My name is Christopher Hammerly and I
study Linguistics and Psychology with
minors in French and Philosophy.
I'm interested in a lot of different
things because I think that's the best
way to study language, is to look at it from
a lot of different angles.
It can be difficult to explain
exactly what linguistics is to people,
because a lot of people just think it's
learning
a bunch of languages, but it's a lot
more than that. Really what you're doing
is like looking deep inside of
all languages and seeing what is kinda
behind them,
what makes them work. Sometimes its
grammar, sometimes it's the sounds that
people make,
sometimes it's the meanings behind the
words, but it's basically looking at
all those things in a scientific way. All
the technology
you see, like with Siri or any of
those kinda speech
programs, Google Translate, that you use
those are all programed by linguists,
because they know how language works and
they know how it can be put together and
how it can be interpreted.
The nice thing about linguistics is that you
don't have to learn the language, you
just have to learn
about the language, so basically you're
just gonna take a buncha data,
and look at it and analyze it. It's like
doing a puzzle,
you don't have to paint the whole picture,
you just have to put the pieces together.
The faculty is very approachable, they're young
so they kinda understand where you're
coming from.
They're grounded in a way that I think is
pretty unique.
The other thing that you can do as a
linguist is
help save dying languages. Ninety
percent
of the languages that are spoken today
are
in danger. Less than, you know, a couple
thousand speakers. And many of thse speakers
are,
you know, 60, 70, 80, years old, so as a
linguist, you can go to these communities
and help people
document their language and show people
that their language does matter.
The thing about languages is it's not isolated,
it
exists in the world, it exists in
communities and cultures.
It's easy to maybe forget about that
sometimes,
and not look at it in the context that
it exists in, but that's something that
linguistics tries to take into account. You
have to look at
the people and their relation to each
other.
There's so many things that we haven't
figured out yet, that it's going to take
a hundred years before we even start to
feel like we have a loose grapple on what
language is all about.
