Tag: linguistics

Letters “r” lies, or why English spelling is horrible

~ Rachael Tatman ~ 6 Comments

If you’re like me and have vivid memories of learning to read English, you probably remember being deeply frustrated. As far as four-year-old-Rachael was concerned,  math was nice and simple: two and two always, always equals four. Not sometimes. Not only when it felt like it. All the time. Nice and simple.

Reading, and particularly phonics, on the other hand, was a minefield of dirty tricks. Oh, sure, they told us that each letter represented a single sound, but even a kid knows that’s hooey. Cough? Bough? Come on, that was like throwing sand in a fight; completely unfair. And what about those vowels? What and cut rhyme with each other, not cut and put. Even as phonics training was increasing my phonemic awareness, pushing me to pay more attention to the speech sounds I made, English orthography (that’s our spelling system) was dragging me behind the ball-shed and pulling out my hair in clumps. Metaphorically.

Books that make literacy fun
“Oh man, they’re trying to tell us that A makes the ‘Aaahhh’ sound. What do they take us for, complete idiots? Or is that ‘whaahhht’ to they take us for?”
“I know, right? One-to-one correspondence? Complete rubbish!”
Of course, I did eventually pass third grade and gain mastery of the written English language. But it was an uphill battle all the way. Why? Because English orthography is retarded. Wait. I’m sorry. That’s completely unfair to individuals suffering from retardation. English orthography is spiteful, contradictory and completely unsuited to representing the second most widely-spoken second language. This poem really highlights the problem:

Recovering Sounds from Orthography

Brush up Your English

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble but not you
On hiccough, thorough, slough and through.
Well done! And now you wish perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead, it’s said like bed, not bead-
for goodness’ sake don’t call it ‘deed’!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(they rhyme with suite and straight and debt).

A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth, or brother,
And here is not a match for there,
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there’s doze and rose and lose-
Just look them up- and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart-
Come, I’ve hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive!
I’d learned to speak it when I was five!
And yet to write it, the more I sigh,
I’ll not learn how ’til the day I die.

A dreadful language? Man alive! I mastered it when I was five.

— T.S. Watt (1954)

So why don’t we get our acts together and fix this mess? Well… trying to fix it is kind of the reason we’re in this mess in the first place. Basically, in renaissance England we started out with a basically phonetic spelling system. You actually sounded out words and wrote them as they sounded. “Aks” instead of “ask”, for example. (For what it’s worth, “aks” is the original pronunciation.) And you would be writing by hand. On very expensive parchment with very expensive quills and ink for very rich people.

Enter the printing press. Suddenly we can not only produce massive amounts of literature, but everyone can access them. Spelling goes from being something that only really rich people and scribes care about to a popular phenomena. And printing press owners were quick to capitalize on that phenomena  by printing spelling lists that showed the “correct” way to write words. Except there wasn’t a whole lot of agreement between the different printing houses and they were already so heavily invested in their own systems that they weren’t really willing to all switch over to a centralized system. By the time Samuel Johnson comes around to pin down every word of English like an entomologist in a field of butterflies, we have standardized spellings for most words… that all come from different systems developed by different people. And it’s just gotten more complex from there. One of the main reasons is that we keep shoving new words into the language without regard for how they’re spelled.

“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that the English language is as pure as a crib-house whore. It not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary.”

― James Nicoll

There’s actually a sound in English, the zh sort of sound in “lesiure”, that only exists in words we’ve “borrowed” from other language and, of course, there’s no letter for it. Of course not; that would be too simple. And English detests simple. If you’re really interested in more of the gory details, there’s a great lecture you can listen to/watch here by Edwin Duncan which goes into way more detail on the historical background. Or you can just scroll through the Oxford English Dictionary and wince constantly.

 

Rap Reduplication

~ Rachael Tatman ~ 2 Comments

I love rap and hiphop. In addition to being a great example of how different cultural traditions can combine to create a uniquely American art form and fun to listen to (I don’t get much chance to stretch my English-major chops these days) it’s often a carrier of linguistic change. I mentioned one example of this earlier, when I was discussing language games and in-group/out-group language. But I’ve recently noticed another interesting linguistic phenomena in rap that you don’t really see in English very often: reduplication.

