A Crash Course In Linguistics For Star Trek Fen
Hi. I really like stories about linguistics. So I find it very exciting that there are so many stories about Spock and Uhura and languages and linguistics. And it occurred to me (after being gently prodded by a few S/U fen) that maybe I should write up a little bit about what linguistics was, so that people who want to write stories involving it can make it look good.
So who are you to tell us about linguistics?
I have a BA and MA in linguistics from a school with a well-regarded linguistics program. (Theoretical linguistics, of course. Also Marc Okrand, who invented Klingon, went there.) My subfield of choice is phonology, though I've always had a soft spot for syntax -- pure syntax, none of that semantics interface stuff. My MA thesis was on historical phonology, an analysis of a particular sound change in several dialects of Russian.
I am currently All But Dissertation on a PhD in another well-regarded linguistics program; if I ever write this thing, it's gonna be phonology. Possibly historical or computational.
I have taught Introduction to Linguistic Theory three times and been a TA for it three times. I have also TA'd a more touchy-feely intro course about language and society, as well as Pragmatics and Syntax I.
Everything I say is based, naturally, on my own experiences, and I am aware that my undergraduate linguistics program was unique in its pedagogical methods. (I hear there are people who learn linguistics from books! Whoa.) Also I should point out that my education is pretty much Chomskian. YMMV.
So how many languages do you know?
Argh. Here is the first, really big thing you need to know. I will capitalize it for you. LINGUISTICS IS NOT TRANSLATION. That is not what we do. A lot of people use "linguist" to mean "translator." For example, the US Army. A dictionary will probably tell you it means "polyglot." And it's clear in AOS that at least part of Uhura's job involves translation -- she's asked if she knows Romulan. But the film's website dossiers list her and Spock as being involved in phonology. And I can assure you that's not translation.
It is perfectly possible to be a linguist and know no other languages besides your own. However, having said that, a lot of linguists do learn a lot of languages, because, well, languages are fun, and the more you know about particular languages, the easier it is to study them. Many linguists specialize in particular languages or language families for their research: my classmates work on Tibetan, the Bantu languages (yes, the whole family), Kiowa (a Native American language), and Icelandic.
Oh, fine. Languages I have studied: French. Russian. Arabic. Latin. Ancient Egyptian. Esperanto. In my spare time, I am currently learning Old English. My girlfriend lysimache is trying to convince me to learn German and Gothic.
What is linguistics?
Here's an explanation of the sort you'll probably find on Wikipedia. Linguistics is the study of language, in an analytical, scientific manner. Everyone learns at least one language, perfectly, as a child. Furthermore, everyone can (and does) say sentences that have never been spoken before, and can understand people saying sentences they've never heard before. Everyone can recognize whether words or sentences are (or could be) valid in their native language(s), and can identify words/sentences as things no speaker of their language would ever say.
And human languages can be very different from each other, yes, but they're not as different as you might think -- there are things many languages all do similarly. There are six possible orders of subject, object, and verb, and three of them account for something like 85% of the world's six thousand languages. And there's things no languages ever do, too -- the classic example is "no language forms questions by saying all the words in reverse order."
The goal of linguistics, pretty much, is to come up with an explanation of that. What it is you know when you know a language. What it is you have in your head that lets you do all that. Why the hell it is languages are all like each other, and exactly what they have in common. So basically we just want to describe human language as best we can and analyze how it might work. You get very, very good at pattern-recognition and coming up with an analysis of a set of data that explains why you see what you see and why you don't see what you don't see.
Linguistics has, as you might guess, a lot of subfields. In theoretical linguistics, these are the big four:
Phonetics: The study of sounds, as you might guess. Splits into articulatory and acoustic phonetics. Acoustics is the study of sound itself -- waves, harmonics, pitch, the formant frequencies that make up vowels. For example. You can learn to calculate the length of your own vocal tract by measuring the formants of your own vowels. This is the more advanced stuff. Articulatory phonetics (usually just called phonetics) is something everyone takes. You learn the anatomy of the vocal tract, how sounds are produced, how to recognize (and at least try to pronounce) almost every sound human languages use, and how to identify and classify sounds with respect to where and how they are produced. You learn the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which is an unambiguous transcription system for indicating how anything is pronounced. Everyone knows this, even if they work in a different subfield.
Phonology: This is the study of how sounds work together in a language to form a system. That probably doesn't make much sense, so I'll explain below. All phonology courses require phonetics as a prerequisite, because you have to understand what sounds you're talking about.
