WHISC closes shop

WHISC ends for the Summer with this issue. We’ll return at the end of August, when things begin to ramp up for the Fall.

Wendell Kimper in Sound Workshop on Friday

Wendell Kimper will give a practice talk for his AMP talk this week in Sound Workshop, which this week meets at 1:15 Friday, Oct. 2.

WHISC returns

Classes start this week, and with them so does WHISC. As in previous years, WHISC posts news about the goings-on in the Linguistics department at UMass. The posts usually appear on Sundays. If you have an item that you would like to see in WHISC, send it to umass.whisc@gmail.com by the Friday preceding the Sunday you’d like to see it posted. (The staff at WHISC are slow and long in the tooth. They will appreciate a bit of lead time.)

Welcome back!

WHISC goes on holiday

This is the last WHISC post for the 2014-15 year. Look for the next post in the third week of August.

Trivia Answer

On March 1, WHISC posted the following trivia question, sent in by Angelika Kratzer:

Who wrote the following passage and when was it written?

Language, as I remarked earlier, is like seeing and hearing in that it can’t be taught or learned. Who has ever seen anybody teach language to a child? Some of you may have experienced how hopeless it is to teach language to children, as has been tried occasionally. I am sure that anybody who has ever had the opportunity to observe a child between the age of two and four was surprised about the sudden use of a word or a word form. We rarely know where the child got it from. The child grabbed it on some occasion or other; and grabbing means creating.  – We thus shouldn’t talk about learning of language by children. If there isn’t any teaching, there isn’t any learning either. What we do with children to lead them towards language is exactly what a gardener does with a seed from which he wants to produce a plant: we provide them with the necessary conditions for growth, namely human society. The gardener doesn’t truly make plants grow. Likewise, we do not teach children how to speak. A flower grows following the laws of nature. In the same way, language is generated in the consciousness of a child following the laws of the mind.

The answer is:

Heymann Steinthal: Abriss der Sprachwissenschaft (‘Fundamentals of Linguistics’), 1871.  

https://archive.org/details/abrissdersprach00mistgoog

 

Here is the German:

Von der Sprache ist schon bemerkt, dass sie so wenig gelehrt und gelernt werden kann, wie Sehen und Hören. Wer hat wohl je bemerkt, dass man Kinder sprechen gelehrt hätte? Vielleicht aber hat Mancher schon beachtet, wie vergeblich das Bemühen ist, das man wohl zuweilen anstellt, das Kind zu lehren. Mit Gewissheit aber setze ich voraus, dass Jeder, wer Gelegenheit gehabt hat, ein Kind vom zweiten bis zum vierten Lebensjahre zu beobachten, oft genug darüber erstaunt war, wie urplötzlich das Kind ein Wort oder eine Wortform gebraucht hat. Selten weiss man, woher das Kind das hat. Es hat es ergriffen bei irgend einer Gelegenheit; und ergreifen heisst erzeugen. — Man sollte also gar nicht vom Lernen der Sprache bei Kindern reden. Denn wo keine Lehre, da ist kein Lernen. Nur was der Gärtner mit Samen tut, aus dem er Pflanzen ziehen will, nur das tun wir mit unsern Kindern, um sie zur Sprache zu bringen: wir bringen sie in die nötigen Bedingungen geistigen Wachstums, nämlich in die menschliche Gesellschaft. Aber so wenig der Gärtner wachsen macht, so wenig machen, lehren wir das Kind sprechen; nach dem Gesetze, dort der Natur, hier des Geistes, entsteht dort die Blume, hier die Sprache im Bewusstsein des Kindes.

Trivial WHISC

In recognition of the high levels of scholarship held by the members of the UMass linguistics community, as well as the recognized prowess in games of trivia that some have earned, WHISC introduces a linguistic trivia question.

The Question:

Who wrote the following passage and when was it written?

Language, as I remarked earlier, is like seeing and hearing in that it can’t be taught or learned. Who has ever seen anybody teach language to a child? Some of you may have experienced how hopeless it is to teach language to children, as has been tried occasionally. I am sure that anybody who has ever had the opportunity to observe a child between the age of two and four was surprised about the sudden use of a word or a word form. We rarely know where the child got it from. The child grabbed it on some occasion or other; and grabbing means creating.  – We thus shouldn’t talk about learning of language by children. If there isn’t any teaching, there isn’t any learning either. What we do with children to lead them towards language is exactly what a gardener does with a seed from which he wants to produce a plant: we provide them with the necessary conditions for growth, namely human society. The gardener doesn’t truly make plants grow. Likewise, we do not teach children how to speak. A flower grows following the laws of nature. In the same way, language is generated in the consciousness of a child following the laws of the mind.

Send your responses to WHISC!

WHISC

This will be the last WHISC of the year, and it’s dominated by sad news. The UMass linguistics community lost two of its members last week: Emmon Bach and Pius Tamanji. WHISC will return with the Spring semester at the end of January.

WHISC

The department newsletter is named after the department’s former home: South College. Perhaps WHISC has become enough name-like to no longer hit our readers’ ears as “What’s Happening in South College,” but to the extent that it does, its suitability for our masthead has waned. 

We seek a new name. Our hardworking reporters are hired for their lack of imagination, and WHISC’s office drones are sadly lacking in this virtue as well. Months of in-house brainstorming have yielded only “This Week in Preview” and “This Week In Local Linguistics,” neither sufficiently inventive. We therefore turn to our readers for help.

Please send us your suggestions. We are especially desirous of short, euphonious names. It must be able to be rendered in the Roman alphabet. We will award a prize to the best entry.

Send your suggestions to Kyle Johnson (kbj@linguist.umass.edu) by October 10.

WHISC goes on Holiday II

It broke 80 degrees Fahrenheit this weekend in the WHISC offices, signaling the official beginning of the summer holiday. WHISC will return at the end of August.

WHISC's holiday postponed

WHISC mistook last week’s warm snap for summer. We have returned to wait for proper beach weather.

WHISC goes to the beach

This will be the last posting of WHISC for the season. We’ll return, tanned and thin, in the Fall.

WHISC whisks

away to vacationland.

WHISC goes on holiday

WHISC has discovered summer, and will be doing something about it. See you in the Fall!

WHISC returns

The WHISC staff have returned from the beach today, hungry for news. Please let us know if we have missed one of your newsworthy summer activities by sending a description of it to umass.whisc@gmail.com.

WHISC janitor takes over

With the WHISC staff prematurely on holiday, the duty of publishing this, the last issue of the 2010-11 academic year, has fallen to the WHISC janitor. You may notice a slight dip in production values.

WHISC goes to the beach

With this issue of WHISC, the 2010-2011 volume officially closes. Our hardworking staff is already lathering on the sunscreen and blowing up the beach toys.

WHISC returns in September.

A New WHISC!

WHISC has found a new home, with a new look and feel. The tired old WHISC can still be found at http://web.linguist.umass.edu/~whisc/. Go there for all the tired, old, posts.

Why has WHISC moved?

Because the hardworking (and other) staff of WHISC have decided that WHISC's former blogging software -- Moveable Type -- was just too hip.

Also Moveable Type's manual exceeded the legendary attention span of the WHISC staff member charged with reading it.

We are now "powered" by Blogger.