Joshua Whatmough (June 30, 1897 – April 25, 1964) was an English linguist, professor, and writer from Rochdale, Lancashire who served as the president of the Linguistics Society of America in 1951. He was also the chairman of the department of linguistics at Harvard University from 1926 to his retirement in 1963. He studied comparative philology and classics at the University of Manchester and the University of Cambridge.
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Joshua Whatmough in the context of North Picene language
North Picene, also known as North Picenian or Northern Picene, is a supposed ancient language that may have been spoken in part of central-eastern Italy; alternatively the evidence for the language may be a hoax, with the language never having existed. The evidence for the language consists of four inscriptions apparently dating from the 1st millennium BC, three of them no more than small broken fragments. It is written in a form of the Old Italic alphabet. While its texts are easily transliterated, none of them have been translated so far. It is not possible to determine whether it is related to any other known language. Despite the use by modern scholars of a similar name, it does not appear that North Picene is closely related to South Picene, and they may not be related at all. The total number of words in the inscriptions is about 60. It is not even certain that the inscriptions are all in one language.
The forerunner of the term North Picene was devised in 1933 by the linguist Joshua Whatmough, in Prae-Italic Dialects of Italy, a catalogue of texts in Italic languages. While neither Picene language could be read with any confidence at the time, Whatmough distinguished between six inscriptions in a central-east Italic language and all the rest southern. The northern later lost three and gained one. Before that work, all the inscriptions had been lumped together under a variety of names, such as "Sabellic".
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