Why I cannot shut up about linguistics
I do not have a good reason. I just like it, and I have made peace with being permanently somewhere on the wrong part of the learning curve
People ask why I keep bringing it up. Why, in the middle of a normal conversation, I need to mention that two words which sound like relatives are not related at all.
I do not have a satisfying answer. I like it. That is the whole thing.
I am not a linguist. I have no degree in it and I will never publish anything about it. I am a person who finds the subject delightful and who has gone through the standard stages of being an amateur, which I can describe precisely because I have lived in each of them.
The three stages, all of which I have occupied
First, pattern spotting with no knowledge whatsoever. Two words sound alike, so obviously they are connected, and obviously that tells us something deep about two peoples who met somewhere around the Caucasus. This stage produces a great many theories. All of them are wrong, and the confidence is enormous, because nothing is slowing it down.
Second, learning a little. Sound changes, borrowing, the comparative method, families and branches. This is the most dangerous stage. You now have vocabulary, so you can be wrong at a higher resolution, and you feel like you have the whole thing in hand. Peak stupidity, from the inside, feels exactly like competence.
Third, learning more and staying roughly where you were. Every answer opens three questions. Every neat rule has a list of exceptions longer than the rule. The confidence drains away and the interest does not.
I am in the third stage, permanently, and I have stopped expecting to graduate.
What actually sparks the joy
The good part, the part I will not stop talking about, is when a root turns out to have nothing to do with what I assumed.
My favourite kind is the chance resemblance. The English word earth, and the Semitic words that sound so close to it, Hebrew eretz, Arabic arḍ. Same meaning, similar shape, no relationship at all. The Germanic word comes down one family tree, the Semitic ones down a completely different tree, and the resemblance is a coincidence that has fooled a lot of people, including me.
There is a well known one in my own direction too: Persian bad and English bad mean the same thing, sound the same, and are not related. Nothing connects them. The universe simply allowed it.
That is the feeling I chase. A pattern you were sure about dissolves, and the real history underneath is stranger and better. Words that look foreign turn out to be ancient neighbours, and words that look like siblings turn out to be strangers who happen to dress alike.
It is the same pleasure I get from a bug that turns out to have a completely different cause than the symptom suggested. You were wrong in an interesting way, and now you know something.
The part that frustrates me
Here is where I become tedious at parties.
Language gets pulled into arguments it has nothing to do with. A grammatical feature becomes proof that a people are logical, or poetic, or backward, or oppressed, or superior. A vocabulary gap becomes a thesis about a culture’s soul. A borrowed word becomes a territorial claim.
Some of it is nationalism wearing academic clothes: my language is older, purer, closer to the original. Some of it is the opposite, a tidy modern story where grammar explains an entire society’s behaviour. There are papers claiming that how your language marks the future predicts how much you save, and they get shared far more widely than the criticism that follows them.
A language is a system that changes over time under pressures we can describe. Sounds shift in regular ways. Contact produces borrowing. Frequent forms stay irregular because frequency protects them. Those mechanisms do not care about borders, pride or politics, and they are the interesting part.
Why can we not look at it the way we look at mathematics? Observe the pattern, state the rule, hunt for the counterexample, enjoy being corrected.
I am not claiming language and society never touch. Of course they do. Words carry history, and who is allowed to speak which language is an entirely political question. But that is sociology, and it should be argued with evidence from sociology. Reaching into a grammar table to settle it is not analysis, it is decoration.
The strange thing is that the real history is almost always a better story. The actual path a word took across centuries, through conquests, trade routes and misunderstandings, beats any theory anybody invents to prove a point about their neighbours.
So, no, I will not stop
I will keep looking up etymologies at inappropriate moments. I will keep being delighted when something I believed for years turns out to be a coincidence. I will keep being the person who says “actually, those are unrelated” and immediately regrets the word actually.
It is pure amateur enthusiasm, it makes me no money, and it has never once been useful.
It is just good. And in a field where I will always be a beginner, being wrong costs nothing and finding out is the entire reward.