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Joseph Greenberg
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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.
Early life and career
(Main source: Croft 2003)
Greenberg was born on May 28th, 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.
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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.
Early life and career
(Main source: Croft 2003)
Greenberg was born on May 28th, 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 he 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, who introduced him to Prague school structuralism. In 1962, he moved to the anthropology department of Stanford University in California, where he continued to work for the rest of his life.
Contributions to linguistics
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", 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. A call to reconcile the Greenbergian and Chomskyan approaches can be found in Linguistic Universals, edited by Ricardo Mairal and Juana Gil (2006). It remains to be seen whether this call will be heeded.
Many who are strongly opposed to Greenberg's methods of language classification (see below) nevertheless acknowledge the importance of his typological work, in particular his tremendously influential 1963 article, "Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements."
Mass comparison
- Main article: Mass comparison
Greenberg rejected the view, prevalent among linguists since the mid-20th century, that comparative reconstruction was the appropriate vehicle to discover relationships between languages. He argued that genetic classification is methodologically prior to comparative reconstruction: 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, while for 25 languages there are 4,749,027,089,305,918,018 ways (1957:44). (By way of comparison, the Niger-Congo family has 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: Instead of increasing the amount of material to be compared (to the entire vocabulary, grammar, and phonology of each language) and restricting the number of languages to be compared to two at a time, Greenberg 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, he asserted, make it possible to compare large numbers of languages reliably, while providing a check on accidental resemblances through the sheer number of languages under comparison, since the mathematical probability that resemblances are accidental decreases sharply with the number of languages concerned (1957:39). He also considered that mass borrowing of basic vocabulary is unknown and that borrowing, when it occurs, is concentrated in cultural vocabulary and clusters "in certain semantic areas", making it easy to detect (1957:39), when the issue was not to get every word right but to determine the broad patterns of relationship. Thus the theory of mass comparison – contrary to what is claimed by Greenberg’s critics – from the very beginning addressed the issues of chance resemblance and borrowing and provided explanations for why these are not obstacles to it.
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. According to him, multilateral comparison is not in any way opposed to the comparative method, but is, on the contrary, its necessary first step (1957:44). In Greenberg's view, comparative reconstruction has the status of an explanatory theory for facts already established by language classification (1957:45), but the facts remain prior – reflecting the methodological empiricism also visible in his typological work.
The most persistent critics of mass comparison have been Lyle Campbell, Donald Ringe, William Poser, and the late R. Larry Trask.
Using the method of mass comparison, Greenberg arrived at a number of novel classifications of languages. All these classifications were rejected when first proposed as factually incorrect and methodologically unsound. Since then, some have come to be accepted in whole, others in part; some are still rejected; the status of others is pending. Some details and appreciations of these classifications follow.
Genetic classification of languages
The languages of Africa
- Main articles: Languages of Africa, The Languages of Africa (book), Afro-Asiatic languages, Nilo-Saharan languages, Niger-Congo languages, Khoisan languages.
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 revised 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, not as an independent language family but as a branch of the newly identified Niger-Congo 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 language family, but is now 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 feel that his classification is justified by his data and 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). Neither Campbell nor Ringe is an African specialist. Their objection is methodological: if mass comparison is not a valid method, it cannot have successfully 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, a link more recently endorsed by Roger Blench (1995).
The languages of New Guinea, Tasmania, and the Andaman Islands
- Main articles: Indo-Pacific languages, Trans-New Guinea languages, Papuan languages
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.
The languages of the Americas
- Main article: Amerind languages
Americanist linguists classify the native languages of the Americas into two language families spoken in parts of North America, Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dené, and some 600 to 2,000 language families (Diamond 1997:368) that occupy the rest of North America and all of Central and South America. 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, he proposed that all the other Native American languages belong to a single language family. He termed this postulated family Amerind.
Language in the Americas was greeted with a firestorm of criticism (bibliography in Greenberg 2005:406-409). Even before the work had appeared in print, Lyle Campbell, an Americanist, called for it to be "shouted down" (1986:488). A virtual who's who of Americanists lined up against Amerind. The criticisms are directed not so much toward the classification per se, but primarily to the method of mass comparison used to establish it, which the majority of historical linguists consider inherently unreliable (see above); and toward the large number of errors that have been shown to be present in the sources used by Greenberg, such as wrong or non-existent words, incorrect translations, words attributed to the wrong languages, and unsupported or wrong identification of prefixes and suffixes.
While some of these errors (which, according to Greenberg's defenders, only affect a few percent of the data) could conceivably lead to an artificial increase in the similarity measure, others would merely introduce random noise in the measurement, and therefore tend to reduce it — which would only strengthen Greenberg's conclusions. Nevertheless, the allegations of widespread errors in the data along with objections to his methodology have led many linguists to dismiss this part of Greenberg's work.
