Help, help, I'm being turned into a linguist!

Or rather, I'm turning myself into a linguist, of sorts anyway. Which not only has to do with someone in my vicinity learning Sanskrit, creating his own language and regaling me with tales about language and grammar, which is a exhilaratingly frustrating experience in it's own right as I'm lost one-third into those tales, if not sooner, but also with the fact that I have realized something. Knowing grammar by instinct isn't enough, at least not when one is proud to be a literature geek. (Hm. Study of languages = linguistics. Study of Literature = ? Have to look this up.) Literature, after all, is made up of words following certain rules, and if you don't know the rules, how can you describe what happens when an author breaks them?

So, like any inquisitive person, I went to the Uni library and got books. Introductions to linguistics, Indo-European, grammar of German and English, history of German and English language. And language change, something that's always fascinated me. Why is language changing? What are the factors? Even though I've been told that the "Why?" question here is not really applicable, I'm still curious. There has to be a reason why languages change, no?

I've belatedly realized the other day that what I am doing at the moment is doing what I should have done years ago. I am basically teaching myself what I should have learned in my first few semesters at university. I have always been curious about language, etymology and things like that, so why I haven't done this earlier is beyond me. Maybe it's because grammar used to horrify me, especially when I took Latin at school. But these days, I'm sitting at my desk, or in my favourite café, copying the important things out of linguistics books. In longhand, with a fountain pen, into bound notebooks. It takes time, but it's cheaper than photocopying it, and this way I'm actually reading them.

Who knows, maybe I'll even refresh my Latin, or re-learn French (something I took for two years at school, and which, like most others in that course, I took because there was a trip to Paris at the end of the two years), or take up a totally different language. Old English looks very fascinating, too. Maybe I should start learning Czech, as in "really learning", since it's a shame I can speak and understand it, but read and write only with difficulty.

A crash course in linguistics. I wonder how I will justify that in light of having to write a PhD about science fiction literature.