Syntax: The study of word order, and arguably the part of linguistics that leads to fame and fortune. (Guess what Noam Chomsky does.) The goal of syntax is to come up with a grammar (usually a set of rules, or descriptions of what is possible) that will allow you to produce all the grammatical (possible) sentences of a language and none of the impossible (ungrammatical) ones. They're still working on this, obviously. Syntacticians do a lot of sentence diagramming. Syntacticians can probably diagram sentences in their sleep. This is not the sentence diagramming you did in grade school. This is fiendishly complex sentence diagramming, and deriving sentences from deep structures, and moving phrases around, and all sorts of good stuff. It is awesome.
Semantics: The study of meaning. Now you might think that this would be about what words mean, how you know what words mean, et cetera. You would be wrong. Semantics takes it as a given that you know this, and pretty much wants to talk about how words combine into sentences to make sentences mean something -- it requires syntax as a prerequisite, because you're working with syntax trees. There are a lot of truth tables. If you are the sort of person who really enjoys truth tables and the word "epistemic," you might want to consider semantics. Or philosophy. Pragmatics is more or less a subfield of semantics and talks about what sentences mean in conversation, and tries to come up with things like guidelines for what people do/don't say in conversation. (For a good time, check out Grice's maxims of conversation. I try to violate them as much as possible.)
My current department likes to talk about P-side (phonetics and phonology) versus S-side (syntax and semantics). It's a bit of a rivalry. Ooh, hey, forgot one...
Morphology: The study of morphemes (the smallest units of meaning) and how they combine to form words. I know they mentioned morphology in the movie, but, um. My morphology instructor referred to it as "the Poland of linguistics," because the other subfields are always invading it. Almost no one does pure morphology. What you will see is it showing up in other subfields. Morphophonology, which many phonologists like, looks at how morphemes interact with phonology -- sometimes adding morphemes causes words to be pronounced differently. Morphosyntax is interested in how morphemes interact with syntax -- how words will be marked in languages with case, say, to indicate that they are the object, or how the verb agrees with the subject (or whatever the hell it agrees with in ergative languages).
There are a bunch of other fun things you can study: acquisition, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, computational linguistics... but these are all basically applied uses of the subfields as above.
Again, NOT TRANSLATION. And, dude, when you're doing phonology, most of the time you don't even need to know what the words mean.
What exactly is phonology?
Okay. Let's say you've got a language. Let's make it English. And let's say that, as you know phonetics, you have its inventory, a list of all the phonemes in it -- all the sounds that an English speaker can tell apart from other sounds. (The way you do this is to find a minimal pair, two words that mean different things and are exactly the same except for one sound. Like "cat" and "pat." Because you can recognize those as different words when you hear 'em, this proves that you must be able to tell [k] and [p] apart, so they are separate phonemes in English. One year lysimache and I went as a minimal pair for Halloween; I was "formication" and she was "fornication.")
But phonemes aren't all a language has. Phonemes are actually more of an abstract concept. What languages have are allophones, which are the different ways in which specific phonemes get pronounced. Each phoneme has its own set of allophones. One of the things phonology does is try to figure out, for a language, what the phonemes are, what their allophones are, and how you tell what allophone is used when.
Here's an example for native English speakers. Hold your hand in front of your mouth and say "spy," then "pie." When you say the /p/ in "pie" you should feel a puff of air against your hand that isn't present in "spy." (The technical term is aspiration.) You do this even though you don't know you're doing it, and there's a consistent pattern as to when you do it. Basically, English /p/ comes in multiple varieties, and if you were in Intro Ling I'd give you a bunch of words and make you come up with an account of where you get the aspirated one versus the unaspirated one.
(We also talk about how you tell where the stress is in words and phrases, when you might add sounds (like "hampster") or delete sounds, and really a whole lot of other things that are way too complicated to explain.)
What do you do in an Advanced Phonology class, anyway?
Hmm. Okay. These are the two course descriptions of the phonology sequence I took as an undergrad. You can call them beginning and advanced if you like:
Phonology I
Phonetics focuses on the physical aspects of sounds. Phonology considers the role sounds play in the grammars of languages. What features of sound can serve to distinguish words? What rules govern the variations in sounds in words and the way sounds can combine? What principles are common across languages? We will begin by discussing the internal structure of sounds and developing a precise formalism (the distinctive feature system) for representing this internal structure, drawing on familiar phonetic parameters of place, manner, and so on. The course then provides a thorough grounding in the the kinds of phonological phenomena commonly found in languages, with an emphasis on developing theories to explain them. Topics include distinctive feature theory, phonemic analysis, autosegmental phonology, and principles of syllabification and stress.
