Why is it that Linguists cannot speak multiple languages?

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This is a spinoff from a post that I made in the "Microsoft not doing enough to encourge females?" thread. My post made me think of this, but I did not want to take the thread off topic.

 

I recall speaking to a girl who was majoring in Linguistics and upon learning her major, I asked her what languages could she speak. She immediately used some sort of body language that I could not understand, but I believe the general jist of it was "you complete moron, that is not what a linguist does" and she proceeded to say something along those lines.

 

There is a maxim that says "A good programmer can write code in any language." That might be "A good programmer can write Fortran in any language," but I am not from that generation so I am not sure what is correct. Anyway, I would expect that by extension, a good Computer Scientist could write code in any language and since a Linguist does for human languages what a computer scientist does for computer languages, also by extension, I would expect a good Linguist to do the same thing for human languages.

 

There are two cases here. One is that the girl to whom I spoke is not a good Linguist, which would answer my question and there would be no point to this thread. The other is that she is a good Linguist. I do not understand why a good Linguist would not be able to speak/write in multiple languages.

 

I am not an assembly programmer by any means, but the other day, I had some disassembly from Visual Studio that I wanted to optimize. It was produced under debug mode and the "optimized" version I made was inferior to what Visual Studio produced under release mode, although it could have been made better with the appropriate modifications, as I had used 2 registers when I needed to use 4 and Visual Studio used the full 4. I had not realized that you could not use constants as operands in x87 assembly, which is something I was still trying to find a way to do when I saw what Visual Studio had done. Anyway, I downloaded a pdf of Intel IA-32 Architecture Software Developer's Manual and I was able to produce better optimized assembly than what Visual Studio produced in debug mode. I even learned that simply rearranging parts of a equation enabled Visual Studio to generate better optimized assembly in debug mode. Even though I am not an assembly programmer, I was able to write some assembly language because I am a computer science student.

 

So, operating under the assumption that this girl to whom I spoke is a good Linguist, why it is that linguists, who study human languages, cannot (or more appropriately, do not) speak multiple languages, despite the fact that Computer Scientists, who study computers, can write code in multiple languages?

 

 

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