Etymologies of 'linguistics' and 'language'

[john]

It isn't sensible, but it might be an argument that the literature
people will listen to. They are obsessed with the idea that this is a
'language' department and that this makes it inherently and eternally
different from a 'linguistics' department, even though they don't know
what linguistics is. We (the linguists) want a linguistics program, and
the present situation is so completely unacceptable that we're setting
aside more specific questions. Many of the students (particularly the
Arabs, who are the majority of the students) really want linguistics,
but the literature people don't understand and don't care. The
university administration is saying that this is a department-internal
matter, so they won't get involved, and we always get outvoted when we
try to push any kind of agenda inside the department. 

John 

On
13.10.2012 17:59, René-Joseph Lavie wrote: 

> A few sparse remarks,
just in case they help.
> 
> In French we have two words where English
has 'language' only':
> 'langage' is language in general (LE langage)
>
'langue' is ONE particular language, e.g. Yaqui, Hungarian
> 
> It is
not sensible to base on etymology the setup of scholar 
> departments.
>

> What sort of things do you want to teach / foster research about?
>
Chaucer's theatre.
> How in time the 2nd pers. plural English 'you' came
to be used to 
> denote the allocutor (in the singular).
> The variety
of the pronoun systems across languages today?
> The subordination
devices that are to be observed in Papuan languages.
> The question of
linguistic infinite productivity.
> Language acquisition
> Build up
artifacts that behave like speakers with moderate computation 
>
demand.
> Build up artifacts that behave like speakers in a cognitively
plausible 
> way. Etc.
> The naming of the department(s) / section(s)
takes places once this is 
> settled.
> 
> Who provides you with money?
What do they say they want? What are their 
> real needs? What are their
organisational constraints? What are their 
> operational constraints?
What do your students want?
> 
> -- 
> René-Joseph Lavie
> MoDyCo
(Université Paris Ouest Nanterre la Défense et CNRS)
> rjl at ehop.com
>
http://rjl.ehop.com33 (0)9 8065 6722 ---- 33 (0)6 0818 6973
> 
> Le
2012-10-13 12:42, john a écrit :
> 
>> Dear Funknet Colleagues, We
(linguists at the University of Haifa) are in the midst of a truly inane
confrontation with the literature specialists in our department (there
are 5 of us and 6/7 of them). We are attempting to establish a
linguistics stream with a specific curriculum, organizational autonomy,
etc. (parallel to the literature stream which already exists in the
department) and they are rejecting this on the reasoning that we are a
'language' department, not a 'linguistics' department. They don't seem
to recognize the absurdity of this argument, and because there are more
of them than us, it seems that we need to argue with them on their
level. So what is the etymology of these words? After a little research
on the internet, it looks to me like they both came into English through
French, ultimately from Latin 'lingua', but 'language' was the regular
historical development whereas 'linguistic' was a later Latinization
which was adopted by those developing the scientific study of language,
because Latinate words sound more scientific. Is this right, and could
any of you suggest references to this of the type that would impress
literature specialists? Thanks, John