How we (liguists) roll.

A parable in several, unlabeled acts.

A zoologist goes out into the field, maybe even a literal field, and finds a brand new species of rabbit. He captures that rabbit and brings it back to his university/zoo (they are often hard to tell apart, universities and zoos).

He then proceeds to skin the rabbit, gut it and put all of it's different inner bits into separate jars. He then sends the carcass, the pelt, and each organ to the respective fur/carcass/organ specialists. He does this in the hope that, some day soon when the results of each specialist's analyses come back, we will understand something about the rabbit, something that we wouldn't be able to understand from observing the living rabbit itself as well as everything that we could. (that last, difficult to comprehend sentence involves what linguists call grammatically questionable ELLIPSIS)

But the zoologist doesn't wait for the results. In fact, there's no one waiting for the results.

The gallbladder expert gets his sample and then analyzes the rabbit's gallbladder (do rabbits have gallbladders?). He publishes his results, which are then read by a small handful of gallbladder experts who use what he learned from the rabbit's gallbladder and apply it to other gallbladders. The heart expert does the same, as does the fur expert, etc. Once in a while, the stomach expert chats with the intestine expert and, together they learn something new about the digestive system of all the animals they've seen. A few people get excited, but they all soon go back to work since the toe-nail, eyeball, and ulna experts aren't quite sure what to make of that exciting new research. The spleen expert hasn't even heard of it.

In the meantime, the zoologist goes back out to the field and gets a mouse and repeats the process.

Certainly, to some extent, real world biology works this way, or at least it does in my twisted mind. But the critical difference is that zoologists exist not to feed anatomical biologists' grisly need for carcasses (although it would be fun to picture Dr. Frankenstein's Igor as a zoologist). There are several scientists in the field of biology who study whole, living rabbits: their diets, environments, sexual habits (perverts), etc.

The problem in linguistics is that no linguists are studying the sexual habits of the Ob-Ugric language family. And what I mean by that is, as hard as it might seem, more linguists need to attempt to make a career out of designing clever ways to put all that shit together, or fuckin' stop tearing up rabbits.

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