After being immersed in a linguistics course I can say at least with some sense that I now understand why people rever Linguists to be heartless and cold hard boring individuals. Linguistics unlike most other studies lacks a view of human nature, human culture, and more importantly what's so cool about human language.
You can break the study of linguistics down into small parts each one serving to explain a certain part of a language, and to simplify is syntax analyze the semantics and understand just what exactly is being said, or so we think. There is nothing inherently wrong with this process, it makes sense, it is natural and necessary for understandings to exist. However, what the study of linguistics lacks is a commitment to human language.
Linguists of today transcribe many of the languages that are on the verge of death, attempting to save them, preserve their sounds perfectly and may convey cultural remnants of the dying language. A simple taste of the people. This is all well and good. However, there is a divide between the person who studies in depth a language, and a person who studies all language in general. The transcription process does not so much as empathize in the process of preserving the language, it simply catalogs it, and preserves it in another database where it is essentially forgotten.
Let's face it, how many endangered languages have you been exposed to from online catalogs? Why is it so difficult to access these languages that have been so hopelessly "saved"? The answer is a mix not for lack of trying, but the nature of the linguist that deliberately it seems catalogs the data at hand, then stores it away without any artful presentation of the data. UNESCO has of course pledged to make the clips available and viewable to the entire public, sadly the clips are disorganized, the languages are presented in clips, and no cultural overview is presented, no translation. I can scarecely imagine how language can be valued without the culture that was promised. Perhaps the online sample is unfair to judge from, but how else should the public obtain these records? Why has such a poor attempt at real preservation been made? I think linguists look at the cold hard facts, see data, sounds, semantics, and coldly ignore the rest.
I think the not very old and the new very well heard adage that has accused linguists of being boring individuals is not altogether incorrect. What are linguists preserving? We worry about the languages we are losing, but what of the cultures, the people? Unfortunately, language is mistakenly said to convey the entirety of culture, but a language is nothing without its people. I wonder if the preservationists are really doing enough to save these languages or only saving the parts that happen to serve their study.
