Current Issues in Linguistic Taxonomy Peter A. Michalove; Stefan Georg; Alexis Manaster Ramer Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 27. (1998), pp. 451-472. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0084-6570%281998%292%3A27%3C451%3ACIILT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-X Annual Review of Anthropology is currently published by Annual Reviews.
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CURRENT ISSUES IN LINGUISTIC TAXONOMY Peter A. Michalove University of Illinois, 307 S. McKinley, Champaign, IL 61821-3247: e-mail:
[email protected]
Stefan Geo1.g Uni\ ersity of Bonn, Heerstrasse 7. Bonn. D-53 11 1 Federal Republic of Gennany, e-mail
[email protected]
Alexis Manaster Rarner Wayne State University, 4225 Walden Dri\e. Ann Arbor, MI 48105: e-mail: manaster@umich edu KEY WORDS: historical linguistics, comparative linguistics
The genealogical classification of languages has been the subject of investigation for more than two centuries, and progress continues to be made in deepening our understanding of language change, both in theoretical terms and in the study of specific language families. In recent years. as in the past, many new proposals of linguistic relationships have been constructed. some promising to various degrees and others clearly untenable. The debate about specific recent proposals is part of the healthy process needed to evaluate proposed relationships. discard those that prove incorrect. and refine those of merit. Rather than evaluating the relative linguistic "distance" between potentially related languages, with temporal distance leading to some point where we cannot distinguish real relationships from chance similarities, we propose a scale of easy to difficult relationships in which temporal distance is only one factor that makes some relationships more recognizable than others.
INTRODUCTION Linguistic taxonomy, the attempt to group languages by genetic affiliation, has been going on informally for as long as people have noticed that some lan-
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guages share certain features that do not characterize other languages. But it was Sir William Jones' famous statement in 1786 that not only led to the recognition of Indo-European (which has become the most intensely studied language family in the world, by far), but also put linguistic taxonomy on a solid foundation for the first time: The Sanskrit language, whatever may be its antiquity. is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than Greek. more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either. yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity. both \vithin the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed that no philologer could examine them all. without believing them to have sprung from some common source. \vhich. perhaps. no longer exists.. ..
Although there were various precursors of Jones, such as Pere Gaston Coeurdoux (see Godfrey 1967), it was Jones' statement alone that influenced the developlnent of comparative linguistics. One of the immediate implications of Jones' pronouncement was the concept that all living languages change over time. Thus, the thousands of modem languages spoken in the world today are all later. changed fosms of earlier languages and, at least in many cases, they are later. changed forms of the same earlier languages. Thus, by comparing languages that have developed from an earlier comlnon ancestor. we can reconstruct, to varying degrees, the actual features of the ancestral language comlnon to that group of later. attested languages. By the middle of the nineteenth century, many linguists concluded that it might be possible to reconstruct the greater part of such an unattested ancestral tongue language (which came to be known as a "proto-language"). although ever since then opinions have continued to be divided over the extent to which we can hope to know any proto-language. This view of a discernible genealogical relationship among at least many of the languages of the world paralleled the growth of Darwinian ideas ofbiological evolution and Linnaean classification in the nineteenth century. Over the past two centuries. however, the study of historical and comparative linguistics has grown vastly more sophisticated, and scholars have profited from the lessons gained in neighboring fields, such as synchronic linguistics. anthropol-
ogy, and sociology. While the genetic model of linguistic relationships is still the best way to describe the relationships among the majority of languages. more recent insights about language contact have demonstrated that linguistic development is not nearly so simple. Thus, the lexicon of modem English, a Germanic language, consists no re of loan fosms (primarily from Latin, French, and Norse, with slnaller contributions from a host of other languages around the world) than of native forms. Yet the derivation of its most basic vocabulary, as well as its structure, leave no doubt of its Germanic origins. We can see this clearly by comparing features of
