09-07-03 17:39, fortuna11111 wrote:
>> Since discuting with a senior linguist, there no doubt he's aware
>> of these trivia.
>
> Now this is a very scientific statement :-) Truly based on belief.
Is "he" _me_? OK, if it matters, I _am_ aware of such trivia. I can't
speak fluent Bulgarian (though I've been to Bulgaria several times and
know the country quite well), but I know quite a lot _about_ Bulgarian,
including its phonology, grammatical system and history. I have access
to dictionaries and grammars of Bulgarian, so if there's something I
don't know, I know where to check it up. Is that enough?
> This is a remark on something I have experienced. Consider the
> lengthy explanations on Macedonian.
Also unnecessary. I know full well what Macedonian is, what it isn't,
and why these questions are politically sensitive. Enough?
>> > Unfortunately, linguistics does not have those checking mechanisms.
>> > And my general impression is many linguists are actually worse at
>> > speaking living languages than many amateurs. I do not think this
>> > is normal.
The linguists I know speak the languages they specialise in, plus
usually one or two more. Is this abnormal? In general, however,
linguistics is not the art of speaking many languages. You may speak a
language very well but know nothing _about_ it, have no idea where it
comes from, what it's related to, etc. Most native speakers of any
language are blissfully ignorant of such stuff, just as they don't give
a damn about the difference between a pronoun and a preposition. This is
why native users are not automatically experts on their own first
language. If one studies a large field, like Indo-European (where the
number of living languages is several hundred), it isn't humanly
possible to learn all, or even most of them, but the knowledge of a few
modern languages plus familiarity with two or three dead ones gives
you sufficient competence. The most important thing is not to know
everything about everything but to know where and how to collect more
information if need be.
Piotr