I was first introduced to ‘Linguistics’ when I started to study French as a 7th grader. The rules of the language at the time felt arbitrary to me. STEM is relatively straightforward; you apply logic and reason and have a definitive answer. That wasn’t the case for the French language. I started to wonder what the science behind the construction of these languages is. My search with an old friend, google, introduced me to Linguistics. So I realized there was indeed science behind the structure of languages and a whole field named Linguistics, which encompasses the study of many aspects of human language, including sounds (phonetics, phonology), words (morphology), sentences (syntax), meaning (semantics) and pragmatics (implied meaning).
As I delved into Linguistics more through my Summer course as a rising Junior at the ‘Summer Linguistics Institute for Youth Scholars’ at Ohio State University, I learned that knowledge of Linguistics could help us improve communication between people, enable translation between languages, and treat speech disorders.
Understanding Linguistics enables speech-language pathologists (SLPs) to understand the cognitive processes involved in understanding and using the language. With this knowledge, they develop treatment approaches for speech disorders. Pragmatic Linguistics further enables understanding of the context, interpreting non-verbal cues, following conversational rules, and inferring implied meaning, which are all essential components of Pragmatic Linguistics.
Linguistics makes translation from one language to another possible by analyzing and interpreting the structure of language, considering cultural nuances and context to convey accurate meaning, and making sure that the original message is preserved when converting text from one language to another.
Since the rules of Linguistics could rather be well reasoned to understand a language, I was now ready to explore how to teach machines to apply these rules. Once this is done, we should be able to translate one language to another using computers, detect speech disorders, understand nonverbal cues, simplify the language for better understanding, and much more at a large scale. My quest introduced me to ‘Computational Linguistics,’ a field that combines Linguistics and Computer Science. More on the subject in my next blog!