Whose work displays metrical complexity, rich cultural/literary/historical allusions and healthy lashing of dirty jokes? Trick question! It’s both. Man, I hope nobody in the future tries to claim that Jay-Z was actually Dick Chaney in disguise…
Reduplication is one of my favorite linguistic phenomena and a great example of a autological word. Basically, reduplication is a linguistic phenomena where you say the same thing twice. It’s also one of those rare phonological phenomena that are semantically meaningful. There are lots of ways to interpret what saying something twice means, but you there are a couple of pretty popular choices:

  • Probably the best English example is “Like like”, as in “I like him, but I don’t like like him.” It seems to serve as some sort of deintensifier (Yeah I just made that word up. Deal with it.) or to disambiguate between two possible meanings of the same word. It seems to serve to narrow the scope of the base word. So, “like-like” is a type of “like” and “holiday holiday” is a type of “holiday”. Apparently there’s a similar relationship in Italian and French (see comments).
  • In Koasati, (and Cree as well apparently) it’s used to indicate a repeated action. So it would be like if I said “cut-cut” in English to mean that I chopped something finely instead of cutting a piece off of  something.
  • In Mandarin it’s an almost juvenile marking, used to indicate “cuteness” or “smallness”. (You can see this in Hebrew as well.) You’ll sometimes see this in English, too, particularly from children.  If you hang out with young kids, keep your ears peeled for things like “bunbun” for “bunny”.
  • On the other, Mandarin also uses reduplication to indicate plurality. Khmer is another language that does this, and I think Japanese does as well. So that’s things like “bird” for one bird and “birdbird” or “bir-bird” for a flock of birds.
  • Finally, and this is what I think’s going on in rap, you’ll see reduplication to intensify things. Like I’d say a “red red” is a really intense red, or that someone who’s “short short” is really tiny.

I’ve been noticing this particularly with “truetrue”.  You can hear it in Chamillionare’s “I’m true”, both as “I’m true, I’m true” and “true true” in verse two. And Lil Wayne’s “My Homies Still” is absolutely rife with reduplication. You’ve got “click click” in the first line, and in verse four (which is Big Sean’s) you’ve got these lines:

Whoa, okay, boi this here’s what I do do
Got your sister dancing, not the kind that’s in a tutu
Got me in control, no strings attached, that’s that voodoo
She said can’t nobody do it better, I tell her, true true yep ***** true true
True true, my my bro bro say…

Of course, a grouping this concentrated speaks more towards an artistic choice than pervasive linguistic change… but it is something I’ve been noticing more and more. The earliest example I could find is GZA’s “True Fresh MC” from 1991, but I’m hesitant to call it reduplication, since there’s a definite pause between the first and second “true”.

Feel free to weigh in in the comments. Is this a legitimate trend or have I fallen prey to a recency illusion? Are there other examples that I’m missing? Is this something you say in everyday speech?

The Many Moods of “Alarming”

~ Rachael Tatman ~ Leave a comment

So you’ll all be doubtless relieved to know that I have cheerfully settled in Seattle and immediately returned to my old tricks. Observe this gem brought to you by Seattle City Light:

Something’s alarming right enough… but I think it’s actually my linguistics sense.

Now, as both a linguist and native speaker of American English, I find this command troubling. Not because I have a problem with civic-minded individuals alerting the power company to potentially dangerous problems, but because it’s ambiguous. I’ve written about ambiguity in language before, but it’s something that I revisit often and it’s a complex enough subject that you can easily spend an entire lifetime studying it, let alone more than one blog post.

Let’s examine why this sign is ambiguous a little more closely.

First, there’s (what I would consider) a non-standard usage of the word “alarming”.  I tend to imagine something that is “alarming” to be capable of putting me in a state of alarm, rather than currently expressing alarm. Or, as the OED puts it:

“Disturbing or exciting with the apprehension of danger.”

Yeah, that’s right, “alarming” is one of the few words that the OED only has one definition for. Let’s put that aside for the moment, though, and assume that there’s a linguistically-creative sign maker working for Seattle City Light who has coined a neologism based on parallels with words like “understanding” or “revolving”. The real crux of the matter is that the command is not a sentence, and has just too many gaps where the reader has to fill in information.

These are just a couple of the possible interpretations I came up for the sign:

  • If [the alarm is] alarming (in the sense of performing the action which alarms traditionally do, such as whooping and revolving) [then] call.
  • If [you are] alarming [other people, then] call.
  • If [the alarm is] alarming [you, regardless of whether or not it’s currently flashing or making noise then] call.

Now, English syntax is a pretty resilient beast and can put up with a certain amount of words  left out. The fancy linguistics term for this is “ellipsis“, just like the punctuation mark. (This one: …) Words have to be left out of of certain places in certain ways,  though. Like you don’t have to say “you” every time you tell someone to do something. “Don’t sit there!” is perfectly acceptable as a sentence, and if someone told  you that you’d have no problem figuring out that they were telling you not to sit on their cat. Like everything else in language, though, there are rules and by breaking them you run the risk of failing to communicate what you’re trying to… just like this sign.

Language Games*

~ Rachael Tatman ~ 2 Comments

A lot of the games that we play as kids help us learn important life skills. “I spy”? Color recognition. “Peekaboo”? Object permanence. But what about language games? In English, you’ve got games like pig Latin, which has several versions. Most involve moving syllables or consonants from the front of a word to the end, and then adding “-ay”. It’s such a prevalent phenomena that there’s even a Google search in pig Latin.

And English isn’t alone in having language games like this. In fact, every language I’ve studied, including Nepali and Esperanto, has had some form of similar language game.

Codex Manesse 262v Herr Goeli
“Ekchay Atemay!”
“Roland, please stop being so infantile. This is backgammon and I know perfectly well you’re fluent in Liturgical Latin.”
The weird thing, though, is that it kinda looks like the only people that language games are really useful for is linguists.

Let’s look at syllables. If you’re a normal person, you only think about them when you’re forced to write a haiku for some reason. (Pro tip: In Japanese, it’s not the syllables that you count but the moras.) If you’re a linguist, though, you think about them all the time, and spend time arguing about whether or not they actually exist. One of the best arguments for syllables existing is that people can move them around relatively intuitively without even having a university degree in linguistics when language games require it. (I know, shocking, isn’t it?)

And you can use the existence of language games to argue that there’s a viable speaker community of any given language, a sort of measure of language health, like mayflies in streams; that’s a valuable indicator, since language death is a serious problem. Or you can even use them to argue that a language is alive in the first place.

The main use of language games for language users, however, seems to be the creation of smaller speech communities within larger communities.  But then, as a linguist, you probably already knew that. Keep an ear out for them in everyday life, however, and you might be surprised how often they tend to crop up–like the use of -izz  in early hip hop parlance.

*If you thought I was going to bring up Wittgenstein in a blog post meant for people with little to no background in linguistics you are a very silly person. Oh, alright, here. I hope you’re proud of yourself.

What’s the loudest / softest / highest / lowest sound humans can hear?

~ Rachael Tatman ~ 2 Comments

Humans can’t hear all sounds. Actually, not even most, in the grand scheme of things. Like how we can only see a narrow band of all wavelengths–hence “visible” light–we can also only hear some of the possible wavelengths. And wave heights. You might remember this from physics, but there are two measurements that are really important on a diagram of a wave: wave length and intensity. Like so:

CPT-sound-physical-manifestation
This should be bringing back flashbacks of asking if you were going to be able to use a formula sheet and a calculator.
So you’ve got the wavelength, which is the distance between two peaks or two troughs, and the amplitude, which is the distance between the mid-point of the wave and the tip of a peak. Which is all very well, but it doesn’t tell you much in the grand scheme of things, since most waves aren’t kind enough to present themselves to you as labelled diagrams. You actually have a pretty good intuitive grasp of the wavelength and amplitude of sound waves, though. The first is pitch and the second is what I like to refer to as “loudness”. (Technically, “loudness” is a perceptual measurement, not a… you know, this is starting to be boring.)

So there’s a limit in how loud and how soft a sound can be and a limit of how high and low a sound can  be. I’ll deal with loudness first, because it’s less fun.

Loudness

So we measure loudness using the decibel scale, which is based on human perception. Since 0 decibels is, by definition, the lower perceptual limit of sound for humans, the quietest sound humans can hear is just above that, which is around 20 micro-pascals of pressure. Of course, that’s healthy young humans. The older you get, the more your hearing range decreases, which is why your grandmother asks you to repeat yourself a lot. The loudest is just under 160 decibels, since exposure to a sound at 160 decibels will literally rip your eardrum. That’s things like being right under a cannon when it fires, standing next to a rocket when it launches or standing right next to a jet engine during take off, all of which tend to have other problems associated with them. So… avoid that.