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English and German, such as ablaut (vocalic alternations that indicate morphological functions) in the English paradigm sing, sang, sung with German singen, sang, geszlngen; or in suppletive relationships like English good, better, best with Gerrnan gut, besser, am besten. At the same time, the presence of loans in the language makes the need to distinguish native and borrowed elements a key task in historical linguistics. In languages without the long written tradition of English (that is, the majority of languages of the world), this task is all the more crucial and difficult, but not necessarily impossible, as we shall see below. As the field of historical linguistics matured, a number of language families quickly emerged as clear taxonomic entities, agreed upon by all scholars who worked with them. Some, like the Romance or Germanic languages, were easily recognized as valid families simply because their structure and lexicon were so obviously parallel. Indo-European as a whole, while more diverse and less obviously related, came to be recognized as an uncontroversial grouping, simply because it was subject to greater study, since most historical linguists were native speakers of Indo-European languages. Still other language groupings, such as Altaic and Na-Dene, have been more controversial and, to some extent, remain so, partly because the evidence is much less clear, and partly because they have received far less scholarly attention than have the classical languages of the Old World. In the meantime, new research continues to modify our views of the taxonomy of even wellrecognized families. Our goal in this paper is to survey some of the better-known current proposals, and to put them and the discipline of linguistic classification into proper historical perspective. We refrain from discussion of our personal views on each of these proposals, since that is not our goal here, and in fact the three of us do not all agree on the merits of each of these proposals. In addition, some of these proposals involve languages with which we do not all have familiarity and are not competent to judge. Rather, in this survey we hope to convey some of the potential and importance of recent work in language classification. The study of linguistic classification is twofold: ( a ) It attempts to identify which languages are demonstrably continuations of a common earlier fonn, and (11) it attempts to separate that evidence for common origin from the more recent developments within the individual languages as well as the results of language contact. In these tasks, the discipline of historical linguistics has achieved a number of remarkable successes, both in identifying language families that represent later, changed forms of a common ancestral language, and in identifying spurious matches, common features of attested languages that are not, in themselves, evidence of common ancestry. Thus, to take a concrete example, we know that forms like Modern English rev, Latin dec,em, Greek dPka, Sanskrit daSu, Russian desjat', Lithuanian
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dFiimt, and Annenian tusn are cognate fonns; that is, they represent the subsequent developments of a common Indo-European form. usually reconstructed as *deGtp. A vast number of fornls illustrate the correspondences by which English and Armenian initial .It.'- correspond to Idi- in the other branches of Indo-European; certain instances of Is.' in Slavic and Armenian, and Lithuanian .:'I correspond to .'k/ in the other branches: Greek /a/ and Armenian and Germanic final .'II.' correspond to the vocalic *lqV of Indo-European: Sanskrit lai corresponds to Greek and Latin /el, and so on. Examples of each of these correspondences can be found dozens and, in some cases, hundreds of times among these languages. By the same token. the absence of such correspondences in English forms such as decade and decinzul indicates that we are not dealing with native Germanic forms, but with loan words-in this case, the first from Greek. and the second from Latin. Similar regularities in ~norphologicalconstn~ctiollsare another important clue that we are dealing with descendants of a common earlier language. For example. Latin es-t (he is) and s-zlnt (they are), correspond to Sanskrit as-ti and s-anti (id.), Old Church Sla\.onicJes-tli and .s-~tli(id.). as well as German is-/ and s-ind (id.) and other Indo-European fonns.
