It strikes me that there's a lesson there for linguists. Often linguists study a language for a specific theoretical goal - looking at Malagasy primarily to see what VOS syntax is like, or Oneida primarily to learn how polysynthesis works, or Songhay primarily to see whether it's related to Nilo-Saharan or not. That's fair enough; no one can focus on everything at once. But we can miss some really interesting stuff by focusing on one aspect of the language to the exclusion of others. For example, when Laoust studied Siwi, he was interested almost exclusively in its Berber origins - and as a result, his generally excellent study somehow ignored the vowels e and o (which are found even in Berber words, but are not phonemic in the Moroccan Berber varieties he was more familiar with), and mistakenly attributed the Arabic elements of Siwi to the adjacent Bedouin dialects, when in fact they show some very distinctive non-Bedouin characteristics. This is something we all need to watch out for.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
When goals create blind spots
You're watching a ball game attentively. A person in a gorilla suit walks right through the middle, remaining visible for 5 seconds. Can you imagine not noticing the gorilla guy? Well, it turns out that nearly half of all people undergraduate volunteers don't, if they're busy trying to count passes - and the authors of that study cite 7 other experiments confirming the same principle.
It strikes me that there's a lesson there for linguists. Often linguists study a language for a specific theoretical goal - looking at Malagasy primarily to see what VOS syntax is like, or Oneida primarily to learn how polysynthesis works, or Songhay primarily to see whether it's related to Nilo-Saharan or not. That's fair enough; no one can focus on everything at once. But we can miss some really interesting stuff by focusing on one aspect of the language to the exclusion of others. For example, when Laoust studied Siwi, he was interested almost exclusively in its Berber origins - and as a result, his generally excellent study somehow ignored the vowels e and o (which are found even in Berber words, but are not phonemic in the Moroccan Berber varieties he was more familiar with), and mistakenly attributed the Arabic elements of Siwi to the adjacent Bedouin dialects, when in fact they show some very distinctive non-Bedouin characteristics. This is something we all need to watch out for.
It strikes me that there's a lesson there for linguists. Often linguists study a language for a specific theoretical goal - looking at Malagasy primarily to see what VOS syntax is like, or Oneida primarily to learn how polysynthesis works, or Songhay primarily to see whether it's related to Nilo-Saharan or not. That's fair enough; no one can focus on everything at once. But we can miss some really interesting stuff by focusing on one aspect of the language to the exclusion of others. For example, when Laoust studied Siwi, he was interested almost exclusively in its Berber origins - and as a result, his generally excellent study somehow ignored the vowels e and o (which are found even in Berber words, but are not phonemic in the Moroccan Berber varieties he was more familiar with), and mistakenly attributed the Arabic elements of Siwi to the adjacent Bedouin dialects, when in fact they show some very distinctive non-Bedouin characteristics. This is something we all need to watch out for.
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