Joseph Greenberg
Encyclopedia
Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was a prominent and controversial American linguist
, principally known for his work in two areas, linguistic typology
and the genetic classification
of languages.
Greenberg was born on May 28, 1915 to Jewish parents in Brooklyn, New York. His first love was music. At the age of 14, he gave a piano concert at Steinway Hall. He continued to play the piano daily throughout his life.
After finishing high school, he decided to pursue a scholarly career rather than a musical one. He enrolled at Columbia University
in New York. In his senior year, he attended a class taught by Franz Boas
on American Indian languages
. With references from Boas and Ruth Benedict
, he was accepted as a graduate student by Melville J. Herskovits
at Northwestern University
in Chicago. In the course of his graduate studies, Greenberg did fieldwork among the Hausa
of Nigeria, where he learned the Hausa language
. The subject of his doctoral dissertation was the influence of Islam
on a Hausa group that, unlike most others, had not converted to it.
In 1940, he began postdoctoral studies at Yale University
. These were interrupted by service in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II
, where he worked as a codebreaker
and participated in the landing at Casablanca. Before leaving for Europe, he married Selma Berkowitz, whom he had met during his first year at Columbia.
After the war, Greenberg taught at the University of Minnesota
before returning to Columbia University in 1948 as a teacher of anthropology
. While in New York, he became acquainted with Roman Jakobson
and André Martinet
. They introduced him to the Prague school
of structuralism
, which influenced his work.
In 1962, Greenberg moved to the anthropology department of Stanford University
in California, where he continued to work for the rest of his life. In 1965 Greenberg served as president of the African Studies Association
.
In particular, Greenberg invented the notion of "implicational universal"
, which takes the form, "if a language has structure X, then it must also have structure Y." For example, X might be "mid front rounded vowels" and Y "high front rounded vowels" (for terminology see phonetics
). This kind of research was taken up by many scholars following Greenberg's example and remains important in synchronic linguistics.
Like Noam Chomsky
, Greenberg sought to discover the universal structures underlying human language. Unlike Chomsky, Greenberg’s approach was empirical
rather than logico-deductive. Greenberg’s approach, often characterized as "functionalist", is commonly opposed to Chomsky’s rationalist
approach. An argument to reconcile the Greenbergian and Chomskyan approaches can be found in Linguistic Universals, edited by Ricardo Mairal and Juana Gil (2006).
Many who are strongly opposed to Greenberg's methods of language classification (see below) nevertheless acknowledge the importance of his typological work. In 1963 he published an article that was extremely influential in the field: "Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements".
was the only tool to discover relationships between languages. He argued that genetic classification is methodologically prior to comparative reconstruction, or the first stage of it: you cannot engage in the comparative reconstruction of languages until you know which languages to compare (1957:44).
He also criticized the prevalent view that comprehensive comparisons of two languages at a time (which commonly take years to carry out) could establish language families of any size. He pointed out that, even for 8 languages, there are already 4,140 ways to classify them into distinct families, while for 25 languages there are 4,749,027,089,305,918,018 ways (1957:44). By way of comparison, the Niger–Congo
family is said to have some 1,500 languages. It is evident, therefore, that all language families of any size were established by some means other than bilateral comparison. The theory of mass comparison is an attempt to demonstrate what those means are.
Greenberg argued for the virtues of breadth over depth. He advocated restricting the amount of material to be compared (to basic vocabulary, morphology, and known paths of sound change) and increasing the number of languages to be compared - to all the languages in a given area. This would make it possible to compare numerous languages reliably. At the same time, the process would provide a check on accidental resemblances through the sheer number of languages under comparison. The mathematical probability that resemblances are accidental decreases sharply with the number of languages concerned (1957:39).
Greenberg noted that mass "borrowing" of basic vocabulary is unknown. Borrowing, when it occurs, is concentrated in cultural vocabulary and clusters "in certain semantic areas", making it easy to detect (1957:39). With a goal of determining broad patterns of relationship, the issue was not to get every word right but to detect patterns. From the beginning with his theory of mass comparison, Greenberg addressed why the issues of chance resemblance and borrowing were not obstacles to its being useful. Despite that, some critics suggested those areas were shortcomings of the theory.
Greenberg first called this method "mass comparison" in an article in 1954 (reprinted in Greenberg 1955). As of 1987, he replaced the term "mass comparison" with "multilateral comparison", to bring home its contrast with the bilateral comparisons recommended in linguistics textbooks. He believed that multilateral comparison is not in any way opposed to the comparative method, but is, on the contrary, its necessary first step (Greenberg, 1957:44). Comparative reconstruction has the status of an explanatory theory for facts already established by language classification (Greenberg, 1957:45). His method was to establish the facts first, reflecting the methodological empiricism
also visible in his typological work.
The use of mass comparison as a tool for establishing genealogical relationships between languages is rejected by most historical linguists (Campbell 2001:45). Among the most outspoken critics of mass comparison have been Lyle Campbell
, Donald Ringe
, William Poser
, and the late R. Larry Trask
.
