Joshua Whatmough

Joshua Whatmough (born June 30, 1897 in Rochdale , † April 25, 1964 in Winchester, Massachusetts ) was an American linguist .

Life

Joshua Whatmough was from England. He studied Classical Philology at the University of Manchester ( BA 1916), then took part in the First World War and then completed his Graduate Studies , which he completed in 1921 with a Masters in Manchester and a Bachelor in Cambridge ( Emmanuel College ). He first worked as a lecturer in Classics at the University College of North Wales . From 1925 to 1926 he held the professorship of Latin studies at Cairo University for a short time . In 1926 he moved to the United States, where he spent the rest of his life. He was hired as Professor of Comparative Philology at Harvard University and at the same time appointed chairman of the department of the same name, which was transferred to the Department of Linguistics in 1951 .

Whatmough enjoyed national recognition as a linguist. Visiting professorships took him to the University of Chicago ( Splendid Lecturer 1930, Visiting Professor 1948), Stanford University ( Collitz Professor 1949), the University of California, Berkeley ( Sather Professor 1954/1955) and the Lowell Institute (1957). In 1928 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1951 he was President of the Linguistic Society of America and in 1961 President of the Ninth International Congress of Linguists.

Whatmough's approach to linguistics was heavily influenced by philology. He promoted Indo-European studies through extensive dialect studies of Celtic and Italian varieties. From his findings he also constructed a general linguistics that did not prevail. He largely ignored his colleague at Harvard University, the semiotic Roman Ossipowitsch Jakobson , and did not recommend him to his students.

His students include Murray Fowler , Eric P. Hamp , Jaan Puhvel , Ernst Pulgram (1915-2005) and Calvert Watkins .

Fonts (selection)

• Scholia in Isidori Etymologias Vallicelliana . Paris 1926
• Liber glossary . Paris 1926
• with Robert Seymour Conway and Sarah E. Johnson : Prae-Italic Dialects of Italy . Three volumes, Cambridge / London 1933. Reprint, Hildesheim 1968
• The Foundations of Roman Italy . London 1937. Reprinted New York 1971
• Poetic, Scientific, and Other Forms of Discourse: A New Approach to Greek and Latin in Literature . Berkeley / Los Angeles 1956 ( Sather Classical Lectures 29)
• Language: A Modern Synthesis . New York 1957
• with Christine Mohrmann and Alf Sommerfelt : Trends in European and American Linguistics 1930–1960 . Utrecht 1961
• Grammar of Dialects of Ancient Gaul . Ann Arbor 1963
• Dialects of Ancient Gaul: Prolegomena and Records of the Dialects . Cambridge 1970

literature

• William F. Wyatt, Jr .: Whatmough, Joshua . In: Ward W. Briggs (ed.), Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists , Westport, CT / London: Greenwood Press 1994, ISBN 978-0-313-24560-2 , pp. 688-691

Web links

• Entry on Joshua Whatmough in the Database of Classical Scholars (English)
• Literature by and about Joshua Whatmough in the catalog of the German National Library