Phonology II
This course focuses on advanced topics in phonology. These include underspecification theory, the role of markedness constraints in driving phonology, and advanced topics in feature geometry, syllable theory, and stress theory. Students are introduced to recent advances in the field, including Optimality Theory. Readings include published scholarly articles. Throughout the course the emphasis is on theory construction and argumentation based on data.
Right. Basically you're learning about a bunch of different phonological phenomena -- syllables, assimilation, dissimilation, epenthesis, deletion, stress assignment, vowel harmony (oh man, so much vowel harmony) and so on. All the different processes languages have. And you learn to analyze them in a bunch of different theories -- first the older theories that involve writing rules to describe what's going on, then autosegmental phonology (which involves, um, diagrams), and the new-ish and popular Optimality Theory, which makes you come up with a list of constraints and rank them in the order that is important to the language.
The way you actually do this is through problem sets, because the only way to get good at linguistics is to do it enough that you start getting an idea of what sorts of things are likely to happen where. (This took me about a year.) Problem sets are usually assigned weekly (or daily, if you took the sadistic Syntax I class at my undergrad institution) and many of them start with the sentence "Consider the following data from (name of language and its family)."
What follows is a bunch of data. In phonology, these are typically words in the IPA and their glosses (translations); in syntax, these are sentences, with glosses at the word/morpheme level and the sentence level. If your instructor is merciful, the data will be arranged into groups with leading questions to help you develop and refine a theory about it. If they are mean, you get one big lump o' data. Your goal is to explain why the data is the way it is. For example, if you have a bunch of related words in Finnish with [t] in them and then suddenly one of them has an [s], your job is to explain why the [s] is there, and why the other words have [t]s instead. (This one's actually complicated.) Then you write it all up in your theory of choice and give examples showing how your theory works and why it's better than any alternatives. These things are usually only a few pages long, but it's the kind of writing where you have to do a bunch of heavy thinking first.
(I was going to upload one of my own, but I couldn't find any where I thought my answer was decent and would show up correctly in a .pdf. Google will find you some, I'm sure.)
In my undergrad program, I never really had exams -- my grades (not that I had them; long story) were almost entirely based on homework. I understand other programs may like in-class exams more.
So I imagine that as a TA, Uhura would be, you know, grading problem sets and geeking about Turkish vowel harmony or something.
What's it like being a linguistics TA?
Not that anyone has asked this, but just in case. Assignment as a TA varies based on department and courses -- at least here, if there's a need for a TA for a subfield course, usually people in that subfield who want a TA position are tapped first. For the general courses, mostly we get randomly assigned based on a bunch of complicated factors like "has TAed for it before," "should not TA; needs to have a chance to teach own Intro Ling course," and occasionally things like "has agreed to TA in exchange for first pick of class timeslots when teaching own course next semester."
Your responsibilities vary, but generally include (a) grading the homework and tests, (b) holding office hours and answering student questions and (c) being responsible for leading a smaller discussion section. (At my undergrad, the sections were usually optional and most of the time three of us showed up and the TA discussed random linguistics things when we didn't have any questions. Usually, as a TA in section, I ended up answering questions about the material and doing a lot of practice problem sets.) It varies as to whether you are responsible for (d), showing up to the main lecture. Basically you do everything the professor would do except teach the class, and sometimes you do that when the professor's off at a conference or something.
Generally TAs meet with the professor for an hour or so every week to discuss things like what the class should do next, what the next homework should be about, how the particular assignments should be graded, and so forth. Sometimes there are grading parties to get all the exams done. Those of you looking for places to set your S/U UST-fests might consider it.
What do we know about Uhura as a xenolinguist in AOS?
I'm going by the movie here. The novelization has additional details, but they're pretty much full of crap, in terms of technical accuracy.
Uhura is a xenolinguist, which, as we know from Kirk's pick-up lines, consists at least of phonology, syntax, and morphology. (This is good.) The official website lists her as a TA (or rather "Academy aide," but I assume that's the same thing) for Spock's Advanced Phonology course -- though why Spock is teaching that is beyond me -- and Advanced Acoustical Engineering. So clearly she's some kind of phonetician/phonologist, although I'm thinking "acoustics" here is probably also about sounds other than just speech sounds.
(It also says she's proficient in 83% of official Federation languages and regional dialects. Um. I mean, come on, what?)
