If someone is an expert in written (rather than spoken) language, can they still be called a "linguist"?

When I think of “linguistics”, I typically think of the study of spoken languages, particularly phonetics. Compared to “language”, which of course is used of writing systems, it carries to me a stronger association to the original literal meaning of “lingua” being “the tongue”.

Wikipedia’s article on linguistics speaks mainly of language concepts in the abstract: things that apply equally to written and spoken language. It has a small section comparing writing to speech, which says:

Most contemporary linguists work under the assumption that spoken (or signed) language is more fundamental than written language. […] Nonetheless, linguists agree that the study of written language can be worthwhile and valuable.

So consider a hypothetical person; let’s call him “Jim”. Jim can read and understand Ancient Greek texts, and he is an expert translator. Jim may not know the IPA, and he may not even be able to pronounce Ancient Greek words all that well, but he’s definitely the guy you call when you have a piece of written Ancient Greek that you need made readable by Americans.

Can Jim properly be called a “linguist”? Specifically, will other linguists scoff at the idea of a mere translator being called a “linguist”? Or does being a translator by definition make you a type of honest-to-goodness linguist?

Solution 1:

Linguists study linguistics, which is the generalized study of language as a phenomenon. Of course, in the course of studying linguistics, one has to study individual languages, but knowledge about individual languages is not the goal of linguistics; rather, the goal of linguistics is to learn about the phenomenon of language as a whole, using facts about specific languages to elucidate generalities about language and relations between languages.

Someone who only studies one language, say Ancient Greek, in depth, to the general exclusion of other languages, would be a scholar of Ancient Greek, but to be a linguist, the focus of your study is on something deeper or more general than the specifics of one particular language.

I don't want to imply, however, that someone who devotes their study most intensely to one language is not a linguist, just that being a linguist is about more than just learning a language.

Solution 2:

Jim is definitely a classicist because of his focus on Ancient Greece.

He might be called a philologist if he is mainly interested in the Greek language and its historical context, but doesn't care as much about language in general.

Finally, he could be called a linguist since he studies (a) language in a scholarly manner. Linguistics covers many diverse activities (philosophy, statistics, anthropology, computing, biology, neuroscience, history, ...) and can certainly accommodate Jim too.