Amateur here.
Got into linguistics from my philosophical studies which was my major at Northwestern. It all came home with Sausure's "A Course in General Linguistics". Around the Sixties, my era, Noam Chomsky was a big hit, so along with Mehr Baba, Bakunin, Gurdijieff, "Be Here Now(forgot the author),and a host of other stuff(during the Sixties, people read everything: including Stewart Brand's "Whole Earth Catalog), I had to cut my teeth on transformational grammar, which led to the Whorfian hypothesis(Benjamin Whorf) and later more formal linguistics work. Anyone familiar with twentieth century philosophy knows that language has become a pivotal aspect of philosophical inquiry(Austin, Searle, Wittgenstein, later Husserl, Ricoeur, Gadamer, Heidegger, Ryle, Strawson) and all those guys doing "ordinary language philosophy" or the dreaded logical positivists(Nagel, Carnap, that gang).
During the seventies I discovered an amazing book by Fredrick Bodmer titled the "Loom of Language" which really got me going. I had two years of Latin in high school and taught myself rudimentary Homeric Greek with a good friend who studied the "Gospel of John" and "Odysseus" in Greek. French, Spanish, Italian I learned to read but still have a hard time understanding it when it is spoken. Also, took two years of Russian in college with the intent of reading the original Lenin. German I find the hardest but recently I have come to understand that if I think in the "expected word order", for example, 'I you love' of the language I am studying I can get by instead of expecting the expected English order and then trying to translate it on the fly. All in all, I love languages. Most philosophers are very conversant with French and German which I wish I knew more of but you just have so much time. However, everyone of the linguistics people I have met were totally awesome, many honkering down with Icelandic, Gaelic, Twi, (I learned a little Swahilli when it was fashionable but I forgot it all), Hausa, and the incredibly difficult American Indian languages. There is a black intellectual, McWhorter, at U of Cal whose politics I have trouble with but who seems to have a good understanding of the nature of creole languages which seem fascinating.

One day I am really going to get my language act together, but it has been a hodge-podge of a little here, a little there. Since I've been out of school, I don't run into alot of people who like to talk about linguistics, much less language. As a "political progressive" I find the times today quite stultifying and intellectualism is kind of a "closet" affair.

Gilton