Linguistics

simu

Is anyone else interested in linguistics? I find it fascinating and although there have been no threads on linguistics in this forum yet, it's certainly something that would be on topic here imo. I was thinking of mentioning this in the forum charter to encourage people to post about linguistics. What are people's thoughts on this?

punka

*waves hands excitedly*

always one of those things i wanted to learn, sadly don't get an option to study it at college in my course. sometimes (usually when i'm trying to put off an essay) i peek at the linguistics books in the library. historical linguistics in particular fascinates me. wish i had the opportunity to find out more about it.

Hobbes

MIT have all their coursework online for free.. enjoy.

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Linguistics-and-Philosophy/index.htm

Manach

I had always assumed linguistics was the study of how languages evolved ie from proto-Language to present day. Skimming through a Teach yourself lingustics book, it seems this is but a small part of the field - for instance one aspect is using "Game Theory" as a model for a language's workings.

Ania

I study linguistics in the university of Krakow and I really like it.
My special fields are Latin and the develpoment from the Indoeuropean language to today's Slavonic languages.
It's very interesting and I would be very interested how Irish language developed because I'm told that Gaelic hasn't changed much during all the centuries while other languages are changing every once a while.

Cathy

I would have loved to study linguistics or etymology, but I couldn't find any courses in Ireland. They're really interesting subjects.

Dalta

Please forgive my ignorance, but what exactly is linguistics? I presume I would be interested in it since I love learning and speaking different languages. I don't really get how you can "study" languages though, is it literature-based or something?

simu

Dalta wrote:

Please forgive my ignorance, but what exactly is linguistics? I presume I would be interested in it since I love learning and speaking different languages. I don't really get how you can "study" languages though, is it literature-based or something?

Take a look at this page for an idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics

punka

I came across this link to an online etymology dictionary just now and thought it might be of interest to some of the readers of this forum.

Sourced from the rather excellent blog Laudator Temporis Acti.

pickarooney

It's a bit of a vast area, linguistics and some aspects are more interesting than others. I loved phonetics, phonology and morphology when I studied it, but was less enthralled by semantics, syntax and the more mathematical aspects of language structure and formation.
I think etymology is something that everyone enjoys to a degree, but the field is almost entirely conjecture and educated guesswork, so I imagine few courses cover it in any great or serious detail. Of course I went to a college (DCU) where the notion of learning for the sake of learning was an aberration

simu

pickarooney wrote:

I think etymology is something that everyone enjoys to a degree, but the field is almost entirely conjecture and educated guesswork, so I imagine few courses cover it in any great or serious detail. Of course I went to a college (DCU) where the notion of learning for the sake of learning was an aberration

Well, I wouldn't be that dismissive of etymology - there's a lot more to it than guess work. This book gives a taste of how it's done with the English language (amongst other things). Worth a read!