It's clear that also she knows a lot of languages, because clearly translation is something called for. She knows three dialects of Romulan, and she knows enough Klingon to translate the message about the Klingon armada's destruction. (Incidentally, this is sort of against TOS canon: in Star Trek VI, Uhura is forced to pretend to be a Klingon and hold a conversation in Klingon, which she has a hard time doing even with the aid of dictionaries. On the other hand, she was kind of being put on the spot there, and presumably here she had time to translate the message.)
She's also clearly got to know whatever else it is communications officers have to know -- detecting anomalies in subspace, or whatever it was she told Spock she was good at in addition to the aural sensitivity. (And seriously, hearing things well is hard. My current department's phonetician says he doesn't think any of us should give transcription exercises to our students because he doesn't think *we* can do it right.) The line in the novelization makes up some nonsense about how she can produce clicks better than the MIT students at the "Oxford Linguistics Invitational." Um. Seriously, I only needed to be able to pronounce clicks for one class, ten years ago. It doesn't really matter if you can say the sounds as long as you know what they are.
What might linguistics be like in AOS?
Hmm. This is a little tricky for me to answer, mostly because I think they're drawing a lot of their inspiration for what linguists/communications officers do from Hoshi Sato on Enterprise, and I bailed on Enterprise a few episodes in because I was angry that the show's linguistics talk made no sense.
In the one K/S story I've written, I decided it would be hilarious to have Uhura mention the IPA... and call it the *Interplanetary* Phonetic Alphabet. Number of people who have found this funny: two.
The big difference between now and them is, of course, going to be the existence of the Universal Translator. Which basically means that machine translation will have gotten very, very, very good. (Although, given that they need Uhura to translate Klingon and Romulan, maybe AOS isn't doing as well as TOS on the translation front.)
So if the UT exists, presumably a lot of linguistics work would be focused on fieldwork -- going to other planets and talking to the people there and trying to figure out what their language is all about, for inclusion in the UT. (I'm assuming that it can't translate languages it's never heard before with no idea of the content, even though I think that contradicts TOS canon -- blah blah brainwave reading blah -- because, uh, that's not realistic. Besides, we might want to read written texts.)
If they don't have the UT yet -- and they might not have anything very good; the Romulans from the future may have conveniently pre-translated their speech, and the AOS Starfleet may have thrown more resources into building more awesome ships instead -- then they're really going to need people to work on figuring out what all the different species' languages are like. Because before you can have translators and train people as translators, you really need to understand how the languages work first.
I'm also thinking that in the future we'll probably know more about how brains work, meaning that psycholinguists won't have to say things like "we think maybe this negative spike in ERP activity at 400ms after stimulus represents something about meaning." Which might, you know, make this whole business easier. Maybe they will be able to read brainwaves. Because right now it's a lot of guessing as to what our brains are doing when we're processing language.
But really the most awesome thing they could do in AOS is really study alien languages. What ways will they be like human languages? How will they be different? Will they do things no human language does? Will they violate Greenberg's universals? Typology is sure going to be more fun -- and given probable anatomical differences and all, so is Uhura's phonetics/phonology knowledge.
(Suzette Haden Elgin, a linguist, wrote the Native Tongue trilogy of feminist SF, in which the way we learn to speak with aliens is the way we learn any language properly -- by being raised speaking it. So there's all this fostering going on. And then there's a species that is so alien that all the babies they have try to communicate with it end up going insane.)
I had more to say here, but I have forgotten it.
Where can I find out more?
Actually, Wikipedia's coverage of linguistics is generally pretty good. No, really. If you'd like a basic text, my favorite is O'Grady's Contemporary Linguistics
LINGUIST List is where linguists hang out on the internet. The part of their site that you will probably find most useful is Ask-A-Linguist, in which a panel of volunteer linguists diligently strive to answer your linguistics- and language-related questions.
The Linguistics Olympiad, modeled after the longstanding Russian competition, gives linguistics problems (requiring no knowledge of linguistics, but pretty much the same reasoning) to high school students. They are tricky and fun and give you just enough information needed to solve the problem. Sometimes we give these to our students. Once they even stumped me. It was embarrassing. (There are more puzzles here. The one that I got stuck on once was Orkhono-Yeniseyan. *facepalm*) So this might give you a better idea of what linguistics is like.
Or, y'know, if there's some kind of beta list, I'm happy to linguistics-check people's fanfiction. (No one took me up on this in SG1 fandom eight years ago, even after I ranted about how Daniel Jackson should never have been able to speak Egyptian. Actually, maybe that was why no one took me up on it. Looking back on it, that was a pretty good rant, considering that I hadn't taken Egyptian at the time.)
