Didn't get in...

[zissou'smom]

For being old-fashioned, I guess. Of the ivory-tower things you can do, it's pretty high up on the list because it really has few practical applications outside of academia. Especially compared to, say, computational linguistics, which would be designing the voice-recognition software for your cell phone, designing those fancy crime-fighting programs where you can analyze the criminals voice pattern even if they've used some sort of thing to make it unrecognizable, etc (like in Scream), or compared to cognitive linguistics, which can help people with strokes learn how to speak again, study speech pathology, etc. Historical linguistics can't really do things like this.

 

[commonoddity042]

Originally Posted by Zissou'sMom

For being old-fashioned, I guess. Of the ivory-tower things you can do, it's pretty high up on the list because it really has few practical applications outside of academia. Especially compared to, say, computational linguistics, which would be designing the voice-recognition software for your cell phone, designing those fancy crime-fighting programs where you can analyze the criminals voice pattern even if they've used some sort of thing to make it unrecognizable, etc (like in Scream), or compared to cognitive linguistics, which can help people with strokes learn how to speak again, study speech pathology, etc. Historical linguistics can't really do things like this.

Ah, ok. I wonder sometimes when people in a field frown upon another part of it. The way I see it, they clearly liked at least the basic structure of it, and I can't help but wonder what specific thing causes the dislike.