Greenberg is widely known for his development of a new classification system for the languages of Africa
, which he published as a series of articles in the Southwestern Journal of Anthropology from 1949 to 1954 (reprinted together as a book in 1955) and, in a heavily revised form, in 1963, followed by a nearly identical edition in 1966 (reprinted without change in 1970). A few further changes to the classification were made by Greenberg in an article in 1981.
Greenberg grouped the hundreds of African languages into just four families, which he dubbed Afroasiatic
, Nilo-Saharan
, Niger–Congo
, and Khoisan
. In the course of this work, Greenberg coined the term "Afroasiatic" to replace the earlier term "Hamito-Semitic," after showing that Hamitic
, widely accepted since the 19th century, is not a valid language family. Another major feature of his work was to classify the Bantu languages
, which occupy much of sub-Saharan Africa
, as a branch of the newly identified Niger–Congo language family rather than as an independent family.
Greenberg's classification rested in part on earlier classifications, making new macrogroups by joining already established families through mass comparison. His classification was for a time considered very bold and speculative, especially the proposal of a Nilo-Saharan languages
family. Now it is generally accepted by African specialists and has been used as a basis for further work by other scholars.
Greenberg's work on African languages has been criticised by Lyle Campbell
and Donald Ringe, who do not believe that his classification is justified by his data; they request a reexamination of his macro-phyla by "reliable methods" (Ringe 1993:104). Even Harold Fleming
and Lionel Bender
, who are sympathetic to Greenberg's classification, acknowledge that at least some of his macrofamilies (particlularly Nilo-Saharan and Khoisan) are not fully accepted by the linguistic community and may need to be split up (Campbell 1997). Their objection is methodological
: if mass comparison is not a valid method, it cannot be expected to successfully have brought order out of the chaos of African languages.
In contrast, some linguists have sought to combine Greenberg's four African families into larger units. In particular, Edgar Gregersen (1972) proposed joining Niger–Congo and Nilo-Saharan into a larger family, which he termed Kongo-Saharan, while Roger Blench
(1995) suggests Niger–Congo is a subfamily of Nilo-Saharan.
In 1971 Greenberg proposed the Indo-Pacific
macrofamily
, which groups together the Papuan languages
(a large number of language families of New Guinea
and nearby islands) with the native languages of the Andaman Islands
and Tasmania
but excludes the Australian Aboriginal languages. Its principal feature was to reduce the manifold language families of New Guinea to a single genetic unit, with the exception of the Austronesian languages
spoken there, which are known to result from a more recent migration. Greenberg's subgrouping
of these languages has not been accepted by the few specialists who have worked on the classification of these languages since, in particular Stephen Wurm
(1982) and Malcolm Ross
(2005), but their work has provided considerable support for his once-radical idea that these languages form a single genetic unit. Wurm stated that the lexical similarities between Great Andamanese and the West Papuan and Timor–Alor families "are quite striking and amount to virtual formal identity [...] in a number of instances", but considered this to be due to a linguistic substratum
.
into 150 to 180 independent language families. Some have thought two language families, Eskimo–Aleut and Na-Dené, were somehow distinct, perhaps the results of later movements into the New World. Early on, Greenberg (1957:41, 1960) became convinced that many of the reportedly unrelated languages could be classified into larger groupings. In his 1987 book Language in the Americas, while supporting the Eskimo–Aleut and Na-Dené groupings as distinct, he proposed that all the other Native American languages belong to a single language macro-family, which he termed Amerind
.
Language in the Americas has generated lively debate but has been heavily criticized, rejected by most specialists in indigenous languages of the Americas and also by most historical linguists. Specialists find extensive inaccuracies in Greenberg’s examples and they reject his method of multilateral (or mass) comparison upon which the classification is based. They argue that he has not provided a convincing case that the similarities presented as evidence are due to inheritance from an earlier common ancestor rather than being explained by a combination of accidental similarity, errors, excessive semantic latitude in comparisons, borrowings, onomatopoeia, etc.
Later in his life, Greenberg proposed that nearly all of the language families of northern Eurasia
belong to a single higher-order family, which he called Eurasiatic
. The only exception was Yeniseian
, which has been related to a wider Dené–Caucasian grouping also including Sino-Tibetan. In 2008 Edward Vajda
related Yeniseian to the Na-Dené
languages of North America in a Dené–Yeniseian family.
The Eurasiatic grouping resembles the older Nostratic
groupings of Holger Pedersen
and Vladislav Illich-Svitych
by including Indo-European
, Uralic
, and Altaic
. It differs by including Nivkh
, Japonic, Korean
, and Ainu
(which the Nostraticists excluded from comparison because they are single languages rather than language families) and in excluding Afroasiatic. At about this time, Russian Nostraticists, notably Sergei Starostin
, constructed a revised version of Nostratic. It was slightly broader than Greenberg's grouping but it also left out Afroasiatic.