Right. So, uh, that's about it.
So who are you to tell us about linguistics?
I have a BA and MA in linguistics from a school with a well-regarded linguistics program. (Theoretical linguistics, of course. Also Marc Okrand, who invented Klingon, went there.) My subfield of choice is phonology, though I've always had a soft spot for syntax -- pure syntax, none of that semantics interface stuff. My MA thesis was on historical phonology, an analysis of a particular sound change in several dialects of Russian.
I am currently All But Dissertation on a PhD in another well-regarded linguistics program; if I ever write this thing, it's gonna be phonology. Possibly historical or computational.
I have taught Introduction to Linguistic Theory three times and been a TA for it three times. I have also TA'd a more touchy-feely intro course about language and society, as well as Pragmatics and Syntax I.
Everything I say is based, naturally, on my own experiences, and I am aware that my undergraduate linguistics program was unique in its pedagogical methods. (I hear there are people who learn linguistics from books! Whoa.) Also I should point out that my education is pretty much Chomskian. YMMV.
So how many languages do you know?
Argh. Here is the first, really big thing you need to know. I will capitalize it for you. LINGUISTICS IS NOT TRANSLATION. That is not what we do. A lot of people use "linguist" to mean "translator." For example, the US Army. A dictionary will probably tell you it means "polyglot." And it's clear in AOS that at least part of Uhura's job involves translation -- she's asked if she knows Romulan. But the film's website dossiers list her and Spock as being involved in phonology. And I can assure you that's not translation.
It is perfectly possible to be a linguist and know no other languages besides your own. However, having said that, a lot of linguists do learn a lot of languages, because, well, languages are fun, and the more you know about particular languages, the easier it is to study them. Many linguists specialize in particular languages or language families for their research: my classmates work on Tibetan, the Bantu languages (yes, the whole family), Kiowa (a Native American language), and Icelandic.
Oh, fine. Languages I have studied: French. Russian. Arabic. Latin. Ancient Egyptian. Esperanto. In my spare time, I am currently learning Old English. My girlfriend lysimache is trying to convince me to learn German and Gothic.
What is linguistics?
Here's an explanation of the sort you'll probably find on Wikipedia. Linguistics is the study of language, in an analytical, scientific manner. Everyone learns at least one language, perfectly, as a child. Furthermore, everyone can (and does) say sentences that have never been spoken before, and can understand people saying sentences they've never heard before. Everyone can recognize whether words or sentences are (or could be) valid in their native language(s), and can identify words/sentences as things no speaker of their language would ever say.
And human languages can be very different from each other, yes, but they're not as different as you might think -- there are things many languages all do similarly. There are six possible orders of subject, object, and verb, and three of them account for something like 85% of the world's six thousand languages. And there's things no languages ever do, too -- the classic example is "no language forms questions by saying all the words in reverse order."
The goal of linguistics, pretty much, is to come up with an explanation of that. What it is you know when you know a language. What it is you have in your head that lets you do all that. Why the hell it is languages are all like each other, and exactly what they have in common. So basically we just want to describe human language as best we can and analyze how it might work. You get very, very good at pattern-recognition and coming up with an analysis of a set of data that explains why you see what you see and why you don't see what you don't see.
Linguistics has, as you might guess, a lot of subfields. In theoretical linguistics, these are the big four:
Phonetics: The study of sounds, as you might guess. Splits into articulatory and acoustic phonetics. Acoustics is the study of sound itself -- waves, harmonics, pitch, the formant frequencies that make up vowels. For example. You can learn to calculate the length of your own vocal tract by measuring the formants of your own vowels. This is the more advanced stuff. Articulatory phonetics (usually just called phonetics) is something everyone takes. You learn the anatomy of the vocal tract, how sounds are produced, how to recognize (and at least try to pronounce) almost every sound human languages use, and how to identify and classify sounds with respect to where and how they are produced. You learn the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which is an unambiguous transcription system for indicating how anything is pronounced. Everyone knows this, even if they work in a different subfield.
Phonology: This is the study of how sounds work together in a language to form a system. That probably doesn't make much sense, so I'll explain below. All phonology courses require phonetics as a prerequisite, because you have to understand what sounds you're talking about.
