LINGUIST List 5.1404

Wed 07 Dec 1994

Disc: Comparative method in linguistics

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1. benji wald, (COPY) Kar/Jie
2. Karl Teeter, Re: 5.1368 Varia: Comparative Linguistics, Thanks

I was originally going to send the message below simply to Leo Conolly
with respect to his question about Karamojong, Jie and can we trust
Greenberg's classification. As I was writing it, I realised that it
might be related to the ongoing and interminable discussion about methods
in historical linguistics -- but mainly a historical perspective on
Greenberg's contributions to African linguistics, which have become
tainted to the less well informed because of his debacle with Amerind
and various other schemes. In fact, I think the following, written in
 my inimitable (and nobody should want to) style, should invite further
comment from Africanists AND Amerind scholars , and raise
questions about why his Amerind theory is likely to be less
successful than his 4-African-families theory. In a gist, the parallelism
between the G Africanist and Amerind controversies is that the more
particular experts knew about their languages the more they resisted
and resented his intrusion, because of G's apparently cavalier attitude
to expertise (hmm, and dirty data).
 The difference is that there are large sociopolitical
differences between the dominant theories and attitudes that G attacked
with his African hypotheses and with his Amerind hypothesis. When I
say "sociopolitical" I don't mean just office politics, but ways in which
the prevailing hypotheses of the time fit into the larger society. Note
in that context my reference to "Hamitic" below, and its sociopolitical
implications with respect to the Egyptians -- in some quarters their
"race" is still being argued, and will probably continue to be until
people understand what "race" really is/has been.
I make some suggestions below, but there is a lot more to
the story -- and none of us alone knows enough to tell it. Benji

 Text-of-forwarded-mail

 Date Tue, 29 Nov 94 21:04 PST
 To conollymsuvax.memphis.edu
 From benji wald (IBENAWJ)
 Subject Kar/Jie

Leo. Karamojong is one of a number of languages which are collectively
called Jie. They are Nilotic languages. Obviously related languages
are spoken in Sudan, e.g., Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk, in Uganda, e.g.,
 Achooli, Lango and in Kenya/Tanzania, e.g., Luo. If you saw a
 word list from each of these languages, e.g., the numbers from one to
 ten, you would have little difficulty reconstructingthe parent language
 yourself. Now when it comes to another branch of Nilotic which includes
 Maasai and Kalenjin I think you could also see the genetic relationship.
 All the Nilotic languages were recognised as genetically related long
 before Greenberg. But then the bigshots of pre-Greenberg, esp the
 German super-star Carl Meinhof went further. They wanted to connect
 these languages with"Hamitic"(you know people related to the Egyptians
with all the implications of the jaded racial arguments about whether
the Egyptians were black or not -- or rather NOT black, or not not).
 They drew not only cultural but racial conclusions from
this. Greenberg came along and ended that nonsense. On the other hand,
he used his mass comparison method to connect them to languages which
had previously not been recognised as related -- and called them
"Sudanic". He had renamed the West African languages related to
Bantu "Niger-Congo", where Westermann had previously used the name
"Sudanic" for those West African languages (but did not dare relate
them directly to Bantu though he had some such suspicions, against
the orthodoxy of the time.) The Greenberg Sudanic languages include
groups spread through Northern Zaire and Central African Republic,
e.g., Avukaya, Lugbara etc. and Chad, e.g., the Sara and Bagirmi
languages.
 Renamings without reclassification occur after Greenberg
first outlined what became his and MOST Africanists basic scheme,
so you are welcome to be confused by the literature, and must
pay careful attention to the date of whatever you read.
Although G's Sudanic group is problematic, it is a better grouping
then came before (to the extent that scholars were simply bewildered
by the number of unrelated families -- which wouldn't be so bad,
but then they used geographical labels for groupings which became
ambiguous for geography and genetic relationship). Finally, G
went on to incorporate Sudanic into a larger group called Nilo-
Saharan. This includes such West African giants as Kanuri in
Nigeria and Songhai in Mali, etc. While they are clearly not Niger-
Congo, their relationship to each other and to "Sudanic" (I already
said that was problematic, but less so then Nilo-S) is quite
problematic. Nevertheless, G established order where there was
prejudice and chaos, and a grateful set of Africanists adopted his
labels, fully aware that they were problematic. And they started
working on the problem. he gave experts in different languages a
basis for talking to each other. The Bantuists, the royalty of
African linguistics, were latest to adopt his framework. If you
want a quick survey of the history and so on, read Edgar Gregersen's
book, found in most libraries. Although Gregersen admires G, and
tries to outdo him by relating Nilo-Saharan (or whatever it was
called at that time -- I forget) and Niger-Congo by using G's
method, almost everyone agrees that this was going too far, and G
had already moved on to greener pastures, he thought. So G's
classification was good for African linguistics, and was able to
dispel racial myths in an area where they had run rampant. The
tradition in American Indian languages is quite different, and
apparently much of the data were even lousier than what was
available for African languages in an earlier time. I have no
idea how useless G's work is in Amerind lgs, but his work was very
useful in African languages, and not at all far-fetched even when
still questionable -- and questioned. Benji

Message 2: Re: 5.1368 Varia: Comparative Linguistics, Thanks

The notion that it is possible to "show the [genetic] relationship of a
group of languages by exhibiting systematic correspondences of sounds in
the vocabularies of said languages", as suggested in a recent
communication of Alexis Manaster Ramer, is indeed novel, and would allow
us, for example, to reconstruct Proto-French-English forthwith. The only
problem is that we would not be able to write the grammar of this
putative protolanguage. And in fact, that is the real point : two
languages are proven to be genetically related when one can demonstrate
the possibility of writing a grammar of the protolanguage. "Systematic
correspondences of sounds in the vocabularies" may prove a connection
between languages, which is certainly an interesting first step, but
there the real work of comparative grammar starts: the connection proven
by such systematic correspondences may be the result of universals (see
Jakobson Why Mama and Papa), of chance (soup in English and Sanskrit), of
borrowing (French and English, for the most part), or of genetic
relationship. Until one can exclude the first three factors, one has
proven nothing at all regarding genetic relationship. It's not
"morphological paradigms" you need, Alexis, but a grammar! Write a
grammar of Nostratic and the linguistic world will beat a path to your
door.

I am also grateful to Herbert Stahlke for his interesting comment on this
subject. To my mind the difference in Greenberg's African and American
Indian is that African languages and language families are in fact rather
close, so a down-and-dirty Guessing system such as Greenberg's does not
do too badly. In "Amerind", however, he has packed around eleven
families and the same number of "isolates", and it is this which
stretches the credulity of us honest comparativists. American Indian
languages are a far more diverse group than African, and will at minimum
take a lot more work if true interconnections are to be established. AS
my teacher Mary Haas always said, we need grammars of protolanguages!!
Get to work, ye aspiring grammarians. Yours, Karl (=Karl V. Teeter,
Professor of Linguistics, Emeritus, Harvard University)