Jack Wooten IV

Mr. Moorer
ENglish 1113
7 November 2022

Critical thinking soft skills in Linguistics

When dealing with the vast and rich field of linguistics, there are many things to consider
such as: specific position, which language(s) you want to deal with, and how fluent you are in
said language(s). But in order to be proficient in the field of linguistics, or most of any field for
that matter, you need to have a range of soft skills; skills that are easy to acquire and work
across the board. Among the many soft skills which are required for linguistics, one of the most
important categories is critical thinking. This soft skill is vital in many ways because when you
are proficient in critical thinking, information can be determined accurately with given material
and evidence of a particular subject that is either undetermined or heavily debated.
But how can we properly apply critical thinking when it comes to languages, ancient or
modern? Well one way is to apply this soft skill in a manner that can determine the most
accurate pronunciation of a language. One might ask why critical thinking would be important for
pronunciation? It is important because pronunciation is the foundation of any language in history
or modern times. It is especially important for ancient and or dead languages because all that
would remain of it is some form of writing like literature or letters and whatnot, as well as any
modern descendants that exist. And if any modern forms of it exist, we then have to see how
much it was influenced by other languages, sister or foreign.
To put this into perspective with a real language, My expertise will someday lie in the
Germanic languages as well as Semitic languages, so I will demonstrate with ones such as Old
Norse to Scandinavian and other Germanic languages such as our own, English. And I will also
demonstrate with ancient forms of Semitic languages such as Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic to
their sister, Arabic.
When applying critical thinking to Old Norse in comparison with its modern daughter
languages such as Icelandic or Norwegian, or even its eventual sister Old English, how are we
able to know pronunciation, and how did experts determine pronunciation? Careful examination
of documents, and cross examination of modern scandinavian languages, Particularly Modern
Icelandic. Icelandic was eyed because most of the Old Norse literature was composed in the
Old Icelandic dialect which is commonly called “Textbook Old Norse”. There were a few other
dialects such as Old Swedish and Danish which are part of the East branch of North Germanic
languages, as opposed to Icelandic and Norwegian which are the West branch.
As for critical thinking of the pronunciation of Semitic languages such as Biblical Hebrew,
its modern form unfortunately does not preserve much of its original phonology. We can
determine this by examining its sister languages Aramaic and Arabic. And of these, only Arabic
truly keeps to its ancient phonology in the form of Standard or Fusha arabic. But what about
Grammar? Grammar is something that is very generalized among languages and its sister
variants. Perhaps the biggest range of contrast is in the form of nouns. Arabic in its standard
form declines nouns by use of endings such as nominative -un, genitive -in, and accusative -an
in singular forms. Hebrew is theorized to have originally done this as well, but the only evidence
of this is the archaic directional ending -ah.
These may all be very scattered examples, but these are all examples nonetheless
where critical thinking is a very important soft skill to have.