Sometimes I think it is useless. I have not really found what I want to do for the rest of my life. It is all a great coincidence that I study linguistics and I am going to hate this sooner or later. People around me seem to think I am perfect for this just because I do it well but I think I could do just as well in many other fields of study - the real question is what I want to do. I envy people who know, who are 100% percent sure this and only this is their passion and they could not be doing anything else. It is a perfect situation unless.... you cannot do the thing, for some reason.
One of my classes this semester is all about saving endangered languages. It seems that is Daniel's, our professor's, mission in life - to save languages that are on the verge of extinction, or maybe at least manage to record and analyze some of them before their native speakers all die. This is a meritorious enterprise. We are saving languages, we are saving human heritage, we are adding another data set to the great big bank of languages so that other linguists can finally figure out the intricacies of mysterious Universal Grammar. Something that makes us human. Something that we all have, no matter what, where, how,and when....
This is what makes linguistics such a tedious field. I labor at figuring out how person markings work in some never before documented language so that one day somebody who has a talent for seeing the big picture gets a Nobel prize for putting this puzzle together. I will suffer through this for the greatest good, for the sake of humanity, hoping that it will make a difference one day that we know exactly how to answer the famous Plato's problem. But one day I will be doing only what I will find interesting, exciting, and insightful (I hope). I just have to find it. I am thinking ethnosemantics in multilingual societies. Sounds interesting enough. No time for that now, though. Have to decide if my endangered language has cases...
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