Aurelie Herbelot (she/her)
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So just for clarification, #linguistics is the science of language. And like any other science, it builds models of its object of study by gathering observations, building theories and evaluating such theories. Depending on the strand of linguistics involved, models can be expressed in various ways, including formal logic and mathematical representations. /3
Aurelie Herbelot (she/her)
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Now, linguists rarely make the news. They don't get interviewed by the TV. They don't feature in novels. Hollywood villains are usually chemists, biologists or physicists, but not linguists. Because language doesn't kill, does it?

(Well, okay, there is the story of Edward II being allegedly executed as the result of an ambiguous Latin message to his gaolers. But it must have been a glitch and the story is only alleged.) /4
Aurelie Herbelot (she/her)
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Schools do not teach #linguistics. I got out of school knowing about the theory of relativity, genetic recombination and chemical structure. All I was ever taught about language is that there are lots of irregular verbs in French and you have to learn the conjugations by heart because it is important to speak proper.

Which could be seen as anti-linguistics at its peak. /5
Aurelie Herbelot (she/her)
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So now we are in the world of Large Language Models (note the 'Language' in there) and surprise, very few people are able to tell whether the machine is, in fact, generating language. Very few people even think to ask the question.

And it would be difficult to blame anybody because no one was ever told that language is a natural phenomenon with definitions, models and a whole scientific field behind it. /6