>>14405636Well, thanks for the honest take anon. Since the theoretical parts of the linguistics split into different schools of thought, I would bet the dogmaticism comes from seeking to prove their particular theory, or doing fieldwork within the framework of a certain theory.
Tbqh, I’m closer to a spergy type myself, and yes, linguistics does appeal to me over many other things, including hard sciences. I’ve always been an encyclopedic, unfocused person, I was great at quiz bowl in grade school. And yes, the fundamentals (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax) aren’t too demanding to learn by themselves, providing you have time to study. I’d wager the challenge lies in the massive dataset and corpus collection the linguist is given to analyze, as well as the intersection with other studies once you get into it (anthropology, archaeology, etc). “Mastering” it seems to lie in mastering knowledge of the subset you choose in a particular grammatical or semantic category, a specific language family, the like. Moving forward in the study would expose me to a very diverse field with a relatively shallow initial learning curve, and would force me to specialize in a much more involved discipline, something I’ve never really done in my life.
> Really condescending to English speakersYou mean to “normal” language speakers, because they don’t know other languages?
