Falsehoods About Linguistics
Compiled by
N. Correct,
N. Accurate,
and Aaron Nius
Inspired by Patrick McKenzie’s “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names”, here is a list of ideas, thoughts, and assumptions about linguists and linguistics that come up from time to time, but none of which are necessarily true.
- Linguists know what a language is.
- Linguists know what a word is.
- Linguists know what linguistics is.
- Linguists can tell you the correct way of doing linguistics.
- Linguists can tell you the correct way of speaking a language.
- All linguists know multiple, if not many, languages.
- All linguists love languages.
- All linguists enjoy learning, and learning about, different languages.
- Knowing how to speak many languages is one of the main prerequisites for being accepted to a linguistics program.
- The field of linguistics came into being with the publication of Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures.
- Linguistics is a field that is free of factional squabbles.
- All subfields of linguistics are hard science.
- Syntax, in particular, is a hard science.
- Once we truly understand MERGE, we will truly understand humanity.
- One of the most important discoveries in the field of linguistics is how color words work.
- Another one of the most important discoveries in the field of linguistics is how color words determine the way people think.
- One of the main challenges facing the field of linguistics is determining which language has the most words.
- The exact number of words for “snow” in Inuktitut is of great import for linguistic theory.
- Linguists are all good at learning languages.
- Linguistics involves speaking multiple languages.
- Linguistics involves having a thorough understanding of how one’s native language works and being able to explain the details of its grammar on command.
- Linguistics has mainly the same concerns as Professor Higgins from Pygmalion.
- Professor Higgins is an accurate example of the average linguist.
- Studying linguistics will get you a job in linguistics.
- Studying linguistics will probably get you a job in linguistics.
- Studying linguistics will get you a job.
- Knowing linguistics will make you a better interpreter.
- There are just a few words in every language that have no equivalents in some other language. They have hidden meaning.
- Linguistics is not only different from, but superior to philology.
- Given the snowclone “Falsehoods X believe about Y”, if Y is “linguistics” then X is limited to “linguists” or “the general public”.
