Etymologies of 'linguistics' and 'language'

[René-Joseph Lavie]

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.com
33 (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