Pitch

Pitch is a bit more interesting. Normal human hearing is generally between 20 hertz and 20 kilohertz–compare that to 15 to 200 kilohertz for dolphins and bats! (Because they both rely on sonar and echo-locution for hunting.) Just like hearing range for loudness, though, this gets narrower as you get older, particularly at the higher end of the range. Here’s a video that runs the gamut of the human hearing range (warning: you might want to turn your speakers down).

If you’re older than 25 (which is when hearing loss usually starts in the upper ranges) you probably couldn’t hear the whole thing. If you did, congratulations! You’ve got the hearing of a normal, young human.

Why are tongue twisters tricky? (Part 2)

~ Rachael Tatman ~ 1 Comment

Oh, so in my last post I talked about the tongue part of tongue twisters. But, as I mentioned, the really interesting part of tongue twisters comes from the brain, not the tongue. It all has to do with lexical access.

Lexical access: The process through which a speaker or listener accesses their mental lexicon (i.e. the not-so-tiny brain dictionaries we all have and are all constantly changing).

If you were a computer, your mental entries on various words would be like files you needed to access. Like, if I write “kumquat”, you probably have some sort of mental entry for it. Even if you’ve never eaten a kumquat, you’ve probably seen them, so you have that mental image associated with the words–like a .txt file with a picture in it. So, once you hear or read “kumquat”, you need to rummage around until you find that file, then open it and access the information inside. And you do! In fact, you do it very, very quickly. You do it for every single word you ever read or hear, and you do it in reverse for every word you ever write or say.

Brain Surface Gyri

This is your brain on language. Well, some of the bits that deal with language, at any rate.

So lexical access is a very important process. You need it for every single aspect of language use. The good news is, there’s a lot we know about lexical access! Remember when I talked about priming? That’s an aspect of lexical access. The bad news is, there’s a whole bunch we don’t know about lexical access.

(Is lexical access starting to sound like a fake word yet? That process, by the way, is known as semantic saturation.)

This is where tongue twisters come into play. (No, I hadn’t forgotten them.) Why? Well, it turns out that tongue twisters are a really good way to get at what happens during the lexical access process. Like many things that happen in the human brain, it can be difficult to study lexical access. Unlike physicists, linguists can’t break apart the mind to see what happens and figure out what’s going on. First, it would be deeply unethical. Second, when you break a brain open, it stops working. Sometimes, however, the brain does something weird. Like with tongue twisters. If you read my previous post, you know that the tongue itself can cause problems… but not enough to explain the most common errors, like saying “How can a clam cram in a clean cream can?” as “How clan a cam cram in a clean cleam can?”

In a 1999 study, Carolyn E. Wilshire found that there were two main contributors to making tongue twisters tricky. The first factor that made it easier to confuse sounds was whether the confuseable sounds were similar. There’s lots of technical reasons this is, but basically sounds can be grouped together and some sounds are more like other sounds. “t” and “d” are really similar, for example, whereas “k” and “m” are not really that alike. Unsurprisingly, sounds that are alike are easier to confuse. Basically, you reach for something that sounds similar, then realize that you made a mistake and try to correct your error.

The second factor was that it was easier to confuse sounds that were repeated. This is because you’re more likely to “reach for” something you’ve already gotten out once, even if it’s the wrong thing. Together, these factors make for some really awesome tongue twisters. Awesome for two reasons: the first is that they’re really, really hard to say. (Try moss knife noose muff!). The second is that we can use tongue twisters like these to help increase our understanding of the human mind. And that’s what it’s really all about.

Flap that!

~ Rachael Tatman ~ 3 Comments

Imagine you’re walking down a sunny street in Chicago and pass by a construction site. Someone yells out, “Adam, the ladder, pick it up!” Congratulations, you’ve just found the elusive wild flap in its natural environment! And not just once, but three times.  Where was it? “Adam, the ladder, pick it up!” Try saying it aloud. If you’re a native speaker of American English, you’ll say all three of the underlined sounds the same way.

Construction worker at Westlake Center, 1988
Come on, Adam, Lulu's having to pick up your slack!

Unless you’re already pretty familiar with linguistics, you’ve probably never heard of the flap (or tap, as some linguists call it), but that doesn’t mean that you’re not already acquainted. In fact, the flap is one of most common sounds of the English language, especially American English. It’s produced by a very quick movement of the tongue against the little ridge of bone just behind your teeth. This video will give you an idea of just how quick:

It’s a little difficult to see, but did you notice that bit in the middle where the tongue suddenly jumped? That was the flap. It’s so fast that it makes the production of most other sounds seem like the proverbial tortoise. A flap takes an average of 20 milliseconds to produce; by contrast, the schwa vowel (it’s an ‘uh’ sound, the most common in the English Language) lasts an average of 64 milliseconds.  You can see why the flap is such a favorite; it’s a huge time saver.

It’s a little difficult to spot a flap  within specialized training because it doesn’t have its own letter, or make any minimal pairs. (A minimal pair is a pair of words that differ by only one sound, like “cat” and “cap”. Because you need to be able to tell the sounds apart in order to tell the words apart, you’re really good at distinguishing the sounds that make minimal pairs, at least in your native language[s]). Usually, it replaces the ‘t’ or ‘d’ sound in the middle of a word, but when you start speaking more quickly, more and more of your ‘t’s and ‘d’s end up coming out as flaps. And that makes sense. When you’re speaking more quickly, you want to be understood, but you just  don’t have as much time to articulate quickly. Since most people will hear the flap as a ‘t’ or a ‘d’, switching one for the other is just easier for everyone.

So that’s the flap, a shy, unassuming sound that you often mistake for one of its more glamorous siblings. Now that you’ve been introduced, though, try to keep an eye out for the little guy. You just might be surprised how often it pops up!

The Brothers Grimm and Their Phonology Habit

~ Rachael Tatman ~ 1 Comment

You’ve probably heard of the Brothers Grimm in conjunction with fairy tales. They were four-handedly responsible for popularizing most of the ones we know and love today. Well, popularizing them for those of us who live outside of the German countryside. If you’ve ever read or watched Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Cinderella, Rapunzel or Rumpelstiltskin, you’ve got them to thank.

Walter Crane12
Oh, you're a prince? Sorry, I'm holding out for a linguist.
But this is a linguistics blog, not a folklore blog, so why am I going on and on about these guys? Because they were also pretty awesome linguists. They were like the Galileo of linguistics, way ahead of their time and brilliant. They were so brilliant, they discovered something called Grimm’s law. Well, really it was Jacob who discovered it (hence the apostrophe placement) and it wasn’t called Grimm’s law at the time. It was just something that no one had ever thought to look for.

What was it?

Grimm’s law is the very first time we see a set of rules governing linguistic change. And that may sound kind of boring, but it was just as monumental as the discovery of calculus. (Was calculus more of a discovery or a development? Mhh, whatever.) It fundamentally changed the way that linguistics was done.

Basically, Jacob determined that, historically, certain sounds in Germanic languages (including German and English) had changed. And they hadn’t changed randomly. A had changed to B had changed to C across a set of languages, and all across the language. It would be like if three or four different countries, without talking about it, decide that purple was better color for stop signs than red or bright green, and changed out all their stop signs. And then, when they were done, they decided that they really liked pink better and all changed to that.

Why was this exciting? Well, unlike theories like “This word is fun to say becuase I think it is“, Grimm’s law is testable. You can go out and take a picture of some non-pink stop signs and use that evidence to argue against a law that ends with all stop signs being now pink. We have a theory (and phonological theory!) that we can use empirical data to prove or disprove. It obviously took some time to be accepted as the standard practice, and for a long time, all anybody wanted to talk about was historical sound change and written texts. But, hey, once phonology was born, it was only a matter of time before it started saving the world.

What can you do with a degree in linguistics?

~ Rachael Tatman ~ 2 Comments

This is obviously a question that I, as someone who’s going to shortly hold such a degree, get asked a lot. Fortunately, there are a lot of possible answers! I’m going to start with the obvious ones and then start surprising you.

From Linguist Llama (click for original post).

Obvious answer #1: Get another degree in linguistics!

If you’re really in love with the subject, getting a doctorate and competing for the tiny number of teaching positions in the field is certainly an option. Imma be straight with you, though: it’s very, very hard work; very, very competitive and very, very low paying for the amount of specialized training you need. (A PhD usually takes between four and six years…if you manage to finish at all.) Oh, and did I mention that you’ll be expected to do original, groundbreaking research and consistently get it published in addition to your teaching load? Yeah… unless you’re 100% sure that’s what you want to do, you should probably keep reading.

Obvious answer #2: Teach computers how to language!

