Linguistics Homework

So in the last blog, I talked about my major, which is Classics. Now, why don’t we take a look at my minor, Linguistics. You might ask, “this is another somewhat useless field of study, what is this guy doing with his academic career?” Again, the questions never stop for me. Anyway, this is what my writing focus is mainly related to.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Linguists study the five aspects of a language to understand its dynamics. These are phonetics (the study of sounds), phonology (the study of speech patterns and systems), morphology (the study of the meanings when sounds combine), semantics (word and sentence meaning), and syntax (word ordering in a sentence or phrase). But let us focus on phonetics here. I am currently in an upper-division phonetics class to help satisfy minor requirements. Like most college students and my classmates, doing the lecture examples were easy. We were all thinking to ourselves, “this homework due later is going to be easy.” As you would guess, we were way wrong.

The homework consisted of solving phonetic patterns, but our instructor decided to give us a problem set where the language is still being researched in phonetics. This made the assignment a thousand times harder than it should have been expected. We had a study group and no one had an idea of what they were doing. We spent hours trying to crack the sound system but still did not have an understanding. We all giving up and turned in whatever we wrote down for the assignment. Thank goodness that the lowest assignment gets dropped on our final grade.

I may seem dumb for putting myself through this, but this is something that I still want to study. Language was something I have always been good with. Like I mentioned in recent blogs, I studied Latin in high school. It was the only thing I was good at. I then studied German and Ancient Greek later. So I wanted to know the science of language after I found out I was good at it.