The languages of northern Eurasia
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Main article: Eurasiatic languages
Later in his life, Greenberg proposed that 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 since been shown to be related to the Na-Dené languages of North America (Vajda 2008). The Eurasiatic grouping resembles the older Nostratic groupings of Holger Pedersen and Vladislav Illich-Svitych in including Indo-European, Uralic, and Altaic, but differs from them in including Nivkh, Japonic, Korean, and Ainu and in excluding Afro-Asiatic. There are also a number of other differences; for example, Greenberg subgrouped Uralic with the Yukaghir languages. He continued to work on this project from the time of his diagnosis with incurable pancreatic cancer until his death in May, 2001. The final volume of his Eurasiatic work (2002) was seen through the press after his passing by his colleague and former student Merritt Ruhlen.
Selected works by Joseph H. Greenberg
Books
Studies in African Linguistic Classification. New Haven: Compass Publishing Company. (Photo-offset reprint of the SJA articles with minor corrections.)
Essays in Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
The Languages of Africa. (Heavily revised version of Greenberg 1955.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (From the same publisher: second, revised edition, 1966; third edition, 1970. All three editions simultaneously published at The Hague by Mouton & Co.)
Language Universals: With Special Reference to Feature Hierarchies. The Hague: Mouton & Co. (Reprinted 1980 and, with a foreword by Martin Haspelmath, 2005.)
Language in the Americas. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family, Volume 1: Grammar. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family, Volume 2: Lexicon. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Genetic Linguistics: Essays on Theory and Method, edited by William Croft. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Books (editor)
Universals of Language: Report of a Conference Held at Dobbs Ferry, New York, April 13-15, 1961. Cambridge: MIT Press. (Second edition 1966.)
Universals of Human Language, 4 volumes. Volume 1: Method and Theory. Volume 2: Phonology. Volume 3: Word Structure. Volume 4: Syntax. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Articles, reviews, etc.
Journal of Negro History 25.3, 372-375.
- 1941. "Some problems in Hausa phonology."
Language 17, 316-323.
- 1947. "Arabic loan-words in Hausa."
Word 3, 85-87.
- 1948. "The classification of African languages."
American Anthropologist 50, 24-30.
- 1949. "Studies in African linguistic classification: I. Introduction, Niger-Congo family."
Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 5, 79-100.
- 1949. "Studies in African linguistic classification: II. The classification of Fulani."
Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 5, 190-98.
- 1949. "Studies in African linguistic classification: III. The position of Bantu."
Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 5, 309-17.
Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 6, 47-63.
- 1950. "Studies in African linguistic classification: V. The Eastern Sudanic Family."
Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 6, 143-60.
- 1950. "Studies in African linguistic classification: VI. The Click languages."
Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 6, 223-37.
- 1950. "Studies in African linguistic classification: VII. Smaller families; index of languages."
Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 6, 388-98.
- 1954. "Studies in African linguistic classification: VIII. Further remarks on method; revisions and corrections."
Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 10, 405-15.
- 1957. "The nature and uses of linguistic typologies."
International Journal of American Linguistics 23, 68-77.
- 1960. "The general classification of Central and South American languages." In
Selected Papers of the Fifth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, edited by Anthony F.C. Wallace, 791-4. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. (Reprinted in Genetic Linguistics, 2005.)
- 1962. "Is the vowel-consonant dichotomy universal?"
Word 18, 73-81.
Universals of Language, pp. 58–90. Cambridge: MIT Press. (In second edition of Universals of Language, 1966: pp. 73-113.)
- 1966. "Synchronic and diachronic universals in phonology."
Language 42, 508-17.
- 1970. "Some generalizations concerning glottalic consonants, especially implosives."
International Journal of American Linguistics 36, 123-145.
- 1971. "The Indo-Pacific hypothesis." In
Current Trends in Linguistics, Volume 8: Linguistics in Oceania, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok et al., 807-871. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter. (Reprinted in Genetic Linguistics, 2005.)
- 1972. "Numeral classifiers and substantival number: Problems in the genesis of a linguistic type."
Working Papers in Language Universals 9, 1-39.
- 1979. "Rethinking linguistics diachronically."
Language 55, 275-90.
- 1979. "The classification of American Indian languages." In
Papers of the Mid-American Linguistic Conference at Oklahoma, edited by Ralph E. Cooley, Mervin R. Barnes, and John A. Dunn, 7-22. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Interdisciplinary Linguistics Program.
- 1981. "African linguistic classification." In
General History of Africa, Volume 1: Methodology and African Prehistory, edited by Joseph Ki-Zerbo, 292-308. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
- 1983. "Some areal characteristics of African languages." In
Current Approaches to African Linguistics, Volume 1, edited by Ivan R. Dihoff, 3-21. Dordrecht: Foris.
- 1985. With Christy G. Turner II and Stephen L. Zegura. "Convergence of evidence for peopling of the Americas."
Collegium antropologicum 9, 33-42.
- 1986. With Christy G. Turner II and Stephen L. Zegura. "The settlement of the Americas: A comparison of the linguistic, dental, and genetic evidence."
Current Anthropology 27.5 (December 1986), 477-97.
Language 65.1, 107-114.
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 137.1, 79-90.
- 2000. Review of Michael Fortescue,
Language Relations across Bering Strait: Reappraising the Archaeological and Linguistic Evidence. Review of Archaeology 21.2, 23-24.
See also
External links
New York Times (February 1, 2000) by William Croft (2003) (also: ) by William Croft (2003)
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