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crystals.stanford.edu>Alexis Manaster-Ramer writes: I do not really think that we should pay much attention to the rejection of Greenberg's classification of the languages of Papua and vicinity by people who do not themselves do comparative linguistics. And even people that do typically work on just one small family and so their judgement may not be relevant. The point isn't that the near-universal rejection of Greenberg's Indo-Pacific hypothesis in and of itself shows that it is wrong. The point is this: Greenberg and his fans want to use his past batting average as evidence that his methods and judgment are reliable and hence should be accepted in the American case too. They cite the African classification as having been successful. (In any case, as I have pointed out, it wasn't strikingly original and how successful it was is disputed.) But if they want to use as the criterion for success the acceptance of Greenberg's past attempts at classification, then Indo-Pacific must enter the picture, and judging by the SAME criteria as the African case, namely whether it is accepted by specialists, Indo-Pacific was a flop. In any case, it simply isn't true that the people who have rejected Greenberg's Indo-Pacific hypothesis don't do comparative linguistics. If Alexis will consult Foley's book, to which I referred, he will discover considerable discussion of the relationship of the non-Austronesian languages to each other along with Foley's tentative evidence for a relationship between the North-East Highlands family and Australian. Another critic of Indo-Pacific is Donald Laycock, who has devoted considerable effort not only to the description of Papuan languages but to issues of classification. Here's what he (Laycock 1976;57) has to say: To date, it can safely be said that there is no real evidence to link the NAN [Non-Austronesian - WJP] languages of New Guinea with any other linguistic group, though some slight indications of possibilities are discussed elsewhere in this volume (see 2.16.). In particular, Greenberg's `Indo-Pacific Hypothesis' (1971) which would interrelate `the bulk of non-Austronesian languages of Oceania from the Andaman Islands on the west in the Bay of Bengal to Tasmania in the Southeast' is not only far from proven, but also based on inadequate and insufficiently-analysed data (for example, comparisons are all too frequently made only of items within large groups of languages --- such as the Trans-New-Guinea Phylum --- that are already known to be related, so that there is little support for the wider relationships postulated.) Both Foley and Laycock are familiar with diverse languages of New Guinea, and both are also acquainted with Australian languages. The idea that they are narrow specialists whose comparative experience is limited to closely related languages doesn't fit the facts. But I would also ask why we should believe that people who haven't made a point of claiming to demonstrate remote relationships should be regarded as incompetant to evaluate such proposals? Surely anyone trained in the comparative method should be able to examine proposals of relationship. And surely it is those most familiar with the languages who are best able to judge whether the evidence adduced is correct. And doesn't M-R's proposed criterion for evaluators contain a dangerous bias, whereby only those convinced that they themselves have demonstrated distant relationships are able to judge others' proposals? We don't consider astrology valid because astrologers say it is. In the case of the Americas this argument, which Greenberg too has made, is all the more peculiar because the great Americanists are predominantly people with a wide acquaintance with American languages and broad knowledge of the comparative literature. Alexis may only have been acquainted with Uto-Aztecan until his most recent work, but leading Americanists, such as William Bright, Lyle Campbell, Wallace Chafe, Ives Goddard, Victor Golla, Mary Haas, Kenneth Hale, William Jacobsen, Terrence Kaufman, Dale Kinkade, Michael Krauss, Marianne Mithun, Patricia Shaw, and others are known for their broad knowledge. Greenberg's critics include such distinguished Americanists as Wallace Chafe, a specialist in Iroquoian and Caddoan (distantly, if at all, related), Ives Goddard, the dean of Algonquianists and a person of extremely broad knowledge of the languages of the Americas, and Lyle Campbell, who has not only done extensive comparative work but has personally done field work on Mayan, Xincan, Lencan, Uto-Aztecan, Mixe-Zoqean, Otomanguean, Jicaquean, Misumalpman, Chibchan, and Wakashan languages. Eric Hamp, another critic, is perhaps better known as an Indo-Europeanist, but has done substantial comparative work on American languages as well as field work on Quileute. People like these, I submit, with their broad knowledge of the languages of the Americas, their experience in doing solid historical linguistics, and their detailed knowledge of particular languages and families, are vastly better positioned than someone like Greenberg who has done little or no traditional comparative work and has no demonstrated knowledge of ANY American language. As Leonard Bloomfield is said to have remarked, "If you want to compare two languages, it helps to know one of them." Alexis writes: It does appear that Greenberg is right in claiming that historically much of the work on classifying the languages of the world proceeded in much the way that he has used. Sorry, but this is precisely one of the points that Lyle Campbell and I