FACT AND MYTH IN LINGUISTIC TAXONOMY Largely thanks to the work of Greenberg (1955. 1963), but going back at least to Setala (191 3), we also know that many typological features, such as vowel harmony (the restriction on vowels that may co-occur within a given phonological domain). or ergativity (the manner of marking subjects of intransitke verbs and direct objects of transitive \-erbs) occur in many languages throughout the world and are not probative for linguistic relationship. While most linguists take this point for granted today. it is all too easy to forget that the early surveys of the languages of the world had yet to learn this lesson. While we cannot review the entire history of linguistic classification, we should note that Adelung ( 1806-1 8 17), a monumental and valuable effort, classified languages according to their geographical locations but. especially in the first volume devoted to the languages of Asia, the top-level subdi\-ision is that into "einsylbige" vs "mehrsylbige Sprachen": moreover, according to Adelung, the latter are viewed as derived from the former. Typological traits are thus viewed as principally subject to change. Nevertheless, even if sometimes remarkable observations are made that this or that language has some material elements (usually words) in common with another language, Adelung's work rests largely on these isomorphisms of for111 rather than on material commonalities. In fact, languages commonly gain or lose typological features in the course of their development. Old Turkic. like most of the ~nodernTurkic languages, exhibits vowel harmony, but this feature has largely been lost in modern urban Uzbek. Most Indo-European languages, including Classical Greek. on the
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other hand, do not have vowel harmony; however, it has developed relatively recently in the Greek of Asia Minor. Similarly, ergative morphosyntax is attributed to proto-Kartvelian and is characteristic of Georgian and Svan, but it can be shown to have been lost in Laz and Mingrelian, the other two languages of that family. And while ergativity is not characteristic of most Indo-European languages, it developed relatively recently in Hindi-Urdu and most of the other modern Indic languages. The same diversity of development can be shown to apply to the other typological factors, such as word order, the presence or absence of phonemic tone, morphological structure, and others. Greenberg (1955, 1963) also clarified (as had again been stated as early as Setala 1913) that language relationships cannot be determined on the basis of ethnicity. The mistaken notion that languages can be meaningfully classified on the basis of the race or physical type of their speakers is already present in Adelung, especially in Volume 3 on African languages, but reached its epitome in Miiller (1876-1 887), that other major milestone-for, despite this and other drawbacks, a milestone it was-of nineteenth-century language classification. Here, the very subdivision of the work clearly bespeaks the racial foundation of the whole enterprise. Thus, we find ( a )"Die Sprachen der wollhaarigen Rassen" ("The languages of the thick-haired races") (Khoisans, Papuans, and Black Africans); (11) "Die Sprachen der schlichthaarigen Rassen" ("The languages of the sleek-haired races") (Australians, Native Americans, Oceanians, and Asians-the latter further differentiated into speakers of monosyllabic and polysyllabic languages): (c) "Die Sprachen der lockenhaarigen Rassen" ("The languages of the curly haired races") (Nubas and Dravidians); and (d)"Die Sprachen der mittellandischen Rasse" ("The languages of the Mediterranean race"), comprising Caucasians, Basques, and the speakers of IndoEuropean and Afroasiatic languages. Although Miiller explicitly subscribes to the principle that language-relationship can only be asserted and demonstrated positively on the basis of regular material correspondences of vocabulary and morphology, his whole work is riddled with this racial perspective, leading to the acceptance of Altaic but an apparent rejection of Uralic (Samoyed plus Finno-Ugric), obviously for racial reasons. Elsewhere, very correct observations on the relationship between Hausa and other "Hamitic" languages are made, but at last attributed to a "profound influence of Hamitic" on one of the languages of Black Africa, again in order not to allow any language grouping to transgress Miiller's a prioristic racial groups. Of course, languages cannot be meaningfully classified on racial bases. Factors such as conquest, migration, and intermarriage can cause speakers of one language to adopt a completely different language. In the United States alone, English is spoken by representatives of probably every ethnicity in the world. At the same time, a child born to English-speaking parents but raised in
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an environment speaking some different language \\.ill grow up as a native speaker of that language.
