Hi friends,
Every so often I get the urge to blow up my finances and go back to school for linguistics just for funsies. Is funsies a good enough reason to sign up for Linguistics 101? I feel like I need to decide soon while I’m still Cool To Teens™ because I’m approaching an age where the threat of turning from quirky art gal about town to weird neighbour with an intense hobby looms large. What I’m saying is, I gotta get in there before I become the laughing stock of my future 18-year-old classmates. That’s a joke, but only partially. Anyway, here are 5 things that make me want to dip into the ol’ savings account and be a student again.
#1
Sounds have shapes and I’m a huge fan of shapes.
We all know about sound waves and how a sharp upturn means loud and a downturn means quiet, but have you seen spectrograms??? They’re gorgeous! Also, you can spectrogram birdsong and presumably all sorts of other sounds too. Don’t bother looking up “fart spectrogram” because I already did and it’s only waveforms. How do you read a spectrogram, you ask? Not a clue, which is why I want to go to school.
#2
I’m addicted to the big picture.
High school was more or less easy for me except for math and I firmly believe it was because nobody could tell me the big picture of why math was important to know. The closest answer I got to why math was important was that A) one day I’d have taxes to do or B) that it would help me get a good job. Neither of those things are tangible concepts to most 14-year-olds so it really felt like math served no purpose. If math class began with a history lesson on the concepts, a philosophy lesson about what numbers are, and an explanation of why it is fun and important to be able to solve difficult puzzles I think I would have loved it. That anecdote was a long way of saying that I crave knowing the purpose of things. Simply knowing “why” is one of the greatest drugs in the world and I want it every single second of every day. So in the case of language- the thing we engage with near constantly- to know WHY we say what we say would be borderline euphoric. Also, the other day while I was doing my favourite activity of sitting in the green chair and “having a think,” I had this visceral feeling that one day I’d be able to speak French. I can’t really explain the feeling beyond the fact that I somehow just knew in my bones that I’d die bilingual. Since then, I’ve been feeling a bit impatient as I wait on the urge to learn a new language. I think if I became a linguist I’d have more of a desire to put in the effort to learn French because I’d know more about how languages work, or rather WHY they work, and it would give learning a language some necessary background info. Basically, I think knowing more about linguistics would give life more context and that sounds productive and enjoyable to me.
#3
Hearing other people’s conversations and having insider info.
Presumably, getting a linguistics degree would require doing some conversational analysis, which would mean I’d get to listen to or read transcripts of conversations people once had, which would mean I’d get to be professionally nosey. The idea of having any sort of insider access to information that was not intended for me is one of the most exciting things I can think of. On a less gossipy note, I also think it would be fun to go back and analyze my own conversations to see what else can be gleaned from them.
#4
Scoring a conversation
I’ve heard conversational analysis referred to as “scoring a conversation” and wow, what a treat! The way I see it, scoring a conversation could happen in one of two ways. The first way is to look at a conversation that’s already happened and break down the parts. Knowing how to do this linguistically seems like it would open up a whole host of creative possibilities to then look at conversations musically, artistically or even mathematically. The second way would be more similar to how a music score works, in that you’d set conditions for a conversation to happen. I found great examples of this in the work of Aaron Finbloom (and this essay in particular). I know that I don’t technically need to go back to school to do either of these things, which leads me back to my first point that going back to school would really be just for funsies.
#5
The word Fricative
Here’s what it means: A type of sound which is characterised by air passing a constriction somewhere between the glottis and the lips, e.g. [x, s, ʃ, f]. Turbulence arises when air flows through a narrow gap and it is this which causes the noise typical of fricatives. Fricatives can be voiced or voiceless. The equivalent term spirant is sometimes found. Can you even believe that this definition includes the phrase “somewhere between the glottis and the lips”?! It’s pure poetry. There are tons and tons of fabulous linguistics words like rhotic, suppletion, diachronic and alveolar, and I’d like a professor to speak them at me all dang day.
Maybe what I really want is linguistics ASMR and a lot of free time. Yeah, that's probably it.
*blows you a little kiss from across the room*
Bye!