Recently, a consensus has been emerging among proponents of the Nostratic hypothesis. Greenberg basically agreed with the Nostratic concept, though he stressed a deep internal division between its northern 'tier' (his Eurasiatic) and a southern 'tier' (principally Afroasiatic and Dravidian). The American Nostraticist Allan Bomhard
considers Eurasiatic a branch of Nostratic alongside other branches: Afroasiatic, Elamo-Dravidian
, and Kartvelian. Similarly, Georgiy Starostin
(2002) arrives at a tripartite overall grouping: he considers Afroasiatic, Nostratic and Elamite to be roughly equidistant and more closely related to each other than to anything else. Sergei Starostin's school has now included Afroasiatic in a broadly defined Nostratic. They reserve the term Eurasiatic to designate the narrower subgrouping, which comprises the rest of the macrofamily. Recent proposals thus differ mainly on the precise placement of Dravidian and Kartvelian.
Greenberg continued to work on this project after he was diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer until he died in May 2001. His colleague and former student Merritt Ruhlen
ensured the publication of the final volume of his Eurasiatic work (2002) after his death.
(Heavily revised version of Greenberg 1955. From the same publisher: second, revised edition, 1966; third edition, 1970. All three editions simultaneously published at The Hague by Mouton & Co.)
(Reprinted 1980 and, with a foreword by Martin Haspelmath, 2005.)
(In second edition of Universals of Language, 1966: pp. 73–113.)
(Reprinted in Genetic Linguistics, 2005.)
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
, principally known for his work in two areas, linguistic typology
Linguistic typology
Linguistic typology is a subfield of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features. Its aim is to describe and explain the common properties and the structural diversity of the world's languages...
and the genetic classification
Genetic relationship (linguistics)
In linguistics, genetic relationship is the usual term for the relationship which exists between languages that are members of the same language family. The term genealogical relationship is sometimes used to avoid confusion with the unrelated use of the term in biological genetics...
of languages.
Early life and career
(Main source: Croft 2003)Greenberg was born on May 28, 1915 to Jewish parents in Brooklyn, New York. His first love was music. At the age of 14, he gave a piano concert at Steinway Hall. He continued to play the piano daily throughout his life.
After finishing high school, he decided to pursue a scholarly career rather than a musical one. He enrolled at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
in New York. In his senior year, he attended a class taught by Franz Boas
Franz Boas
Franz Boas was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology" and "the Father of Modern Anthropology." Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines; he received his doctorate in physics, and did...
on American Indian languages
Indigenous languages of the Americas
Indigenous languages of the Americas are spoken by indigenous peoples from Alaska and Greenland to the southern tip of South America, encompassing the land masses which constitute the Americas. These indigenous languages consist of dozens of distinct language families as well as many language...
. With references from Boas and Ruth Benedict
Ruth Benedict
Ruth Benedict was an American anthropologist, cultural relativist, and folklorist....
, he was accepted as a graduate student by Melville J. Herskovits
Melville J. Herskovits
Melville Jean Herskovits was an American anthropologist who firmly established African and African American studies in American academia. The son of Jewish immigrants, he obtained a Bachelor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago in 1923 and obtained his Master's and Ph.D...
at Northwestern University
Northwestern University
Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, USA. Northwestern has eleven undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools offering 124 undergraduate degrees and 145 graduate and professional degrees....
in Chicago. In the course of his graduate studies, Greenberg did fieldwork among the Hausa
Hausa people
The Hausa are one of the largest ethnic groups in West Africa. They are a Sahelian people chiefly located in northern Nigeria and southeastern Niger, but having significant numbers living in regions of Cameroon, Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, Chad and Sudan...
of Nigeria, where he learned the Hausa language
Hausa language
Hausa is the Chadic language with the largest number of speakers, spoken as a first language by about 25 million people, and as a second language by about 18 million more, an approximate total of 43 million people...
. The subject of his doctoral dissertation was the influence of Islam
Islam
Islam . The most common are and . : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...
on a Hausa group that, unlike most others, had not converted to it.
In 1940, he began postdoctoral studies at Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
. These were interrupted by service in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, where he worked as a codebreaker
Cryptanalysis
Cryptanalysis is the study of methods for obtaining the meaning of encrypted information, without access to the secret information that is normally required to do so. Typically, this involves knowing how the system works and finding a secret key...
and participated in the landing at Casablanca. Before leaving for Europe, he married Selma Berkowitz, whom he had met during his first year at Columbia.
After the war, Greenberg taught at the University of Minnesota
University of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...
before returning to Columbia University in 1948 as a teacher of anthropology
Cultural anthropology
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans, collecting data about the impact of global economic and political processes on local cultural realities. Anthropologists use a variety of methods, including participant observation,...
. While in New York, he became acquainted with Roman Jakobson
Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary theorist.As a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century...
and André Martinet
André Martinet
André Martinet was a French linguist, influential by his work on structural linguistics....
. They introduced him to the Prague school
Prague linguistic circle
The Prague school or the Prague linguistic circle was an influential group of literary critics and linguists in Prague. Its proponents developed methods of structuralist literary analysis during the years 1928–1939. It has had significant continuing influence on linguistics and semiotics...
of structuralism
Structuralism
Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
, which influenced his work.
In 1962, Greenberg moved to the anthropology department of Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
in California, where he continued to work for the rest of his life. In 1965 Greenberg served as president of the African Studies Association
African Studies Association
The African Studies Association is an association of scholars and professionals in the United States and Canada with an interest in the continent of Africa. Started in 1957, the ASA is the leading organization of African Studies in North America. The associations headquarters are Rutgers...
.
Linguistic typology
Greenberg's reputation rests in part on his contributions to synchronic linguistics and the quest to identify linguistic universals. In the late 1950s, Greenberg began to examine corpora of languages covering a wide geographic and genetic distribution. He located a number of interesting potential universals as well as many strong cross-linguistic tendencies.In particular, Greenberg invented the notion of "implicational universal"
Linguistic universal
A linguistic universal is a pattern that occurs systematically across natural languages, potentially true for all of them. For example, All languages have nouns and verbs, or If a language is spoken, it has consonants and vowels. Research in this area of linguistics is closely tied to the study of...
, which takes the form, "if a language has structure X, then it must also have structure Y." For example, X might be "mid front rounded vowels" and Y "high front rounded vowels" (for terminology see phonetics
Phonetics
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or—in the case of sign languages—the equivalent aspects of sign. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs : their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory...
). This kind of research was taken up by many scholars following Greenberg's example and remains important in synchronic linguistics.
Like Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
, Greenberg sought to discover the universal structures underlying human language. Unlike Chomsky, Greenberg’s approach was empirical
Empirical
The word empirical denotes information gained by means of observation or experimentation. Empirical data are data produced by an experiment or observation....
rather than logico-deductive. Greenberg’s approach, often characterized as "functionalist", is commonly opposed to Chomsky’s rationalist
Rationalism
In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" . In more technical terms, it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive"...
approach. An argument to reconcile the Greenbergian and Chomskyan approaches can be found in Linguistic Universals, edited by Ricardo Mairal and Juana Gil (2006).
Many who are strongly opposed to Greenberg's methods of language classification (see below) nevertheless acknowledge the importance of his typological work. In 1963 he published an article that was extremely influential in the field: "Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements".
Mass comparison
Greenberg rejected the view, prevalent among linguists since the mid-20th century, that comparative reconstructionComparative method
In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor, as opposed to the method of internal reconstruction, which analyzes the internal...
was the only tool to discover relationships between languages. He argued that genetic classification is methodologically prior to comparative reconstruction, or the first stage of it: you cannot engage in the comparative reconstruction of languages until you know which languages to compare (1957:44).
He also criticized the prevalent view that comprehensive comparisons of two languages at a time (which commonly take years to carry out) could establish language families of any size. He pointed out that, even for 8 languages, there are already 4,140 ways to classify them into distinct families, while for 25 languages there are 4,749,027,089,305,918,018 ways (1957:44). By way of comparison, the Niger–Congo
Niger–Congo languages
The Niger–Congo languages constitute one of the world's major language families, and Africa's largest in terms of geographical area, number of speakers, and number of distinct languages. They may constitute the world's largest language family in terms of distinct languages, although this question...
family is said to have some 1,500 languages. It is evident, therefore, that all language families of any size were established by some means other than bilateral comparison. The theory of mass comparison is an attempt to demonstrate what those means are.
Greenberg argued for the virtues of breadth over depth. He advocated restricting the amount of material to be compared (to basic vocabulary, morphology, and known paths of sound change) and increasing the number of languages to be compared - to all the languages in a given area. This would make it possible to compare numerous languages reliably. At the same time, the process would provide a check on accidental resemblances through the sheer number of languages under comparison. The mathematical probability that resemblances are accidental decreases sharply with the number of languages concerned (1957:39).
Greenberg noted that mass "borrowing" of basic vocabulary is unknown. Borrowing, when it occurs, is concentrated in cultural vocabulary and clusters "in certain semantic areas", making it easy to detect (1957:39). With a goal of determining broad patterns of relationship, the issue was not to get every word right but to detect patterns. From the beginning with his theory of mass comparison, Greenberg addressed why the issues of chance resemblance and borrowing were not obstacles to its being useful. Despite that, some critics suggested those areas were shortcomings of the theory.
