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Editor for this issue: Martin Jacobsen <martylinguistlist.org>
worldnet.att.net>Alexis Manaster Ramer writes: > Perhaps it would help to have some concrete examples. In recent > discussions in other lists, a prominent linguist who is not an > expert on African languages cites a recent book by another prominent > linguist who is not an expert on African languages as claiming that > one of the widely accepted African language families (Niger-Kordo- > fanian) is based on nothing more than TYPOLOGICAL parallels. Now, > as we all know (and as Castren first taught c. 1830), typology has > little to do with relationship, and so if this charge were true, the > case for Niger-Kord. would be hopelessly flawed. As it happens, the > charge is not true, there are numerous cognate morphemes (including > the system of nominal class markers) which form the basis for the > recognition of Niger-Kord as a family. Now, I only know this > because I took the trouble of checking in the compendium Die > Sprachen Afrikas and in Greenberg's almost half-century-old book on > the classification of African languages. I am admittedly no expert in African languages, but I have read much of the survey volume *The Niger-Congo Languages*, ed. John Bendor-Samuel (SIL/Univ. Pr. Am., 1989), especially its chapters on overall classification, and the experts agree that it was a mistake to elevate the Kordofanian group to siblinghood with all the rest of the families in the phylum; they assign it a relationship in a more typical chart of binary branchings that subdivide into the large number of attested groups, rathern than showing single languages hiving off from the main body of the phylum. Lyle Campbell, certainly the most vocal of the anti-lumpers (he has even claimed credit for inventing the terms "lumper" and "splitter"), in *American Indian Languages* (Oxford, 1997: 255-57) gathers a variety of criticism of Greenberg's African classification to support his criticism of Greenberg's American classification. Notably, Lionel Bender, a very rigorous comparativist specializing in the Nilo-Saharan phylum, repeatedly expresses doubts about the unity of this "catch-all" and continually revises his picture of the whole. - Peter T. Daniels grammatimMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
umich.edu>My learned friend(and occasional collaborator) Peter Daniels' comments on the state of Semitic and Afro-Asiatic linguistics, while phrased to disagree with some of what I said, state things I completely agree with (namely, that there is a (small and I think shrinking) number of excellent Semitic comparative LINGUISTS who recognize the value of linguistic reconstruction as well as the validity of the Afro- Asiatic language family, of which Semitic is a small part). If one confines oneself to talking to or reading the works of these distinguished scholars, then indeed there is no need for alarm. However, what does alarm me is that many (maybe even most) departments that teach Semitic comparative linguistics (and this usually means depts. of Near Eastern Studies or the like, not of linguistics) are very largely hostile to both reconstruction and classification of languages, and that students of the subject are discouraged from pursuing such topics or acepting the validity of such obvious constructs as Proto-Semitic or the Afro-Asiatic language family. Or even if these concepts are technically accepted, they are paid no more than lip service. Even within linguistics itself, we have the spectacle of Gerhard Doerfer, a distinguished student of Turkic and Mongolic languages and the leading critic of the Altaic theory, repeatedly dismissing the Afro_Asiatic language family--without the linguistic community at large rising up in arms at this. Yet Doerfer's explicit position is a major threat to classificatory linguistics and perhaps to comparative linguistics as a whole: namely, he claims that related languages must have cognate numerals between 2 and 5 and a set of cognate basic body part terms. Since he realizes that the different branches of Afro-Asiatic do not in fact meet this criterion of relatedness (invented as a quick and painless way to dispose of Altaic), he then has to reject Afro-Asiatic (and also incidentally Uralic), because otherwise he would lose what has become his favorite argument against Altaic. Not only do I not see the outraged reaction one would expect if similar absurdities were published by a leading scholar in any other area of linguistics, but in addition we find that Doerfer is cited as an authority for why we must reject Altaic by, e.g., Johanna Nichols (who to be sure cites Unger citing a unpublished paper by Clark summarizing teh views of Doerfer, rather than Doerfer himself), whose work has certainly reached a wide audience of linguists who have no independent information about these topics to fall back on. And as if we did not have enough here to tear our hair about, we also find that recently it has become virtually textbook dogma in historical linguistics that it is impossible in principle to trace linguistic relationships older than 6ooo years (or some such figure, the details differ), with many of the authors apparently not realizing that (even if dating protolanguages is not an exact science), Afro-Asiatic must certainly be far older than this and hence presumably cannot be a valid language family! Moreover, most works which make such claims do not even bother to say where this comes from, because it is taken as such an obvious article of faith. (I myself suspect that the authors do not actually KNOW where the claims about the 'cut-off point' come from, and that they'd be somewhat embarrassed if they knew, but that is a subject better left for anotehr time. It is thus not to the narrow inner circle of Semitic linguists that I am referring, except that I think they should be in the forefront of the outraged reaction to all this (yes, Peter, this does include you). Alexis MRMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue