Etymologies of 'linguistics' and 'language'

Rong Chen rchen at csusb.edu
Sat Oct 13 17:00:18 UTC 2012


There may be another approach: to argue that literature is only one type/part of language--and a very small part at that  (There may be more people who do not read literature than those who do even in the present world of ours.) One might even say that literature is NOT language, but an artistic creation using language as a medium.  

Rong Chen 

-----Original Message-----
From: funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu [mailto:funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu] On Behalf Of Mike Morgan
Sent: Saturday, October 13, 2012 9:44 AM
To: john; funknet at mailman.rice.edu
Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] Etymologies of 'linguistics' and 'language'

another approach (which has worked for many universities in the states when people were trying to get American Sign Language accepted as a foreign language... when of course it isn't "foreign" in the US)...
precedence...

check out a number of (prestigious) "Languages" departments and fing out those which in fact have a setup similar to the one you want, i.e.
with a Linguistics "track"

Can't use MY alma mater DEPT as an example as the department I got my MA and PhD was Slavic Languages AND Literatures (i.e. specifically stated that literature is separate form language!... Slavic Depts at Harvard, Yale, UCLA, etc are similarly named)... and the Germanic Dept is "Germanic STUDIES". (And East Asian is East Asian Languages and CULTURES"... and BTW English is JUST "Department of English"... no language OR literature... nor linguistics... but they in fact have both linguistics and literature))


A quick search (your colleagues can do a more detailed one to document the "evidence") turns up the following example of what you want/need as "evidence: a "Department of English Language" which has a CLEAR Linguistics focus in addition to literature:

* University of Glasgow http://www.gla.ac.uk/subjects/englishlanguage/
(a sampling of thesis produce can be accessed at http://theses.gla.ac.uk/view/faculties/englang.html







On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 9:50 PM, john <john at research.haifa.ac.il> wrote:
>
>
> 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
>
>



--
mwm || *U*C> || mike || माईक || мика || マイク (aka Dr Michael W Morgan) sign language linguist / linguistic typologist academic adviser, Nepal Sign Language Training and Research NDFN, Kathmandu, Nepal


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