Greenberg first called this method "mass comparison" in an article in 1954 (reprinted in Greenberg 1955). As of 1987, he replaced the term "mass comparison" with "multilateral comparison", to bring home its contrast with the bilateral comparisons recommended in linguistics textbooks. He believed that multilateral comparison is not in any way opposed to the comparative method, but is, on the contrary, its necessary first step (Greenberg, 1957:44). Comparative reconstruction has the status of an explanatory theory for facts already established by language classification (Greenberg, 1957:45). His method was to establish the facts first, reflecting the methodological empiricism
Empiricism
Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge comes only or primarily via sensory experience. One of several views of epistemology, the study of human knowledge, along with rationalism, idealism and historicism, empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence,...
also visible in his typological work.
The use of mass comparison as a tool for establishing genealogical relationships between languages is rejected by most historical linguists (Campbell 2001:45). Among the most outspoken critics of mass comparison have been Lyle Campbell
Lyle Campbell
Lyle Richard Campbell is a linguist and leading expert on indigenous American languages—especially those of Mesoamerica—and on historical linguistics in general. He also has expertise in Uralic languages. He is presently Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.-Life and...
, Donald Ringe
Donald Ringe
Donald Ringe is an American linguist and Indo-Europeanist.He received Ph.D in linguistics at the Yale University in 1984 under the supervision of the late Warren Cowgill. He taught Classics at Bard College from 1983 to 1985, and since 1985 he has been on the Faculty in Linguistics at the...
, William Poser
William Poser
William Poser is a Canadian-American linguist who is known for his extensive work with the historical linguistics of Native American languages, especially those of the Athabascan family....
, and the late R. Larry Trask
Larry Trask
Robert Lawrence "Larry" Trask was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sussex and an authority on the Basque language and historical linguistics....
.
The languages of Africa
- Main articles: Languages of AfricaLanguages of AfricaThere are over 2100 and by some counts over 3000 languages spoken natively in Africa in several major language families:*Afro-Asiatic spread throughout the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahel...
, The Languages of AfricaThe Languages of AfricaThe Languages of Africa is a 1963 book of essays by Joseph Greenberg, in which he sets forth a genetic classification of African languages that, with some changes, continues to be the most commonly used one today...
(book), Afroasiatic languages, Nilo-Saharan languagesNilo-Saharan languagesThe Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of African languages spoken by some 50 million people, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers , including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of Nile meet...
, Niger–Congo languagesNiger–Congo languagesThe Niger–Congo languages constitute one of the world's major language families, and Africa's largest in terms of geographical area, number of speakers, and number of distinct languages. They may constitute the world's largest language family in terms of distinct languages, although this question...
, Khoisan languagesKhoisan languagesThe Khoisan languages are the click languages of Africa which do not belong to other language families. They include languages indigenous to southern and eastern Africa, though some, such as the Khoi languages, appear to have moved to their current locations not long before the Bantu expansion...
.
Greenberg is widely known for his development of a new classification system for the languages of Africa
Languages of Africa
There are over 2100 and by some counts over 3000 languages spoken natively in Africa in several major language families:*Afro-Asiatic spread throughout the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahel...
, which he published as a series of articles in the Southwestern Journal of Anthropology from 1949 to 1954 (reprinted together as a book in 1955) and, in a heavily revised form, in 1963, followed by a nearly identical edition in 1966 (reprinted without change in 1970). A few further changes to the classification were made by Greenberg in an article in 1981.
Greenberg grouped the hundreds of African languages into just four families, which he dubbed Afroasiatic
Afro-Asiatic languages
The Afroasiatic languages , also known as Hamito-Semitic, constitute one of the world's largest language families, with about 375 living languages...
, Nilo-Saharan
Nilo-Saharan languages
The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of African languages spoken by some 50 million people, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers , including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of Nile meet...
, Niger–Congo
Niger–Congo languages
The Niger–Congo languages constitute one of the world's major language families, and Africa's largest in terms of geographical area, number of speakers, and number of distinct languages. They may constitute the world's largest language family in terms of distinct languages, although this question...
, and Khoisan
Khoisan languages
The Khoisan languages are the click languages of Africa which do not belong to other language families. They include languages indigenous to southern and eastern Africa, though some, such as the Khoi languages, appear to have moved to their current locations not long before the Bantu expansion...
. In the course of this work, Greenberg coined the term "Afroasiatic" to replace the earlier term "Hamito-Semitic," after showing that Hamitic
Hamitic
Hamitic is an historical term for the peoples supposedly descended from Noah's son Ham, paralleling Semitic and Japhetic.It was formerly used for grouping the non-Semitic Afroasiatic languages , but since, unlike the Semitic branch, these have not been shown to form a phylogenetic unity, the term...
, widely accepted since the 19th century, is not a valid language family. Another major feature of his work was to classify the Bantu languages
Bantu languages
The Bantu languages constitute a traditional sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages. There are about 250 Bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and Ethnologue counts 535 languages...
, which occupy much of sub-Saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa as a geographical term refers to the area of the African continent which lies south of the Sahara. A political definition of Sub-Saharan Africa, instead, covers all African countries which are fully or partially located south of the Sahara...