have disputed in the postings to which M-R is responding, and our BLS and Pittsburgh papers. It simply isn't true, and M-R doesn't advance the argument by repeating this unsubstantiated assertion. Greenberg hasn't been able to produce valid examples in support of this assertion that Indo-European was done using methods like his. There isn't a hint of Greenbergian superficial lexical comparison in most of the work. Where such methods were used, as by Sir William Jones and Franz Bopp, they made horrible errors, as did other practictioners of Greenbergian methods, such as Pliny Earle Chase and Paul Rivet, as pointed out in my previous posting. I could go into greater detail, but long-winded though I may be, I think that posting our entire BLS paper (not to mention its 150pp big brother) would be excessive. It is true that some valid work was done in this way, e.g. the Powell classification of North American languages, but the batting average of the technique is poor except when, as in the case of the Powell classification, the approach is used conservatively and the languages grouped together are closely related. I'd be interested in knowing what exactly Alexis is referring to as Dolgopolsky's improved method. Is this the stuff cryptically discussed in his 1964 _Voprosy Jazykoznanija_ paper? It is true that if all languages are related then showing that Greenberg's methods relate Finnish and Mayan doesn't show that the method is unreliable. It does, however, show that his methods do not discriminate between the remotest relationships and much more plausible ones. I agree with Alexis that his Tonkawa example provides a more direct test of Greenberg's subgrouping since Greenberg claims that Amerind and Na-Dene are separate branches of Proto-World. I note that _Language in the Americas_ contains no evidence whatever for Greenberg's proposed subgrouping of Amerind. For his highest-level groupings, like such as Southern Amerind, he gives no argument at all, but even for his 11 lower-level subgroups, for which he believes he has argued, there is no actual evidence. He merely lists equations that he asserts are restricted to these subgroups. This of course does not establish anything - to present a prima facie case for his subgrouping he would have to show that the languages he groups together show greater similarity to each other than to others, which he does not even attempt to do. So at best Greenberg has established that the "Amerind" languages are related to each other - his proposals about the subgrouping of Amerind and for that matter, that Amerind is a distinct branch of Proto-World, remain bald assertions. It is too bad that some participants in this debate apparently do not use email. Joe Greenberg apparently does use email but not much. If Merritt Ruhlen wants to I would be happy to set up an account for him. REFERENCES Laycock, Donald A. (1976) ``History of Papuan Linguistic Research,'' in Steven A. Wurm (ed.) New Guinea Area Languages and Language Study. Vol. 1: Papuan Languages and the New Guinea Linguistic Scene. Sydney: Department of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University. (= Pacific Linguistics Series C, no. 38).Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU>Concerning Greenberg and Mass comparison. I agree with Alexis Manaster-Ramer that if you work on just one small family, your judgement on Greenberg's method might not be relevant, and that comparing, say Finnish with Amerind does not prove the method does whatever you would like it to do. However, some Amerindianists have worked on a large number of families, and sure enough, like Greenberg, we see all kinds of uncanny resemblances. I've been fortunate to be able to do fieldwork on all three of Greenberg's families (Eskimo: Siberian Yupik; Na-Dene: Navajo, Sarcee, Apache; Amerind: lakota and Quechua) and so I might be in a better than average position as far as feelings (I prefer to say feelings rather than views) concerning mass comparison. There's obviously no way to disprove monogenesis, and many of us feel that all Native American languages might ultimately be relatable. The point is, has Greenberg proved that they are classifiable only in his way? Is the classification replicable by someone else who is completely indepnde? Do we accept the classification simply because no one else is going to be working on the same data as hard as Greenberg did? One finds a lot of similarities that cross-cut Greenberg's three-way classification, for example a suffix -ni in Eskimo, a stem ni in Navajo and Quechua, all meaning 'to say'. Is this Proto-World, Proto-Eskimo- Nadene-Amerind, or does it not count? Some grammtical correspondences are more interesting: for example both Lakota and Navajo have only one prefix thais of a VC shape, u(+nasal hook)k- in Lakota, and iid- iNavajo. They are not too close phonetically but the intersting thing is that they are the only prefixes with that shape and that they mean the same thing, i.e. 1st person dualy question is then: how do we evaluate this? How do we decide that this is/is not evidence for a Siouan/Atahbaskan subgrouping? It seem to be less likely to be due to chance than the famous 1st and 2nd person n-/m- business.Of cour, this is not the only similarity between Siouan and Athapaskan I've found, and I suppose the only reason why I found them is that no other people (since Mary Haas) have been looking in detail at Athapaskan and SiAgain, I'd appreciate comments on this. Willem J. de Reuse Department of Anthropology University of Arizona Tucson, AZ 857Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue