P. L89: LINGUISTS OR BILINGUALS OR POLYGLOTS?

On the media, one often reads and hears statements like "American doesn't have enough linguists in Iraq," statements in which people (viz. translators) who are not linguists are called linguists. There is a great confusion in the public mind over what a linguist (or cognitive scientist) is and does.
So let's begin at the beginning. Regardless of racial background or social status, all children except those with brain defects or certain physiological abnormalities can, up to or through the first year of puberty, "acquire" whatever form[s] of any language they get exposed to--instinctively and more or less perfectly. One is speaking of the grammar system, not the vocabulary, which one goes on learning as long as one is alive and competent to learn; some do it better than others. A minuscule percentage of people are gifted with the ability to "acquire" a language instinctively like a prepubescent child, even after they reach adulthood. (Prepubes- cent children "acquire" their native language[s] instinctively; they do not "learn" them.) This ability seems to be present also in those who have learned four or five native languages as children. What about the rest of the population? Some who may not be gifted to speak languages can learn to read languages after puberty and even speak them to some degree of competence, though native-speakers can often tell that they are not native-speakers. Inflected languages like Mohawk, Inuit, Tlinguit, Greek, and Russian are in many ways more difficult to "learn" than uninflected languages like Malay or mostly uninflected languages like English. (Some languages modify to the left; e.g. Japanese and to a certain degree, German. Most probably modify to the right. English does both; contrast a proven theory with a theory [that is] proved by these new data.

Some who have analytical minds can analyse languages as adults, whether they speak languages other than their native language well or not. The term LINGUIST applies to those with the ability to analyse languages and describe them as they are. (List mentalities cannot cut it as linguists.)
As for as analysing grammar, people with list minds generally formulate grammars as lists of rules and other phenomena. This has given rise to those on the media who express the idea that a grammar is a set of (imposed) rules. They have no thought of every normal person's innate grammatical ability or the idea of a SYSTEM of grammar.

The French have traditionally been better analysts; they have come up with terminology of greater descriptive value than what we see in the history of English grammars.) In the middle of the twentieth century, most linguists were behaviorists.
Beware of many school grammars--especially those that mistakenly suppose that English is a lineal descendent of Anglo-Saxon and therefore "Germanic."

None of the listers were/are "linguists" in today's sense. Translators are of course not linguists, despite the common error of the media.

A "theory" must minimally explain and predict, the prediction normally being dependent on an explanation. A list of rules can, in many or most instances, gain or lose a rule without any affect on the others. In a system, this is not true.

The study of mental grammars or just of language data is usually subdivided into semantics (in its technical sense as a branch of linguistics), syntax, phonetics, and phonomorphology--which deals with the alteration of sounds when units we call formatives come together with the word base (a virtual construct). Compare relate with two formatives, related (where //t// becomes [d] in most styles of many varieties of English) with three formatives, as well as relation (where /ty/ combine to yield the "sh" sound). An inflection is a formative; this applies to umlaut (the change of goose to plural geese),* where a derivational device or an inflection. In special, species, and speciation, however, the same condition causes every "si" to change to the "sh" sound, just as prevocalic "ti" do in promotion. We generally include phonomorphology under phonetology, the sound system of a language. The preceding remarks apply to the intonation system, a subpart of phonetology, whose basic units are phonetemes.

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*Of course gooses is the plural when one has goosed someone more than once. Cf. mouses. Latin had two plurals of locus "place"; the irregular plural loca maintained the basic meaning of the singular, while regular loci referred to passages in written texts, though there was a great deal of variation. A principle of language often applies to make an irregular plural regular, or a regular plural irregular, when a special senses is attached to the less usual form.

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Morphology study includes the difference between the boundaries + (plus-boundary, formative boundary) and # (double-cross boundary or internal word boundary) that distinguish

re+p~re+sent & re#pre+sent
re+c~re+at+ion & re#cre+at+ion

where ~ represents a syllable division, something that generally coincides with a # boundary but coïncides with a + boundary only when the stress and sound principles dictate that. See also L87. ) (Note how pre+sént [a verb], pré+s~ent, and the noun prè+sent+át+ion are analysed. Cf. further:

pro+dúce (verb) : pro+d~ùce (noun) : prò+d~uc+t+ív+ity

The "o of pro+ in the preceding verb form is a reduced vowel, like the "a" in sofa. The "o" in the other two (of these three examples) is like the "o" in prominent. (The "o" is like "o" in in rode in pro#, as in pro#democracy, etc. Unlike pro+, pro# has an independent meaning.) The boundaries are determined by their effects on the sound system, though meaning differ-ences are involved in some of the preceding examples.

Isolated languages do not change very much. (Cf. Icelandic till recently, and the Polynesian language system at the time of Capt. Cook, i.e. before European explorers came in contact with them). When languages come into intimate contact, they change, or rather the less prestigious of them changes. A make-shift jargon (pidgin) normally develops. If the contact lasts long enough, native-speakers will develop AS CHILDREN, IMPOSE A GRAMMATICAL SYSTEM ON THE JARGON TO CREATE WHAT LINGUISTS CALL A CREOLE LANGUAGE. If the contact lasts long enough, the grammatical system will come from the overclass language, while numerous words--and in fact most of the functor words--will come from the underclass language(s). The sounds, intonation as well as individual sound units, come from the underclass language. A reported 28 percent of the total English vocabulary is French-derived; the percentage rises dramatically when we count only functor words--prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, determiners, etc., as well as words that constitute auxiliary verbs (which often replace verb inflections in the dominant parent) and noun or adverbial inflections.
Many daughter languages of English were created in the manner just described in the late 19th century and during the 20th century. It hap- pened that way when speakers of a Germanized Romance language, the Normans, overran Anglo-Saxon England in the Middle Ages. French grammatical words (i.. functors: were generally "calqued" (translated) with Anglo-Saxon words of similar import and or function. The morphological sound system (phonomorphology) of English--the predictable changes we cause //t// to undergo in pretty, assimilation, venture, bitten, etc.; to zero (deleted) in plenty in normal tempos--comes ultimately from Old French.

Only a philistine that worked hard at doing things wrong would wait to introduce language classes till the language-window closes (in early puberty for most persons) . . . or wait until the social window opens ( in early puberty for most persons) to introduce social sciences--history and geography, etc.

Adults gifted with the ability to pick up languages by instinct usually (though not necessarily) make poor teachers, since they have not experienced, and hence fail to understand, the difficulties that most adults have in "learning" languages. Teachers with a rigid view of "standard" languages, etc., make poor teachers and linguists because they have rule mentalities and have little concept of what a (language) system is. It goes without saying that, all else being equal, those who love language(s) make the best teachers. But of course, the "all else being equal" condition is predicated on a teacher's being endowed with other psychological qualities that make a teacher good.

Linguists need data to work on but vary from being not very good to being fairly good in their ability to collect data. Data-collectors are not, as such, (theoretical) linguists, even after they classify the data and analyse its non-systematic aspects. There is no generally accepted name for such people, though they are valuable and can even explain and predict relations or changes they uncover in their data. Linguists often collaborate with translators (e.g. the Bible-translators around the world) to get new data. Some students of languages are called historical linguists (an older term was philologists).
Many theoretical linguists may ascertain the direction of change in a static way, i.e. from the resulting relations. In fact, most theoretical linguists suffer from a static mentality. Some relegate all concern for relating the myriad "outputs" of a language like English to some other (sub)discipline. Yet the brain easily deals with all of the geographic and social differences and age differences of spoken English as well as scores of overlapping style differences (which are such that a mid-formal style of a person of one region, class, and age may be like a mid-familiar style of a person of a difference region or of a different class or of a different age group--all of which of course overlap.

     One source of data-gathering is what dialectologists do.   Unfortunately, both dialectologists and sociolinguists suffer from the false notion that a language system exists outside of human brains--out there in geographical or social space. Some dress up their work with refined statistical analyses from which they are able to make some credible predictions about a small range of data which may or may not apply more generally.
    An interesting theory (proposed by the late Prof. W. Mayerthaler of Austria in connection with this writer's derivation of markedness values from the directionality of change and the principle that, in a default [unmarked] environment, a change is to what is less marked than what it was before the change)--with the exception of certain abnatural developments; analogy, etc. Mayerthaler proposed that reversals of form and/or use regularly take place in marked (non-default) contexts. The writer's application of this to English grammar explains and predicts that those who would never say "Me gave it to she" will be inclined to say "Her and me did it for she and he" (many have even stranger subjects like Sue and MYSELF). Examples of this reversal have been heard on the BBC from mouth of the British Queen, not to speak of examples from a Prime Minister in the marked position before an appositive, a relative clause, or a modifying prepositional or infinitival phrase. This theory explains things previously inexplicable, the reversals of be and get passives under, say, negation, interrogation, or emphasis; or the reversals of be gonna and will in similarly marked contexts . . . and a good deal else.    (See a more lengthy exposition in my forthcoming Pawky grammar as well as earlier analyses in the 1996 book cited above.) What goes on shows you how complex and nimble the human brain really is. In fact, it's more than dazzling.
     Linguists may well be dividing into cognitive scientists interested in cerebral and linguistic universals and rational grammarians, who seek to produce grammars that, in contrast with popular grammars of English till now, analyse the structures of a language, e.g. real English, with some of the universal tools mentioned above.