Syntax: The study of word order, and arguably the part of linguistics that leads to fame and fortune. (Guess what Noam Chomsky does.) The goal of syntax is to come up with a grammar (usually a set of rules, or descriptions of what is possible) that will allow you to produce all the grammatical (possible) sentences of a language and none of the impossible (ungrammatical) ones. They're still working on this, obviously. Syntacticians do a lot of sentence diagramming. Syntacticians can probably diagram sentences in their sleep. This is not the sentence diagramming you did in grade school. This is fiendishly complex sentence diagramming, and deriving sentences from deep structures, and moving phrases around, and all sorts of good stuff. It is awesome.
Semantics: The study of meaning. Now you might think that this would be about what words mean, how you know what words mean, et cetera. You would be wrong. Semantics takes it as a given that you know this, and pretty much wants to talk about how words combine into sentences to make sentences mean something -- it requires syntax as a prerequisite, because you're working with syntax trees. There are a lot of truth tables. If you are the sort of person who really enjoys truth tables and the word "epistemic," you might want to consider semantics. Or philosophy. Pragmatics is more or less a subfield of semantics and talks about what sentences mean in conversation, and tries to come up with things like guidelines for what people do/don't say in conversation. (For a good time, check out Grice's maxims of conversation. I try to violate them as much as possible.)
My current department likes to talk about P-side (phonetics and phonology) versus S-side (syntax and semantics). It's a bit of a rivalry. Ooh, hey, forgot one...
Morphology: The study of morphemes (the smallest units of meaning) and how they combine to form words. I know they mentioned morphology in the movie, but, um. My morphology instructor referred to it as "the Poland of linguistics," because the other subfields are always invading it. Almost no one does pure morphology. What you will see is it showing up in other subfields. Morphophonology, which many phonologists like, looks at how morphemes interact with phonology -- sometimes adding morphemes causes words to be pronounced differently. Morphosyntax is interested in how morphemes interact with syntax -- how words will be marked in languages with case, say, to indicate that they are the object, or how the verb agrees with the subject (or whatever the hell it agrees with in ergative languages).
There are a bunch of other fun things you can study: acquisition, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, computational linguistics... but these are all basically applied uses of the subfields as above.
Again, NOT TRANSLATION. And, dude, when you're doing phonology, most of the time you don't even need to know what the words mean.
What exactly is phonology?
Okay. Let's say you've got a language. Let's make it English. And let's say that, as you know phonetics, you have its inventory, a list of all the phonemes in it -- all the sounds that an English speaker can tell apart from other sounds. (The way you do this is to find a minimal pair, two words that mean different things and are exactly the same except for one sound. Like "cat" and "pat." Because you can recognize those as different words when you hear 'em, this proves that you must be able to tell [k] and [p] apart, so they are separate phonemes in English. One year lysimache and I went as a minimal pair for Halloween; I was "formication" and she was "fornication.")
But phonemes aren't all a language has. Phonemes are actually more of an abstract concept. What languages have are allophones, which are the different ways in which specific phonemes get pronounced. Each phoneme has its own set of allophones. One of the things phonology does is try to figure out, for a language, what the phonemes are, what their allophones are, and how you tell what allophone is used when.
Here's an example for native English speakers. Hold your hand in front of your mouth and say "spy," then "pie." When you say the /p/ in "pie" you should feel a puff of air against your hand that isn't present in "spy." (The technical term is aspiration.) You do this even though you don't know you're doing it, and there's a consistent pattern as to when you do it. Basically, English /p/ comes in multiple varieties, and if you were in Intro Ling I'd give you a bunch of words and make you come up with an account of where you get the aspirated one versus the unaspirated one.
(We also talk about how you tell where the stress is in words and phrases, when you might add sounds (like "hampster") or delete sounds, and really a whole lot of other things that are way too complicated to explain.)
What do you do in an Advanced Phonology class, anyway?
Hmm. Okay. These are the two course descriptions of the phonology sequence I took as an undergrad. You can call them beginning and advanced if you like:
Phonology I
Phonetics focuses on the physical aspects of sounds. Phonology considers the role sounds play in the grammars of languages. What features of sound can serve to distinguish words? What rules govern the variations in sounds in words and the way sounds can combine? What principles are common across languages? We will begin by discussing the internal structure of sounds and developing a precise formalism (the distinctive feature system) for representing this internal structure, drawing on familiar phonetic parameters of place, manner, and so on. The course then provides a thorough grounding in the the kinds of phonological phenomena commonly found in languages, with an emphasis on developing theories to explain them. Topics include distinctive feature theory, phonemic analysis, autosegmental phonology, and principles of syllabification and stress.
Phonology II
This course focuses on advanced topics in phonology. These include underspecification theory, the role of markedness constraints in driving phonology, and advanced topics in feature geometry, syllable theory, and stress theory. Students are introduced to recent advances in the field, including Optimality Theory. Readings include published scholarly articles. Throughout the course the emphasis is on theory construction and argumentation based on data.
Right. Basically you're learning about a bunch of different phonological phenomena -- syllables, assimilation, dissimilation, epenthesis, deletion, stress assignment, vowel harmony (oh man, so much vowel harmony) and so on. All the different processes languages have. And you learn to analyze them in a bunch of different theories -- first the older theories that involve writing rules to describe what's going on, then autosegmental phonology (which involves, um, diagrams), and the new-ish and popular Optimality Theory, which makes you come up with a list of constraints and rank them in the order that is important to the language.
The way you actually do this is through problem sets, because the only way to get good at linguistics is to do it enough that you start getting an idea of what sorts of things are likely to happen where. (This took me about a year.) Problem sets are usually assigned weekly (or daily, if you took the sadistic Syntax I class at my undergrad institution) and many of them start with the sentence "Consider the following data from (name of language and its family)."
What follows is a bunch of data. In phonology, these are typically words in the IPA and their glosses (translations); in syntax, these are sentences, with glosses at the word/morpheme level and the sentence level. If your instructor is merciful, the data will be arranged into groups with leading questions to help you develop and refine a theory about it. If they are mean, you get one big lump o' data. Your goal is to explain why the data is the way it is. For example, if you have a bunch of related words in Finnish with [t] in them and then suddenly one of them has an [s], your job is to explain why the [s] is there, and why the other words have [t]s instead. (This one's actually complicated.) Then you write it all up in your theory of choice and give examples showing how your theory works and why it's better than any alternatives. These things are usually only a few pages long, but it's the kind of writing where you have to do a bunch of heavy thinking first.
(I was going to upload one of my own, but I couldn't find any where I thought my answer was decent and would show up correctly in a .pdf. Google will find you some, I'm sure.)
In my undergrad program, I never really had exams -- my grades (not that I had them; long story) were almost entirely based on homework. I understand other programs may like in-class exams more.
So I imagine that as a TA, Uhura would be, you know, grading problem sets and geeking about Turkish vowel harmony or something.
What's it like being a linguistics TA?
Not that anyone has asked this, but just in case. Assignment as a TA varies based on department and courses -- at least here, if there's a need for a TA for a subfield course, usually people in that subfield who want a TA position are tapped first. For the general courses, mostly we get randomly assigned based on a bunch of complicated factors like "has TAed for it before," "should not TA; needs to have a chance to teach own Intro Ling course," and occasionally things like "has agreed to TA in exchange for first pick of class timeslots when teaching own course next semester."
Your responsibilities vary, but generally include (a) grading the homework and tests, (b) holding office hours and answering student questions and (c) being responsible for leading a smaller discussion section. (At my undergrad, the sections were usually optional and most of the time three of us showed up and the TA discussed random linguistics things when we didn't have any questions. Usually, as a TA in section, I ended up answering questions about the material and doing a lot of practice problem sets.) It varies as to whether you are responsible for (d), showing up to the main lecture. Basically you do everything the professor would do except teach the class, and sometimes you do that when the professor's off at a conference or something.
Generally TAs meet with the professor for an hour or so every week to discuss things like what the class should do next, what the next homework should be about, how the particular assignments should be graded, and so forth. Sometimes there are grading parties to get all the exams done. Those of you looking for places to set your S/U UST-fests might consider it.
What do we know about Uhura as a xenolinguist in AOS?
I'm going by the movie here. The novelization has additional details, but they're pretty much full of crap, in terms of technical accuracy.
Uhura is a xenolinguist, which, as we know from Kirk's pick-up lines, consists at least of phonology, syntax, and morphology. (This is good.) The official website lists her as a TA (or rather "Academy aide," but I assume that's the same thing) for Spock's Advanced Phonology course -- though why Spock is teaching that is beyond me -- and Advanced Acoustical Engineering. So clearly she's some kind of phonetician/phonologist, although I'm thinking "acoustics" here is probably also about sounds other than just speech sounds.
(It also says she's proficient in 83% of official Federation languages and regional dialects. Um. I mean, come on, what?)