, as a branch of the newly identified Niger–Congo language family rather than as an independent family.
Greenberg's classification rested in part on earlier classifications, making new macrogroups by joining already established families through mass comparison. His classification was for a time considered very bold and speculative, especially the proposal of a Nilo-Saharan languages
Nilo-Saharan languages
The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of African languages spoken by some 50 million people, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers , including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of Nile meet...
family. Now it is generally accepted by African specialists and has been used as a basis for further work by other scholars.
Greenberg's work on African languages has been criticised by Lyle Campbell
Lyle Campbell
Lyle Richard Campbell is a linguist and leading expert on indigenous American languages—especially those of Mesoamerica—and on historical linguistics in general. He also has expertise in Uralic languages. He is presently Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.-Life and...
and Donald Ringe, who do not believe that his classification is justified by his data; they request a reexamination of his macro-phyla by "reliable methods" (Ringe 1993:104). Even Harold Fleming
Harold C. Fleming
Harold Crane Fleming is an American anthropologist and historical linguist, specializing in the cultures and languages of the Horn of Africa. As an adherent of the Four Field School of American anthropology, he stresses the integration of physical anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, and...
and Lionel Bender
Lionel Bender (linguist)
Marvin Lionel Bender was an American author and co-author of several books, publications and essays regarding African languages, particularly from Ethiopia and Sudan. He retired from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He did extensive work in all four language families of Ethiopia: Semitic,...
, who are sympathetic to Greenberg's classification, acknowledge that at least some of his macrofamilies (particlularly Nilo-Saharan and Khoisan) are not fully accepted by the linguistic community and may need to be split up (Campbell 1997). Their objection is methodological
Methodology
Methodology is generally a guideline for solving a problem, with specificcomponents such as phases, tasks, methods, techniques and tools . It can be defined also as follows:...
: if mass comparison is not a valid method, it cannot be expected to successfully have brought order out of the chaos of African languages.
In contrast, some linguists have sought to combine Greenberg's four African families into larger units. In particular, Edgar Gregersen (1972) proposed joining Niger–Congo and Nilo-Saharan into a larger family, which he termed Kongo-Saharan, while Roger Blench
Roger Blench
Roger Blench is a British linguist, ethnomusicologist and development anthropologist. He has an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and remains based in Cambridge, England...
(1995) suggests Niger–Congo is a subfamily of Nilo-Saharan.
The languages of New Guinea, Tasmania, and the Andaman Islands
- Main articles: Indo-Pacific languagesIndo-Pacific languagesIndo-Pacific is a hypothetical language macrofamily proposed in 1971 by Joseph Greenberg. Supporters of Indo-Pacific see it as an extremely ancient and internally diverse family...
, Trans–New Guinea languages, Papuan languagesPapuan languagesThe Papuan languages are those languages of the western Pacific which are neither Austronesian nor Australian. The term does not presuppose a genetic relationship. The concept of Papuan peoples as distinct from Melanesians was first suggested and named by Sidney Herbert Ray in 1892.-The...
In 1971 Greenberg proposed the Indo-Pacific
Indo-Pacific languages
Indo-Pacific is a hypothetical language macrofamily proposed in 1971 by Joseph Greenberg. Supporters of Indo-Pacific see it as an extremely ancient and internally diverse family...
macrofamily
Macrofamily
In historical linguistics, a macro-family, also called a superfamily or phylum, is defined as a proposed genetic relationship grouping together language families in a larger scale clasification.However, Campbell regards this term as superfluous, preferring language family for those clasifications...
, which groups together the Papuan languages
Papuan languages
The Papuan languages are those languages of the western Pacific which are neither Austronesian nor Australian. The term does not presuppose a genetic relationship. The concept of Papuan peoples as distinct from Melanesians was first suggested and named by Sidney Herbert Ray in 1892.-The...
(a large number of language families of New Guinea
New Guinea
New Guinea is the world's second largest island, after Greenland, covering a land area of 786,000 km2. Located in the southwest Pacific Ocean, it lies geographically to the east of the Malay Archipelago, with which it is sometimes included as part of a greater Indo-Australian Archipelago...
and nearby islands) with the native languages of the Andaman Islands
Andaman Islands
The Andaman Islands are a group of Indian Ocean archipelagic islands in the Bay of Bengal between India to the west, and Burma , to the north and east...
and Tasmania
Tasmania
Tasmania is an Australian island and state. It is south of the continent, separated by Bass Strait. The state includes the island of Tasmania—the 26th largest island in the world—and the surrounding islands. The state has a population of 507,626 , of whom almost half reside in the greater Hobart...
but excludes the Australian Aboriginal languages. Its principal feature was to reduce the manifold language families of New Guinea to a single genetic unit, with the exception of the Austronesian languages
Austronesian languages
The Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia that are spoken by about 386 million people. It is on par with Indo-European, Niger-Congo, Afroasiatic and Uralic as one of the...
spoken there, which are known to result from a more recent migration. Greenberg's subgrouping
Subgrouping (linguistics)
Subgrouping in linguistics is the division of a language family into its constituent branches.-References:Greenberg, Joseph H. 1957. "The problem of linguistic subgroupings", in Essays in Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press....
of these languages has not been accepted by the few specialists who have worked on the classification of these languages since, in particular Stephen Wurm
Stephen Wurm
Stephen Adolphe Wurm was a Hungarian-born Australian linguist.- Biography :Wurm was born in Budapest, the second child to the German-speaking Adolphe Wurm and Hungarian-speaking Anna Novroczky, and was christened Istvan Adolphe Wurm...