RECENT PROGRESS IN LINGUISTIC TAXONOMY In recent years, the comparison of known language families in a search for more distant relationships has received a great deal of scholarly and (what may be a new factor) public attention. Many of the neu proposals have been quite controversial and, unfortunately, the rhetoric has become very strident and increasingly extremist. Coming on the heels of a generation that showed relatively little interest in diachronic work of any sort. this kind of stormy debate may appear to be a new development in historical linguistics. But our thesis here is that current work in linguistic classification is simply the continuation of a longstanding scholarly tradition that, unfortunately, does not proceed in neat, clearly agreed-upon steps, but that, in the long sun, has always yielded worthwhile results. In fact. aside from some of the more controversial cunent proposals, it is important to note that progress in linguistic classification has been a constant throughout the past two centuries. and recent decades have seen a number of important steps in understanding the position of languages whose affinity had not been previously understood or agreed upon. While the position of a number of languages and families (such as Eskimo-Aleut. Afroasiatic, and Algic) has reached a consensus in recent decades. two examples seem to be especially informati\-e. The Vietnamese language. uhich was tentatix.ely linked with Mon-Khmer in the nineteenth century (Logan 1852. Forbes 188 1). came under further question in the early twentieth century. Its typological similarities with Chinese (such as the phonemic role of tonal contrasts and its primarily monosyllabic structure), along with the large number of Chinese loans in the language led some scholars to consider Vietnamese a Sino-Tibetan language, or specifically a member of the Diac group, which was considered part of Sino-Tibetan at the time. The great authority of Maspero (see Maspero 1912) added considerable weight to this position. But. as we will see shortly, typological similarities can be misleading in genealogical classification, and the matter was not really settled until the decisi\-e array of papers by Haudricourt ( I 952. 1953. 1954). Haudricourt showed that the system of Vietnamese tones developed from the historical loss of certain consonants. and that regular correspondences could be established between the six phonemic tones of Vietnamese and the position of consonants that had been retained in other Mon-Khmer languages. Thus, Vietnamese u a s firmly established among specialists as a Mon-Khmer language that had been subject to enormous Chinese intluence; Logan's and Forbes' original hypothesis was confinned a century later. but this time on a more scientific footing.
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A different example is that of the Daic languages (of uhich the best known is Thai). As we mentioned, these, like Vietnamese, were originally classified with Sino-Tibetan, largely on the basis of typological features and extensive Chinese influence. Benedict (1942) showed that the Sino-Tibetan (specifically Chinese) elements were loans from Chinese, and that Daic could not be treated as part of that family, a finding that is almost universally accepted now. Benedict included Daic in a proposed Austro-Thai family (consisting of Austronesian, Kadai (Thai, Kam-Sui, Lati, and some other minor southeast Asian groups), and Miao-Yao (Hmong-Mien), but that conclusion has not found wide support among others. As a result, the Daic family is now seen as an uncontroversial family. but one to which relations with any other falnilies have not been demonstrated. This example shows that "progress" in linguistic classification cannot be measured solely through greater consolidation of previously recognized families; in some cases, it means the removal of languages from falnilies in which they had been wrongly included. In broader terms, "progress" here can only mean deepening our understanding of the relationships among the world's languages. Moreover, this work of Benedict's, as well as that of other pioneers of linguistic taxonomy (such as Bopp and Rask in the nineteenth century, Sapir and Kroeber earlier in the twentieth century, and Greenberg and Benedict in our time) reveals another important point: the fact that the same linguist quite typically advances a number of proposals of differing quality and probative value. Thus, Benedict included Daic in a proposed Austro-Thai family (consisting of Austronesian, Kadai (Thai, Kam-Sui, Lati, and some other minor southeast Asian groups) and Miao-Yao (Hmong-Mien), but that conclusion remains controversial. As a result, the Daic family is now seen as an uncontroversial family, but one whose relations with any other falnilies are still open to debate. Perhaps the best-known and most thoroughly argued of the currently debated proposals