Do you like computers? Do you like linguistics? Do you like the thought of eventually having a job and making money? Holy balls of yarn, do I have a career for you. Super-high employment rates, cutting edge research, making all the best and newest toys… yeah. Plus, if you have a good background in both computer science and linguistics (a surprisingly large number of people only have a computer background) you’ll be a very competitive candidate.

Obvious answer #3: Help children and adults overcome speech problems!

If you’ve always wanted a career where you help people, you should look into Speech-Language Pathology. Sometimes, someone doesn’t acquire language correctly, or they develop a problem with language. Speech pathologists work with patients to help them acquire language or to relearn language. You’ll need at least a masters, but most people find it to be a very rewarding career.

Obvious answer #4: Work as a translator!

So I wrote earlier about the difference between a linguist and a translator, but being a linguist can really help you with translation as well, particularly if you’re interested in working on bilingual dictionaries. Of course, demand for translators varies from language to language, and you do have to be fluent in at least two languages.

Obvious answer #5: Teach languages!

If you’re interested in teaching anyone to acquire a second language, whether it’s English or something else, having a linguistics background can be very, very helpful. Think back to any foreign language classes you might have taken. Wouldn’t it have been better if your teacher had been able to tell you exactly what you were supposed to be doing with your mouth, instead of vaguely telling you what letters it was like and then that “You’re doing it wrong”? With a background in linguistics, you can really explain how things work in the second language, and that will really help your students.

So those are the biggies. You’ll need other skills for most of them, but linguistics will help you a lot. And, hey, linguistics classes are fun! But what other careers can linguistics help you with? Well…

Be a lawyer!  A background in linguistics is actually a really strong choice for someone heading to law school. Why? Well, law is all about using language really, really carefully and communicating effectively. An academic background in linguistics will help you do that.

Make up languages! Now, this is a bit of a niche, but there is more than one person who has been paid for designing “alien” languages for flims. You’ve heard of Na’vi and Klingon, I presume? They’re actually legit artificial languages with grammars and everything.

Write standardized tests!  If you’re American, you’ve probably taken or will take the SAT’s at some point. Fun fact: most of those language-based questions were written by linguists, who know how to ask questions designed to get at very specific pieces of linguistic knowledge.

Do anything you like! Really, linguistics training gives you a great set of skills. You can analyze large sets of data, deduce the rules that would generate them and then write about them in a clear way. That’s a really useful thing to be able to do.

You Are a Linguist

~ Rachael Tatman ~ 8 Comments

Unless you have a degree in linguistics or are working as a translator (not the same thing, but I’ll get to that later) you probably read the title of this post and immediately thought “No, I’m not.” Trust me, you are. How do I know? Well, a linguist is someone who does two things:

  1. Makes claims about language
  2. Attempts to either verify or disprove these claims (whether they made them or someone else did).

That’s it. There’s no secret cabal of linguists you have to join, you don’t have to speak thirty languages, and you certainly don’t have to have a PhD. I think if you start paying attention, you’ll notice that you do this all the time. Have you ever had a conversation like this?

Lulu: She talks slow.

Max: Really? I’ve never noticed it.

Or maybe one like this:

Lulu: We go to the zoo.

Max: Don’t you mean we’re going to the zoo?

Lulu: No, we go to the zoo all the time.

Max: But we’re going today, so you could have said that “we’re going”.

Lulu: Yeah, but that’s not what I meant.

Bam. You’re a linguist; go you! “But wait a minute,” you say, “I know for a fact that translators are called linguists. Are you saying that just speaking another language doesn’t make you a linguist? Because that’s what I’ve always heard.”

Man, you’ve got the linguistics bug bad. Look at you, bringing up fine semantic distinctions! (Semantics is the study of how words map onto meaning, BTW.) And you’re absolutely right, a linguist can also be someone who speaks more than one language. The Oxford English Dictionary, the most complete record of the English language, defines a linguist as, first:

“One who is skilled in the use of languages; one who is master of other tongues besides his own. (Often with adj. indicating the degree or extent of the person’s skill.)”

And only later as:

“A student of language; a philologist.”

Philology is what the very beginnings of the modern study of language were called. These days, most people prefer the term “linguistics”, and only use philology for a certain field of study within linguistics. For the purposes of this blog and most academic settings, a linguist is not someone who knows languages, but someone who knows about languages. And since knowing a language also automatically means you know about a language–if you’re a native English speaker, you can easily identify where people are from based on their accent, for example–you, sir or madam or other, are a linguist.