simply because no one says it. A made-up adjective like "durfish" would make durfishly fine, but a made-up adjective like "stroomly" would still make stroomlily bad. At some level we know that you can not add the adverbializing suffix -ly to words which end in [li]. Contrary to post-structuralist views, most English speakers agree on this.

I am not arguing against contextualization. Not at all. I completely agree that many aspects of language are contextualized. Yet, rejecting any structure in language does not allow one to make any predictions about its scientific nature. It's just an anti-scientific game that armchair philosophers play. We should leave the discussion about postmodernism and metaphysics on a separate page. It makes Linguistics sound too much like armchair philosophy. It's a science. Lingboy (talk) 02:58, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Article Categories

The article lsits these categories, most of which I submit are not apt.

[[Category:Linguistics]]
[[Category:Linguists]]
[[Category:Language]]
[[Category:Humanities]]
[[Category:Visual_arts]]
[[Category:Literature]]
[[Category:Science]]
[[Category:Aesthetics]]
[[Category:Philosophy]]
[[Category:Anthropology]]
[[Category:Politics]]
[[Category:Music]]
[[Category:Culture]]
[[Category:Cyberspace]]

By comparison, a few of the other Social Sciences only are a member of two categories: social sciences, and their own category. None that I checked were a member of sciences, or "peer", unrelated disciplines like literature is to linguistics.

I suggest changing the categories section to the much smaller:

<!-- Smaller -->
[[Category:Linguists]]
<!-- Peer -->
[[Category:Linguistics]]
[[Category:Language]]
<!-- Larger -->
[[Category:Social_sciences]]
[[Category:Humanities]]

— robbiemuffin page talk 02:34, 9 June 2008 (UTC)