(1982) and Malcolm Ross
Malcolm Ross
Malcolm David Ross is a linguist and professor at the Australian National University. He has published work on Austronesian and Papuan languages, historical linguistics, and language contact.-External links:**...
(2005), but their work has provided considerable support for his once-radical idea that these languages form a single genetic unit. Wurm stated that the lexical similarities between Great Andamanese and the West Papuan and Timor–Alor families "are quite striking and amount to virtual formal identity [...] in a number of instances", but considered this to be due to a linguistic substratum
Substratum
In linguistics, a stratum or strate is a language that influences, or is influenced by another through contact. A substratum is a language which has lower power or prestige than another, while a superstratum is the language that has higher power or prestige. Both substratum and superstratum...
.
The languages of the Americas
Most American Indian linguists classify the native languages of the AmericasIndigenous languages of the Americas
Indigenous languages of the Americas are spoken by indigenous peoples from Alaska and Greenland to the southern tip of South America, encompassing the land masses which constitute the Americas. These indigenous languages consist of dozens of distinct language families as well as many language...
into 150 to 180 independent language families. Some have thought two language families, Eskimo–Aleut and Na-Dené, were somehow distinct, perhaps the results of later movements into the New World. Early on, Greenberg (1957:41, 1960) became convinced that many of the reportedly unrelated languages could be classified into larger groupings. In his 1987 book Language in the Americas, while supporting the Eskimo–Aleut and Na-Dené groupings as distinct, he proposed that all the other Native American languages belong to a single language macro-family, which he termed Amerind
Amerind
Amerind may refer to:* Amerind peoples, neologism for Indigenous peoples of the Americas* Amerind Foundation, a non-profit, museum and archaeological research facility* Amerind languages, putative higher-level language family...
.
Language in the Americas has generated lively debate but has been heavily criticized, rejected by most specialists in indigenous languages of the Americas and also by most historical linguists. Specialists find extensive inaccuracies in Greenberg’s examples and they reject his method of multilateral (or mass) comparison upon which the classification is based. They argue that he has not provided a convincing case that the similarities presented as evidence are due to inheritance from an earlier common ancestor rather than being explained by a combination of accidental similarity, errors, excessive semantic latitude in comparisons, borrowings, onomatopoeia, etc.
The languages of northern Eurasia
- Main article: Eurasiatic languagesEurasiatic languagesEurasiatic is a language macrofamily proposed by Joseph Greenberg that includes many language families historically spoken in northern Eurasia. The eight branches of Eurasiatic are Etruscan, Indo-European, Uralic–Yukaghir, Altaic, Korean-Japanese-Ainu, Gilyak, Chukotian, and Eskimo–Aleut, spoken in...
Later in his life, Greenberg proposed that nearly all of the language families of northern Eurasia
Eurasia
Eurasia is a continent or supercontinent comprising the traditional continents of Europe and Asia ; covering about 52,990,000 km2 or about 10.6% of the Earth's surface located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres...
belong to a single higher-order family, which he called Eurasiatic
Eurasiatic languages
Eurasiatic is a language macrofamily proposed by Joseph Greenberg that includes many language families historically spoken in northern Eurasia. The eight branches of Eurasiatic are Etruscan, Indo-European, Uralic–Yukaghir, Altaic, Korean-Japanese-Ainu, Gilyak, Chukotian, and Eskimo–Aleut, spoken in...
. The only exception was Yeniseian
Yeniseian languages
The Yeniseian language family is spoken in central Siberia.-Family division:0. Proto-Yeniseian...
, which has been related to a wider Dené–Caucasian grouping also including Sino-Tibetan. In 2008 Edward Vajda
Edward Vajda
Edward Vajda is a historical linguist at Western Washington University. He has become known for his work on the proposed Dené–Yeniseian language family, seeking to establish that the Ket language of Siberia has a common linguistic ancestor with the Na-Dené languages of North America...
related Yeniseian to the Na-Dené
Na-Dené languages
Na-Dene is a Native American language family which includes at least the Athabaskan languages, Eyak, and Tlingit languages. An inclusion of Haida is controversial....
languages of North America in a Dené–Yeniseian family.
