The Best Thing I Ever Learned in My Linguistics Class

I arrived fifteen minutes late to my Linguistics 230 class this morning. I wish it had been thirty. We were discussing morphemes, phonemes, affixes and a host of other mind-numbing dialectal details. Needless to say, after approximately twenty seconds of this I was incurably bored.

Out of my backpack I pulled a book—Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. In 2001 it won a few awards and garnered some popular attention, but has since slipped down the ranks of bestsellerdom to make room for the literary masterpieces of Stephenie Meyer (joke). I made a half-hearted attempt to conceal my reading of this book under my desk, though had my professor noticed, I wouldn’t have cared much.

Yann Martel recalls the true life experiences of a man named Piscine (Pi) Molitor Patel (as recounted to the author by Pi himself). Pi grew up a God-loving boy in Pondicherry, India. By the time he was sixteen, he was a practicing Hindu, Christian and Muslim. At that age, his father, a zookeeper, decided to move the family to Canada (due to political turmoil going on in India at the time). Their ship departs India on a beautiful summer day, brimming with the hope and anxiety of new beginnings. It sinks hours later. Pi then must fend for himself on a small lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean—with a 450 pound Bengal tiger as his crewmate.

Morphemes. Breaking down words in to their smallest constituent parts. Grand+mother. Holi+day.

The sheer beauty of this novel lies not with the fact that it’s an incredible true story. Rather, it is to be found in Pi’s journey of faith. Hinduism, Christianity and Islam are seemingly discordant religions to most, but Pi finds peace and harmony in each one of them. Yann Martel illustrates this process with poignant eloquence.

Phonemes. Breaking down words into their smallest constituent sounds. M of mat. B of bat.

“My Arabic was never very good, but I loved its sound. The guttural eruptions and long flowing vowels rolled just beneath my comprehension like a beautiful brook. I gazed into this brook for long spells of time. It was not wide, just as one man’s voice, but it was as deep as the universe.”

Affixes. A word element, such as a prefix or suffix, that can only occur attached to a base, stem, or root.

“I can well imagine an atheist’s last words: 'White, white! L-L-L-Love! My God!'—and the deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the agnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying 'Possibly, a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain,' and, to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story.”

I learned more about linguistics from the ten pages I read this morning that I have during the dozens of hours I've sat through lecture.

If you truly want to learn anything at all, get out of the classroom and immerse yourself in great literature. Don’t miss the better story.