Subject: on becoming a linguist

i too have a theory on why linguistics attracted many of us . as a field it ranges from the humanities to the hard sciences , with the majority of its subdisciplines falling into the general area of social sciences . i have spoken with many linguists who started their scholarly lives as scientists ( chem - istry , physics . . . ) and wanted something which seemed more like a humanities discipline ( often in the more european sense of ` sciences humaines ' , disciplines which deal with people ) , while many others ( including myself ) started in foreign languages and literatures and found we wanted something more scientific than literary analysis . i think the second-language learning component of it is important , as suggested in a posting i read today , but not always because of * difficulty * with learning a language ; but rather a desire to keep working with language in some form without doing literature . on a personal note , i can clearly remember my relief , as an undergraduate , to discover linguistics through a comparative romance course . it meant that majoring in french made sense even if sartre did n't ! margaret
