Being...

 Being a linguist o a philologist

Along my career I always had listened about the differences between linguistics and philology, and the conclusion that I had was “philology studies the language in itself focus in its rules and a good way to use, this takes in account the literature and the writing text along the time, instead of linguistics which studies the language its use in a specific context, it is more flexible with the rules and uses because the most important is the realization language.

Nowadays, I think so the linguistics and philologists are closer that I had ever imagined. We are interested in the language development; we are excited by the same thing “the words”, in a big conception. I am a classical philologist and, of course, I understand the classical languages, Latin and Greek, for this reason I can get the meaning of words through the etymology, it is a passion for me, I learn vocabulary in my native language and in foreign language.

I love to study the language in itself, its structure, its uses, its meaning, its history and I am every days interested in learning something new about the languages. Maybe it is the reason that I have to follow the Russian as a foreign language in my degree at the University of Colombia, where for my fortune, l could choice this language, it was not easy to understand because it has declinations, this is an analytic language, however I had an advantage, I was studying Latin and Greek and they have declinations too. I establish some meaning with the classical language and my nature language and then I can transfer them to learn Russian, It was an amazing adventure through languages.  

Despite my passion for this languages, after I finished my degree the language that help me to develop my professional way the English, which I studied as a free class at night in the university.   Since that  I go into the “angloworld”, but I have never left my essence as a classical philologist, for that reason I decided to continue with my English study and took a translation English-Spanish-English course, really I was amazing I can being a philologist whit a modern language “English”.  

In my own way with language I have been a detective, a historian and, why not, a poetry. During the time I was dedicated to classical languages, I had to research a lot for a “simple text”(like a little story in a determinate time) because its time, because its uses, because its speakers-writers or because its hearers-readers, and of course because its history, that it is impossible to separate them. In consequence I learned these languages; nowadays this is my first motivation to teach languages.

But I have too an otherwise like a linguist, I have worked closer to linguistics than philology, I have learned to understand the language in its realization, as a life thing which can change, transform and move along the time.  I remember the time when I was living in Sweden with my father’s family, my little sister, Erika, at that time she was 3 years old, and she started to speak, in her two nature languages, Spanish and Russian, her mom is Russian and my dad is Colombian, she used to said – Deisy ven! Titta to tam – this sentence is a mixture of three languages, Russian, Spanish and Swedish, I noticed this phenomena as a particular thing because just the people in the home could to understand her. She was using three different languages in the same sentence without a distinction to communicate a diary activity, the first step to be a “semilingual”. Now I start to be reflexive about the language along my own life, not a professional but a common person in this world.