The Eurasiatic grouping resembles the older Nostratic
Nostratic languages
Nostratic is a proposed language family that includes many of the indigenous language families of Eurasia, including the Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic as well as Kartvelian languages...
groupings of Holger Pedersen
Holger Pedersen (linguist)
Holger Pedersen was a Danish linguist who made significant contributions to language science and wrote about 30 authoritative works concerning several languages....
and Vladislav Illich-Svitych
Vladislav Illich-Svitych
Vladislav Markovich Illich-Svitych was a Russian linguist and accentologist, also a founding father of comparative Nostratic linguistics.Of Ukrainian descent, he was born in Kiev but later moved to work in Moscow. He resuscitated the long-forgotten Nostratic hypothesis, originally expounded by...
by including Indo-European
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...
, Uralic
Uralic languages
The Uralic languages constitute a language family of some three dozen languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt...
, and Altaic
Altaic languages
Altaic is a proposed language family that includes the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, and Japonic language families and the Korean language isolate. These languages are spoken in a wide arc stretching from northeast Asia through Central Asia to Anatolia and eastern Europe...
. It differs by including Nivkh
Nivkh language
Nivkh or Gilyak is a language spoken in Outer Manchuria, in the basin of the Amgun , along the lower reaches of the Amur itself, and on the northern half of Sakhalin. 'Gilyak' is the Manchu appellation...
, Japonic, Korean
Korean language
Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...
, and Ainu
Ainu language
Ainu is one of the Ainu languages, spoken by members of the Ainu ethnic group on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaidō....
(which the Nostraticists excluded from comparison because they are single languages rather than language families) and in excluding Afroasiatic. At about this time, Russian Nostraticists, notably Sergei Starostin
Sergei Starostin
Dr. Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin was a Russian historical linguist and scholar, best known for his work with hypothetical proto-languages, including his work on the reconstruction of the Proto-Borean language, the controversial theory of Altaic languages and the formulation of the Dené–Caucasian...
, constructed a revised version of Nostratic. It was slightly broader than Greenberg's grouping but it also left out Afroasiatic.
Recently, a consensus has been emerging among proponents of the Nostratic hypothesis. Greenberg basically agreed with the Nostratic concept, though he stressed a deep internal division between its northern 'tier' (his Eurasiatic) and a southern 'tier' (principally Afroasiatic and Dravidian). The American Nostraticist Allan Bomhard
Allan R. Bomhard
Allan R. Bomhard is an American linguist.He was educated at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Hunter College, and the City University of New York, and served in the U.S. Army from 1964—1966. He currently resides in Charleston, SC...
considers Eurasiatic a branch of Nostratic alongside other branches: Afroasiatic, Elamo-Dravidian
Elamo-Dravidian languages
The Elamo-Dravidian languages are a hypothesised language family which links the living or proto Dravidian languages of India to the extinct Elamite language of ancient Elam . Linguist David McAlpin has been a chief proponent of the Elamo-Dravidian Hypothesis...
, and Kartvelian. Similarly, Georgiy Starostin
Georgiy Starostin
Georgiy Sergeevich Starostin is a Russian linguistics researcher at the Center of Comparative Studies at the Russian State University for the Humanities, and a participant at the Santa Fe Institute's Evolution of Human Languages project...
(2002) arrives at a tripartite overall grouping: he considers Afroasiatic, Nostratic and Elamite to be roughly equidistant and more closely related to each other than to anything else. Sergei Starostin's school has now included Afroasiatic in a broadly defined Nostratic. They reserve the term Eurasiatic to designate the narrower subgrouping, which comprises the rest of the macrofamily. Recent proposals thus differ mainly on the precise placement of Dravidian and Kartvelian.
Greenberg continued to work on this project after he was diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer until he died in May 2001. His colleague and former student Merritt Ruhlen
Merritt Ruhlen
Merritt Ruhlen is an American linguist known for his work on the classification of languages and what this reveals about the origin and evolution of modern humans. Amongst other linguists, Ruhlen's work is recognized as standing outside the mainstream of comparative-historical linguistics...
ensured the publication of the final volume of his Eurasiatic work (2002) after his death.
Books
(Photo-offset reprint of the SJA articles with minor corrections.)(Heavily revised version of Greenberg 1955. From the same publisher: second, revised edition, 1966; third edition, 1970. All three editions simultaneously published at The Hague by Mouton & Co.)
(Reprinted 1980 and, with a foreword by Martin Haspelmath, 2005.)
Books (editor)
(Second edition 1966.)Articles, reviews, etc.
(Reprinted in Genetic Linguistics, 2005.)(In second edition of Universals of Language, 1966: pp. 73–113.)
(Reprinted in Genetic Linguistics, 2005.)
External links
- "What we all spoke when the world was young" by Nicholas Wade, New York Times (February 1, 2000)
- Obituary from Stanford Report
- Memorial Resolution
- "Joseph Harold Greenberg" by William Croft (2003) (also: HTML version)
- "Complete bibliography of the publications of Joseph H. Greenberg" by William Croft (2003)