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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2329 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for May 1, 2024

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How does one get into linguistics as a hobby? I would appreciate some creators or accounts on ig or twitter, people making YouTube videos and podcasts about linguistics.

Lurk https://old.reddit.com/r/linguisticshumor/ and try to understand all the jokes.

That was my main strategy for shifting gears from being a professional machine learning theory researcher to doing computational linguistics work.

What aspects of linguistics interest you? I'm afraid I don't have much advice for how to get into it as a hobby, but maybe some of this will help. Overall, my main recommendation would be to start learning the International Phonetic Alphabet, in parallel with whatever else you try. No matter what you wind up doing, being familiar with IPA will probably help you later. And it can be fun (or frustrating) to try to make all the funny mouth noises at will.

You don't mention books, but if you did, I'd recommend starting with John McWhorter, who also does the podcast "Lexicon Valley". He's probably best known here for his political commentary, but he's also a linguist (studying creoles, which are super cool), and is a shining counterexample to the depressing trend of linguistics professors being bad writers.

You might check out the Language Log blog, which is by a couple of linguistics professors who mostly post random linguistics-related things they find interesting. The most prolific of them specializes in Chinese, so that's a focus, but you can search through the archives and probably find a few entries on just about anything. If you poke around and find yourself fascinated by something, that's a good sign!

From an academic perspective, I'd tend to divide linguistics into a few categories. First, there's the core disciplines, things like phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. These are usually a combination of describing how languages work at that level (as best we can), and the Chomskyan project of uncovering the underlying structure in the brain. This latter aspect should currently be going through some serious upsets, with the new ability of LLMs to generate language, and I wonder whether it'll even be a going concern in 20 years. (Also, sign languages are an important variant to consider, being fully formed languages themselves.)

There's also historical linguistics, which was the focus of the field before Noam Chomsky came along. This is stuff like reconstructing proto-Indo-European, and untangling changes in non-Indo-European languages. It's almost like a puzzle, except you're often missing half the pieces.

There's specializations and extensions of linguistics into other fields, like linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics (I love this, despite having to deal with sociology), child language acquisition, language formation, computational linguistics, neurolinguistics, and so forth.

And there's field research. All the other fields require data, but this is where data comes from. The most prominent type is going off into the middle of nowhere (often Papua New Guinea) and spending 3 or so years documenting the language (and culture, etc.) of an isolated tribe of people before their language and culture dies out completely. But it can also involve stuff like finding examples for the Oxford English Dictionary, or working on an OED equivalent for another language. Linguistics has been dominated by English speakers for the last half century or so, and by Europeans before that, so there's almost certainly good work that can be done by anyone in a different part of the world.

Anyway, that's what comes to mind as a description of the field, from my experience a few decades ago.

Here are some suggestions depending on what your exact interest in linguistics is:

  1. If you're interested in learning languages for travel, reading literature, impressing foreigners, etc. then you might want to check out Ecolinguist, Benny Lewis, Moses McCormick, Xiaomannyc, or Alexander Arguelles on YouTube and in terms of podcasts anything with slow in the title e.g. Slow German Podcast, News in Slow French, etc. for learning purposes.
  2. If you're interested in linguistics because you want to channel your inner Tolkien and invent conlangs for a fantasy novel, then jan Misali or the conlang and neography subreddits are your friends (and so is a historical linguistics textbook like this one).
  3. If you just think languages are cool for intellectual or aesthetic reasons, then ILoveLanguages, NativLang, Langfocus, Watch your Language, and the Lexicon Valley podcast may be of interest to you.

Also if you want to learn Latin or Ancient Greek check out ScorpioMartianus and if you want song covers in obscure dead languages then check out the_miracle_aligner.

I don't have much to say about the rest of your post, but Xiaomannyc is one of those Internet Polyglots that purports to have super language abilities and regularly makes videos "shocking" natives with his knowledge of their little-known language. It's safe to say these types don't really bring anything useful to the table. Learning languages is a game of dedication, not speeding through things in 24 hours and impressing everyone. At least his Chinese sounds like it's good, though.

I mean, some people's language learning goals really are "achieve a phrasebook level in 20 languages to receive social validation" rather than mastering any given language, and aside from that I think it's worth seeing how even quite a low level can get you through some basic interactions and make people much friendlier to you.

I minored in Linguistics and one of the introductory classes used an older edition of this book: https://www.amazon.com/Language-Files-Materials-Introduction-Linguistics/dp/0814252702

It's a pretty good place to get started and then figure out what topics interest you the most. For example, historical linguistics was the most interesting to me and it was fun to use it to make up fantasy languages that sound realistic (Because it's just a real language with some common deletions and vowel shifts.)

The best way to sow the seeds of a casual interest in linguistics is to amble through Wikipedia articles on various languages. Read their sections on phonology and grammar, and when you don’t understand something (e.g. if you’re unfamiliar with the IPA, or you don’t know what a “dative case” is), then skim the appropriate Wikipedia article. Also, reading about Proto-Indo-European is fun: it’ll teach you a bit about comparative linguistics while instilling a sense of awe that universally-spoken modern-day languages still bear the unmistakable genes of their prehistoric ancestors.

Why do you want to get into linguistics? Learning a language is the applied version of it, but the higher level stuff doesn't seem that useful to me.

the higher level stuff doesn’t seem that useful to me.

Sex isn’t very useful either most of the time, but that doesn’t diminish the appeal.

If practical_romantic's reason for wanting to get into linguistics is that linguistics is as compelling as sex, that would be a good reason.

Insert standard “cunning linguist” joke here.

But that wouldn't involve inserting, surely. I suppose it depends on one's er, style.

What, you mean you don't insert?

There's insertion and then there's insertion.

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