Linguistics?

* * * * NOTE FROM THE MODERATOR * * * *

Paul: I am adding the same note here that I did in your other thread. Please remember that linguistics is a field of study, and linguists are people who study languages and/or linguistics.

 

This post is a perfect example. You may have edited it, but you fell far short of perfection. Much of what you have written here is very difficult to understand. And I already corrected your use of "linguists" to "linguistics." The original form of your post was utterly inscrutable.

For example, why do you say that linguists interpret what people write? Linguists analyze the choice of language, the form, the choice of words, the grammar, the dialect, the spelling, the punctuation, etc., but we don't interpret the content. Or is that just another failure to spell "linguistics" correctly? Either way, it doesn't make sense. The science of linguistics does not interpret what people write.

You think you are bewildered? I struggle to understand your writing! Frankly when I first read your post I assumed that you were not an anglophone--a native speaker of English!

"One would think the words alone would tell the reader the writer knows the language they are writing in?" A person may know his own language, but that does not make him a good writer, or even a competent writer. I'm an editor in real life. My job (part of it anyway) is to edit documents that were written by other people in the company. Many of these people are native speakers of English, but their writing is absolutely atrocious. Sometimes I can't figure out what they're trying to say and I have to go back and ask them in person. My manager is from Ethiopia; he learned English as a teenager. His writing is better than some of theirs.

Again, your writing on this thread is a perfect case study. Your sentences are not well crafted, and your choice of words is sometimes simply wrong--e.g.: "linguists" when you meant to write "linguistics." Your grammar is shaky--e.g.: "Does foreign languages have..." instead of "Do foreign languages have..." -- "to edit ones writing" instead of "to edit one's writing." In aggregate, these myriad errors make it difficult for us to be sure we know what you intended to write. These are things we were expected to learn in high school!

Of course they do. How would an Italian figure out the definition of a word if he had to use an English dictionary? Our dictionaries only contain English words, not Italian words--except ones like calzone and pianissimo.

It is indeed my job as an editor to make people's writing clearer and less ambiguous. But this is business and technical writing. Even the editors of newspapers and magazines try to make their articles unambiguous. But in other types of writing, such as novels and stories, there is deliberate ambiguity because the writer wants the reader to stop and think about what he's saying and interpret it for himself.

In unedited writing, such as the typical website or a discussion board like SciForums, the writing can be difficult to interpret correctly because it's not always well-crafted and contains unintentional ambiguities. Again, yours is a case study!

But furthermore, people write the way they talk and most of them don't go back and review their writing to make it easier to understand. (I do: I'm also a writer in real life so I treat everything as if it were going to be read by the company president.) Without the extra dimensions of spoken language (tempo, pauses, pitch, etc.) to resolve potential ambiguities, written language needs extra care, and most people don't bother to apply it. Rather than spend five minutes making their post easier to understand, they want everyone who reads it to spend one minute trying to understand it. This is inefficient and downright rude!

All languages do.

Because most people don't do a very good job, even when they use a dictionary. Again, your writing is a perfect example. It's very hard to read. It took me two days to figure out that you meant "linguistics" instead of "linguists." Apparently you don't actually use your dictionary or you wouldn't have made that rather strange mistake. [BTW, please review my corrections to your post. You said "one's writing" but then you said "what they thought you wrote." You need to make sure your pronouns are in agreement. This is why you should always go back over what you've written and look for errors.]

If this is your definition of "religious," I wonder how your priest feels about your interpretation of the Ten Commandments.

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If I had the job of editing your writing, I would send it back with so many blue-pencil markups that it would probably require a second pass to get it right.

Because language has built-in ambiguity, no matter how expert you are in using it. Only the world's greatest orators, like Winston Churchill, are able to express themselves with almost zero chance of being misunderstood. And that's in speech, which has non-verbal clues such as speed, pitch, pauses, etc. For example, have you ever tried to express sarcasm in writing? It's almost impossible! It relies on highly exaggerated variation in pitch, tempo and other strictly oral attributes.

In writing it's much harder to avoid misinterpretation. In general, the most reliable method is to simply go into more detail than you would in speaking, such as adding more words, using more formal grammar and syntax, choosing words with more precise meanings, etc. This takes talent, training, and/or simply love of language. I don't know what country you live in, but these days in the USA those attributes are not common. As a result we're constantly bombarded by absolutely shitty writing, especially in cyberspace.

"Texting" alone is destroying English. The need to condense everything into 140 characters requires streamlined grammar, ambiguous abbreviations, and the omission of clarifying details. These are horrible habits to be teaching our children!

As a character said on "Boondocks," one of my favorite animated TV shows: "Nothing worth reading was ever written by a man who was typing with his thumbs."