It's clear that also she knows a lot of languages, because clearly translation is something called for. She knows three dialects of Romulan, and she knows enough Klingon to translate the message about the Klingon armada's destruction. (Incidentally, this is sort of against TOS canon: in Star Trek VI, Uhura is forced to pretend to be a Klingon and hold a conversation in Klingon, which she has a hard time doing even with the aid of dictionaries. On the other hand, she was kind of being put on the spot there, and presumably here she had time to translate the message.)
She's also clearly got to know whatever else it is communications officers have to know -- detecting anomalies in subspace, or whatever it was she told Spock she was good at in addition to the aural sensitivity. (And seriously, hearing things well is hard. My current department's phonetician says he doesn't think any of us should give transcription exercises to our students because he doesn't think *we* can do it right.) The line in the novelization makes up some nonsense about how she can produce clicks better than the MIT students at the "Oxford Linguistics Invitational." Um. Seriously, I only needed to be able to pronounce clicks for one class, ten years ago. It doesn't really matter if you can say the sounds as long as you know what they are.
What might linguistics be like in AOS?
Hmm. This is a little tricky for me to answer, mostly because I think they're drawing a lot of their inspiration for what linguists/communications officers do from Hoshi Sato on Enterprise, and I bailed on Enterprise a few episodes in because I was angry that the show's linguistics talk made no sense.
In the one K/S story I've written, I decided it would be hilarious to have Uhura mention the IPA... and call it the *Interplanetary* Phonetic Alphabet. Number of people who have found this funny: two.
The big difference between now and them is, of course, going to be the existence of the Universal Translator. Which basically means that machine translation will have gotten very, very, very good. (Although, given that they need Uhura to translate Klingon and Romulan, maybe AOS isn't doing as well as TOS on the translation front.)
So if the UT exists, presumably a lot of linguistics work would be focused on fieldwork -- going to other planets and talking to the people there and trying to figure out what their language is all about, for inclusion in the UT. (I'm assuming that it can't translate languages it's never heard before with no idea of the content, even though I think that contradicts TOS canon -- blah blah brainwave reading blah -- because, uh, that's not realistic. Besides, we might want to read written texts.)
If they don't have the UT yet -- and they might not have anything very good; the Romulans from the future may have conveniently pre-translated their speech, and the AOS Starfleet may have thrown more resources into building more awesome ships instead -- then they're really going to need people to work on figuring out what all the different species' languages are like. Because before you can have translators and train people as translators, you really need to understand how the languages work first.
I'm also thinking that in the future we'll probably know more about how brains work, meaning that psycholinguists won't have to say things like "we think maybe this negative spike in ERP activity at 400ms after stimulus represents something about meaning." Which might, you know, make this whole business easier. Maybe they will be able to read brainwaves. Because right now it's a lot of guessing as to what our brains are doing when we're processing language.
But really the most awesome thing they could do in AOS is really study alien languages. What ways will they be like human languages? How will they be different? Will they do things no human language does? Will they violate Greenberg's universals? Typology is sure going to be more fun -- and given probable anatomical differences and all, so is Uhura's phonetics/phonology knowledge.
(Suzette Haden Elgin, a linguist, wrote the Native Tongue trilogy of feminist SF, in which the way we learn to speak with aliens is the way we learn any language properly -- by being raised speaking it. So there's all this fostering going on. And then there's a species that is so alien that all the babies they have try to communicate with it end up going insane.)
I had more to say here, but I have forgotten it.
Where can I find out more?
Actually, Wikipedia's coverage of linguistics is generally pretty good. No, really. If you'd like a basic text, my favorite is O'Grady's Contemporary Linguistics
LINGUIST List is where linguists hang out on the internet. The part of their site that you will probably find most useful is Ask-A-Linguist, in which a panel of volunteer linguists diligently strive to answer your linguistics- and language-related questions.
The Linguistics Olympiad, modeled after the longstanding Russian competition, gives linguistics problems (requiring no knowledge of linguistics, but pretty much the same reasoning) to high school students. They are tricky and fun and give you just enough information needed to solve the problem. Sometimes we give these to our students. Once they even stumped me. It was embarrassing. (There are more puzzles here. The one that I got stuck on once was Orkhono-Yeniseyan. *facepalm*) So this might give you a better idea of what linguistics is like.
Or, y'know, if there's some kind of beta list, I'm happy to linguistics-check people's fanfiction. (No one took me up on this in SG1 fandom eight years ago, even after I ranted about how Daniel Jackson should never have been able to speak Egyptian. Actually, maybe that was why no one took me up on it. Looking back on it, that was a pretty good rant, considering that I hadn't taken Egyptian at the time.)
Right. So, uh, that's about it.