Linguistics Dept. Head Whatmough to Retire

Joshua Whatmough, professor of Comparative Philology and chairman of the Department of Linguistics, will retire at the end of this year.

Whatmough, who is 65, has been head of the Department since it was created in 1951. A firm believer in rigorous, "scientific" linguistics, he built up the Department from its predecessor, the loosely organized department of Comparative Philology.

Under his direction, and particularly with the change in name ten years ago, the emphasis in the Department became more descriptive, methodological, and scientific. Whatmough has tried to analyze the statistical nature of language, and has applied such concepts as information theory and probability theory to language as a system of communication. His works include Language and Poetic, Scientific, and Other Forms of Discourse, which contains elaborate graphs and charts.

He has always been suspicious of the "metaphysics" of language and "meta-linguistic" problems such as how much language conditions thought and influence behaviour. Whatmough has instead worked with the actual substance of language as it appears in printed text or in a recording of someone speaking.

The retiring scholar, who shaped the Linguistics Department almost single-handedly, came to Harvard in 1926 after holding a professorship of Latin the Egyptian University in Cairo.

Last year Whatmough was president of the Ninth International Congress of Linguistics. He has contributed to numerous publications, including the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

A colorful lecturer, Whatmough speaks precisely and dresses nattily. He often spends at least half of his lectures in Linguistics 100 relating his ideas on life and the world.

At the present time, about 25 to 30 students graduate each year with degrees in Linguistics combined with some other subject. An increase in the number of concentrators, and a furthering of joint work with the Departments of Psychology and Social Relations, are among the immediate goals of the Linguistics faculty.