is the Nostratic theory, first proposed by Holger Pedersen (1903), and worked out in some detail by Vladislav M Illich-Svitych in the 1960s before his premature death (Illich-Svitych 1967, 197 1-84). IllichSvitych's vision ofNostratic proposed a genetic affiliation among the Afroasiatic, Kartvelian, Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, and Dravidian families. IllichSvitych worked out specific phonological correspondences among these languages, and his posthumous Nostratic dictionary and other works list close to 700 proposed cognates, with varying distributions among the families. One reason that work like Illich-Svitych's appeared when it did is that by the early 1960s, comparative grailllnars andlor etymological dictionaries of these families had been completed. Thus, Illich-Svitych worked from a comparison of reconstructed proto-languages. This procedure struck some observers as a new methodology, but like so much else in recent comparative work, it was really a simple extension of previous methods. The idea of comparing re-
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constructed proto-languages. however imperfectly we may have reconstructed them, is not new: Indo-Europeanists have always ~ i i a d eat least implicit use of Proto-Germanic. Proto-Slavic. Proto-Celtic, and others. since w e d o not have an attested parent form to represent those families. O f course the coniparison o f reconstructed forms can be a somewhat dangerous approach. since our reconstructions are allnost by definition incomplete and are always subject to change as new data become available, or new means o f analysis are applied. For example. i f n e w languages are discovered or newly described, or if outstanding phonological proble~nsare solved by new analyses, then our reconstructed form will have a different look. In this sense, reconstructions alu,ays present a moving target and niay appear less reliable a basis for comparison and further. deeper reconstruction. But a reconstructio~iis by definition a set o f correspondences among attested languages, and the exact phonetic realization of a reconstructed form is not nearly as important to historical linguists as the fact of the attested correspondences. E ~ c nwith the addition o f new data. we still work from the fact that a set of correspondences in one group o f languages regularly corresponds to a siniilar or different set o f correspondences in another group. For example, after the development of the laryngeal theory (or theories) (Winter 1965) in the twentieth century, vie\\;s o f Proto-lndo-Europea~iphonology \vere subjected to profound modification. But the geneticity o f Indo-European was not affected by the inclusion of laryngeals in reconstruction ivork; a new set of correspondences simply took the place o f soliie earlier reconstructions. 111 the conlparison of reconstructed for~iisthen, we must distinguish between ivell-established language families, s ~ ~ as c hDravidian. Uralic, or UtoAztecan, in which \ve are sure that many (although not necessarily all) of the forms \ve compare are truly cognate. and less well established families like Austro-Thai. North Caucasian, o r Khoisan, ivhere fi~rtherresearch may well modify our \.ie\\.s of what forms are indeed cognate. Comparison o f reconstructed forms from these families is naturally much riskier than that of betterestablished families and must be undertaken with the greatest care. O f the language families tliat are established on the basis of large n u n ~ b e r sof cognate forms, studied by specialists in the karious constituent languages, \ve know of no case in ivhich subsequent findings in reconstruction have altered the model of genealogical affiliation. This achie\.ement of historical linguistics may well be unparalleled in the other empirical sciences.
WIDER, CURRENTLY DEBATED CLASSIFICATIONS The exact coniposition of Nostratic is not agreed on by all scholars \vho have dealt \\ ith it. Some recent work suggests that Dravidian and perhaps Afroasiatic do not belong in this group. and tliat Cliukclii-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-
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Aleut do belong here. Joseph Greenberg's (1987) Eurasiatic hypothesis is similar to Nostratic, but excludes Afroasiatic, Dravidian, and Kartvelian-not because Greenberg believes that these families are unrelated to the others, but because he considers their relationship to be more distant, so that they do not form a taxonomic node with the others. Greenberg does include ChukchiKamchatkan, Eskimo-Aleut, Gilyak, and Ainu in his Eurasian proposal. Bomhard & Kenls (1994) and Bomhard (1996) accept Greenberg's Eurasiatic grouping (except for Ainu) and see Eurasiatic as a subset of a larger Kostratic family, restoring Afroasiatic, Dravidian, and Kartvelian at the Nostratic level as more distant relatives, and possibly adding Sumerian. In