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Merritt Ruhlen
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Merritt Ruhlen (pronounced ), born in 1944, 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. In most regards, his work stands within the mainstream of standard comparative-historical linguistics. As the principal advocate and defender of Joseph Greenberg's approach to language classification, he has been the subject of numerous and withering attacks, which have not led to any change in his positions.
Biography
Ruhlen studied at Rice University, the University of Paris, the University of Illinois and the University of Bucharest.
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Encyclopedia
Merritt Ruhlen (pronounced ), born in 1944, 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. In most regards, his work stands within the mainstream of standard comparative-historical linguistics. As the principal advocate and defender of Joseph Greenberg's approach to language classification, he has been the subject of numerous and withering attacks, which have not led to any change in his positions.
Biography
Ruhlen studied at Rice University, the University of Paris, the University of Illinois and the University of Bucharest. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 1973 with a dissertation on the generative analysis of Romanian morphology. He subsequently worked for several years as a research assistant on the Stanford Universals Project directed by Joseph Greenberg and Charles Ferguson. Since 1994, he has been a lecturer in Anthropological Sciences and Human Biology at Stanford and co-director, along with Murray Gell-Mann and Sergei Starostin, of the Santa Fe Institute Program on the Evolution of Human Languages. He has also been a visiting professor at the City University of Hong Kong. Ruhlen knew and worked with Joseph Greenberg for three and a half decades and became the principal advocate and defender of his methods of language classification.
Works
Ruhlen is the author of several books dealing with the languages of the world and their classification:
A Guide to the Languages of the World
A Guide to the Languages of the World provides information on the phonological systems and classifications of 700 languages, prefaced by background information for linguists as well as non-linguists. A greatly expanded version of this work was published in 2005 on the Santa Fe Institute web site.
A Guide to the World’s Languages
In 1987, Ruhlen published A Guide to the World’s Languages, Volume I: Classification, which includes a complete classification of the world’s languages as well as a history and analysis of the genetic classification of languages. In addition to the factual information in this book, Ruhlen provides an examination and defense of the controversial taxonomic work of Joseph Greenberg.
On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy
In 1994, Ruhlen published two books with similar titles. On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy is aimed at a scholarly audience and maintains that some of the assumptions current among historical linguists are incorrect. Among these, Ruhlen argues, is the opinion that only the discovery of regular sound correspondences and the reconstruction of its protolanguage can be considered convincing evidence for the existence of a language family – these latter steps can, according to him, only be carried out after the existence of a language family has been discovered by classification.
The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue
Ruhlen’s other book published in 1994, The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue, explores many of the same topics but with a more general, non-technical, audience in mind. This book includes exercises in which the readers are invited to classify languages themselves using the technique of mass comparison, better described as multilateral comparison.
Major interests
Multidisciplinary approach
Ruhlen has been in the forefront of attempts to coordinate the results of historical linguistics and other human sciences, such as genetics and archaeology. In this endeavor he has extensively worked with the geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza for three decades and with the archaeologist Colin Renfrew for two decades.
Taxonomic methods
Most of the criticism directed at Ruhlen centers around his defense of Joseph Greenberg's technique of language classification, called "mass comparison" or "multilateral comparison", which involves comparing the basic vocabulary of the languages being investigated, examining it for similarities in sound and meaning, and formulating a hypothesis of classification based on these. Ruhlen maintains that such classification is the first step in the comparative method and that the other operations of historical linguistics, in particular the formulation of sound correspondences and the reconstruction of a protolanguage, can only be carried out after a hypothesis of classification has been established.
While, for instance, Hock claims that only reconstruction proves genetic affinity, and that Indo-European, Uralic, Dravidian, Austronesian, Bantu, and Uto-Aztecan have all been proved by successful reconstructions, Ruhlen disagrees, noting:
As an example, Ruhlen mentions Delbrück (1842-1922), who considered Indo-European to have been proved by the time of Bopp at the beginning of the 19th century and that the basis for this proof was the "juxtaposition of words and forms of similar meaning."
Perhaps the strongest evidence supporting Ruhlen can be found in the work of the geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, who has studied the genes in human populations throughout the world and constructed phylogenetic trees, similar in many respects to traditional trees of language families, showing where in the "tree" given genetic groups separated. The results are widely (though not universally) accepted as matching up remarkably well with Ruhlen's proposed structure of the languages and language families of the world. This has served to convince nonlinguists of the validity of Ruhlen's classifications, yet linguists agree that genetic relatedness cannot be used to adduce linguistic relatedness.
This tree has been criticized by some linguists and anthropologists on several grounds: that it makes selective use of languages and populations (omitting the numerous Sino-Tibetan speakers of northern China, for example); that it assumes the truth of such linguistic groups as Austric and Amerind that are controversial; and that several of the population groups listed are defined not by their genes but by their languages, making the correlation irrelevant to a comparison of genetic and linguistic branching and tautological as well.
The Amerind macrofamily
Ruhlen has supported and adduced more evidence for one of Greenberg’s most controversial hypotheses, the Amerind language family. According to the Amerind hypothesis, all of the languages of North and South America, except for the Na-Dené and Eskimo-Aleut language families, belong to a single macrofamily.
Ruhlen thus rejects the prevailing opinion that there are over 200 separate language families in the Americas among which there is no evidence for genetic affinity. He stresses the importance of the three-way i / u / a (i.e. masculine / feminine / neutral) ablaut in such forms as t'ina / t'una / t'ana ("son / daughter / child") as well as of the general American pronominal pattern na / ma (i.e. "I / you"), first noted by Alfredo Trombetti in 1905. Some linguists have attributed this pronoun pattern to other than genetic causes. He refers to the earliest beginnings of the dispute, quoting from a personal letter of Edward Sapir to A.L. Kroeber (1918):
It should be stressed that Greenberg and Ruhlen's views on the languages of the Americas have failed to find acceptance among the vast majority of linguists working with these languages.
Yeniseian-Na-Dené
According to Ruhlen, linguistic evidence indicates that the Yeniseian languages, spoken in Siberia, are most closely related to the Na-Dené languages (here including Haida), spoken in North America. The hypothesis is supported by independent findings of other scholars, for example Heinrich K. Werner, or Edward J. Vajda (who nevertheless rejects Haida's membership in the Na-Dené language family).
This would mean that Na-Dené represents a distinct migration from Asia to the New World, intermediate between the first migration of Proto-Amerind speakers around 13,000 years ago and the third migration of Eskimo-Aleut speakers around 5,000 years ago. Concurring with his earlier work, Ruhlen thinks the Yeniseian–Na-Dené population can plausibly be traced to West Asia, where the more distantly related Caucasian and Burushaski languages, two other members of the tentative Dené-Caucasian family, are found.
The Proto-Sapiens hypothesis
On the question of the Proto-Sapiens language and global etymologies, most “mainstream” historical linguists reject Ruhlen's assumptions and methodology, holding that it is impossible to reconstruct a language spoken at least 30,000 years ago (possibly more than 100,000 years ago). Ruhlen has responded that he (and Bengtson) have never claimed to have reconstructed Proto-Sapiens, but have simply pointed out that reflexes of very ancient words can still be found in the world’s languages:
Ruhlen also maintains that the “temporal ceiling” assumed by many mainstream linguists – the time depth beyond which the comparative method fails, considered by some to lie at roughly 6,000 to 8,000 years ago – does not exist, and that the now universally recognized existence of a language family as old as Afro-Asiatic, not to mention the even older Eurasiatic (whose existence remains controversial), shows that the comparative method can reach farther into the past than most linguists currently accept.
External links
- , including an exhaustive list of his publications.
- Including the latest version of
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