Linguistician

A linguistician is a person active in the field of Linguistics. However, many linguists/linguisticians dislike this term, and insist instead on the term linguist. As most of the the pages in Wikipedia on “linguistics” and related topics were written by linguists/linguisticians, those pages reflect the usage they prefer. However, this page addresses the problem of ambiguity associated with that usage, and so to avoid that ambiguity it uses the term “linguistician” when referring to a person engaged in the field of linguistics.

Terminology: the “linguistician” versus “linguist” controversy

Furthermore, they point out, the shorter term linguist is ambiguous: OED1 records it in use since the 16th century (citing Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona, no less, in 1591) meaning “a person skilled with languages, a ‘master of other tongues besides his own’”. It is indeed still in common use today with this original meaning; most current dictionaries list this meaning first, many defining the word linguist simply as “a person skilled in languages or linguistics”.

How do linguists/linguisticians try to avoid this ambiguity? Well, if one asks a linguist/linguistician today what term one should use for a person who can speak and write several languages, one is likely to be told “a Polyglot” (which itself proves that they recognize that not every linguistician is also a polyglot).

Of course, before about the middle of the nineteenth century, when linguistics was still called “Philology” (which term is nowadays given a narrower meaning), and well before the time of such scholars as Ferdinand de Saussure^{[:Linguistician}}#endnote_FdeS]}, the study of languages always involved actually learning several languages well, and then through this knowledge studying patterns and structures and so on; in those days, a linguist/linguistician was always a polyglot, and the word “linguist” applied to both.^{[:Linguistician}}#endnote_polyglots]} Things have changed. Today's linguists/linguisticians are not necessarily all polyglots because some topics in modern linguistics are so abstract that practitioners can busy themselves with syntactical algebras, computer models, and other specialisms, without needing to speak (fluently or at all) any language but their own.

Thus advocates of the term “linguistician” argue that use of the term “linguist” to mean “linguistician”, when ordinary people (supported by current dictionaries) think of it as meaning “polyglot”, is misleading; moreover, they say, that ambiguity lies at the core of the vocabulary of what is supposed to be a scientific subject.

(Linguists/linguisticians who dislike that name might argue that other sciences use everyday words with specialized meanings; but their opponents might reply that in such other cases there is usually not a well-established alternative term which specialists could use but refuse to for apparently arbitrary reasons.)

Therefore the next question that arises is: why do some linguists/linguisticians so dislike the term “linguistician” as applied to themselves? A cynic might suggest in answer that they all hope that other people will assume they are polyglots, and therefore amazingly accomplished; but this is surely unworthy. So, what is the real reason? Well, one indication of that was offered when Karl V. Teeter, then Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Harvard University, wrote on the subject to "LINGUIST List 5.1123" (Friday 14 Oct 1994):

I am repelled/repulsed by the term "linguistician", as were Einar Haugen and many others when it was first proposed in print years ago by Robert A. Hall -- Haugen pointed out at the time that the only terms of any currency in English with this suffix were beautician, mortician, and cosmetician

Others quickly pointed out (i) that the OED citation of use of “linguistician” was from before Hall was born, and (ii) that there are 40 or more other terms ending in -ician, the vast majority for highly respected occupations^{[:Linguistician}}#endnote_icians]}, such as Mathematician and Physician. (Contrariwise, beauticians and morticians might reasonably argue that such extreme dislike of words merely because of a word-ending shared with their professions is a clear case of outrageous intellectual snobbery.)

Both the above factual errors were put down by the elderly (and then about-to-retire) Teeter to his own bad memory, rather than to any incompetence at research on the two points of fact which he got wrong - both of which obviously come within the subject of linguistics: (i) the grammatical forms of words for occupations, and (ii) the history of the subject's own terminology.

Finally, it has been alleged that “linguistician” is "too much of a tongue-twister to become generally accepted." The obvious dismissal of this objection by advocates of “linguistician” would be that, if the rest of the English speaking world can manage several dozen such terms including rhetorician, academician, and so on, people who are supposedly experts in language ought to be able to manage linguistician. It is, after all, derived from linguistics and preserves the regularity seen in statistician (derived from statistics), and mathematician (derived from mathematics). To a linguist/linguistician who would quibble that a logician's speciality is logic (not logics), and a rhetorician's is rhetoric (not rhetorics), one of the opposing view could suggest they start a campaign to rename the subject linguistic; similarly, to anyone who objected that a physics specialist is a physicist and not a physician, an opponent might suggest that they start a campaign to rename the occupation linguisticist, but that might well be expected to prove even more of a tongue-twister.

Footnotes

1.   Ferdinand de Saussure, who laid the foundation for many developments in linguistics in the 20th century and has even been dubbed “the father of modern linguistics”, although Sir William Jones (philologist) has also been so dubbed, for example by Garland Hampton Cannon in his book The life and mind of Oriental Jones : Sir William Jones, the father of modern linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
2.  Such were men like Sir Richard Francis Burton, Dr James Murray and many notable polyglots. Clearly, this was how such study as theirs came to be called “linguistics”.
3.   The 41 occupation words ending -ician (apart from “linguistician” itself) are:

• 26 academic, medical, or other professional specialists: academician, acoustician, aesthetician, arithmetician, biometrician, clinician, cybernetician, diagnostician, dialectician, dietician, econometrician, geometrician, geriatrician, logician, mathematician, metaphysician, obstetrician, optician, paediatrician, phonetician, physician, rhetorician, semantician, semiotician, statistician
• 10 occupations that are not necessarily of academic or graduate / professional status: beautician, cosmetician, electrician, geopolitician, magician, mechanician, mortician, musician, politician, technician

• 5 other designations (several of which typically refer to academic interest but are not sctual specialisms): metrician, practician, patrician, rubrician, tactician, theoretician