fact, the question of subgrouping is often more controversial than the establishment of larger affinities. In Indo-European, the textbook example of a language family, for example, the relationships of Slavic and Baltic, or Hellenic and Armenian are still undecided. Thus. while Altaic is part of all of these versions of Nostratic, the unity of that family itself is vigorously debated, while Chukchi-Kamchatkan itself is not accepted by all scholars. Yet slnaller configurations of these families (such as Chukchi-Kamchatkan and EskiinoAleut) have been proposed by some scholars (Swadesh 1962, Hamp 1976). Other recent proposals include Dene-Caucasian (Bengtson 1995, 1997), a proposal uniting Basque. Korth Caucasian. Sino-Tibetan. Burushaski. Yeniseian, and Ka-Dene. This proposal is an extension of an earlier one by Starostin (1 984) of an affiliation consisting only of North Caucasian. Sino-Tibetan, and Yeniseian. Of these families, North Caucasian is not accepted by all scholars in the field (for example. Kliinov 1986). and the inclusion of Eyak, Tlingit, and Haida in Na-Dene is disputed as well. While the Dene-Caucasian hypothesis is also based on a set of phonological correspondences among the various languages, it is not nearly as well worked out as Nostratic. and Trask (1995) in particular has shown that many of the Basque forms proposed are secondary or the result of borrowing. Other currently contro~ersiallanguage families include Austric (uniting Austronesian with Austroasiatic) (Benedict 1942), Pakawan (a group of extinct languages of Texas and northern Mexico) (Manaster Ramer 1996), and several others. An important sociological point that must be mentioned in this context is that. for many languages of the world. the taxonomic (or indeed. any) work is done by a very small number of specialists (sometimes as few as one). The sparse coverage of many of the world's languages, especially as far as taxonomy (as opposed to description) is concerned. is also probably the reason why it has more than once been possible for a putative language family to be proposed (and to some extent accepted) on the basis of mere assertions by the one linguist knowledgeable in the relevant area and with literally no data being presented (as happened with Swanton's Coahuiltecan and several of Sapir's proposals in the Korth American arena; see Swanton 19 15; Sapir 19 13, 19 15,
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1920. 192 1 a.b. 1925. 1929). Similar sociological considerations help explain why reference works, textbooks. encyclopedias. and other works of general linguistics have often failed to keep up with the current state of certain proposals (e.g. Altaic in recent decades), sometimes even going so far as to proclaim as fact certain proposals that were far from being generally accepted by specialists in the particular languages (e.g. Ural-Altaic between the world wars) or pronouncing as refuted for all time theories that were (or are) if anything winning increasing acceptance (as with Altaic in the last few years). Somewhat aside from these and other proposals based on the application of traditional methods in historical linguistics is the work of Joseph Greenberg (whose Eurasiatic proposal was alluded to above). based on the comparison of e s once. Greenberg's method of lexical data from large numbers of l a n g ~ ~ a g at classification by "mass comparison" of lexical data goes back at least to von Strahlenberg ( I 730), who used lexical lists to produce an actually quite conseri.ative classification of many of the language families of the Russian Empire. (For more discussion of the connection betiveen von Strahlenberg's and Greenberg's work. see Manaster Ramer 8( Sidivell 1997: 155-56). to demonstrate the affiliaGreenberg used the approach most s~~ccessfully tion of the Afroasiatic family and, by the account of some Africanists (Newman 1995), his findings for the other languages of Africa still hold up well. He has applied the technique most ambitiously to the languages of the Americas. where he concludes (1987) that all of the indigenous languages of North and South America, except for Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene, are related in an "Amerind" family. Hoivever. even this proposal was not entirely neiv, as it was largely foreseen in Sivadesh (1960). While the process of comparing often moder11 forms of large numbers of languages ivithout the confirmatory tools of phonological correspondences may seem to be a superficial one, Newman (1993:235) points out that, whatever the validity of its results in individual cases. Greenberg's work is based not on superficial observation, but on a kind of "immersion technique in which after looking at huge quantities of data from language after language. one begins to develop a sense of what is diagnostic for one group as opposed to an1988:595-96) have claimed that other." Although some critics ( e . Campbell ~ Greenberg considers only lexical parallels to the exclusion of morphological evidence, Newman ( 1 993235-36) continues, "[a]lthough vocabulary is inevitably given prominence, by Greenberg and others, in methodological discussions on mass comparison. in practice Greenberg has always accorded great importance to grammatical similarities in his works on classification. This ivas true in his successful African linguistic classitlcation, and his American Indian classification is no exception." Greenberg often states (1 987 and elsewhere) that his goal is classitlcation, not reconstmction, and that classification must necessarily precede recon-
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struction. He asks how we can reconstruct a language family if we have not first established the genealogical affinity of the languages on which we will base our reconstruction. But it is important to note that, in practice, classification and reconstruction are usually performed in tandem, with (in successful cases) one confirming or refining the other, and it makes little sense to ask which of the two tasks a linguist is working on at a given moment. On the same basis, although perhaps without Greenberg's depth of insight, his adherent Ruhlen (1994a,b) and others (such as John Bengtson and Vaclav Blaiek) have proposed that all languages of the world can be shown to be related, and they have published claims of a number of "proto-world" etymologies (e.g. Ruhlen 1994a). The claim that it might be possible to recover at least some part of the origins of all (surviving) languages goes back at least to the work of Trombetti (1905, 1922). While the idea of monogenesis of language is an appealing one, and may find some confirmation in anthropology, we should note that this is not the issue here. The issue is what relationships we can establish on the basis of the linguistic forms now available to us, and this is what scholars from Trombetti to Ruhlen, Blaiek and Bengtson claim to do. Thus, for these linguists, all problems of classification, then, are really problems of subclassification of a single ultimate family. Few other linguists, however, have accepted their conclusions.
NEW PROPOSALS AND THEIR CRITICS: BETWEEN SKEPTICISM AND REJECTIONISM Thus, as we have seen, many new classificatory proposals have been proposed in recent years, and not all of them will stand the test of time. (In fact, not all of them can be correct, since some are mutually exclusi\.e.) In addition, it is likely that any of the new proposals that may turn out to be essentially correct will need significant revision, just as most theories in historical linguistics ha\ e always been subject to r e ~ i s i o noften , radically. For this reason, detailed critiques of new proposals, particularly by specialists in the \.arious languages in~.olved,are needed and should be welcomed by all parties. The best of recent skeptical work questioning current proposals (such as Vine 199 1 on Nostratic, and Trask 1995 on Dene-Caucasian) does just that, by addressing the data. It is only through a rigorous analysis of the data that we can properly evaluate the individual proposals, work to refine those that appear to be promising, and abandon those that do not. Or, put another way, there is a world of difference between controversial groupings such as Altaic, or even Nostratic (which, whether or not they are eventually found to be correct, or even partially correct, are backed up by solid scholarship and a careful consideration of the histories of the languages involved), and group-
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ings such as "Maya-Altaic" (Wikander 1967-7 I), "Korean as Indo-European" (Eckardt 1965), or "the Dravidian and Manding substratum in Tocharian" (Winters 1988), which can easily be dismissed because they lack just such background. This kind of discrimination, of course. is based on an analysis of the data in the individual proposals being e\ aluated. But what is particularly disturbing are the recent claims that linguistic connections beyond some gi\.en time limit cannot be reco\.ered, so the data adduced for such proposals is a priori meaningless. For example, Nichols (1992:s-6) states, "The cornparati~emethod when applied at time depths greater than its cut-off point of some 8,000 years gives no way of choosing between competing claims ofrelatedness." Later, h'ichols ( 1 992: 184) states that, Since the comparative method is only valid for time depths up to about 10,000 years. in principle it cannot tell us whether any two stocks of a continent-sized area are related or not. and thus in principle it cannot tell whether features shared by several stocks in a continent are ultimately related.. . .
Hock (1986:566) states of the prospects for long-range comparison. Ultimately, this issue is tied up u ith the question of whether there Ivas a single or multiple origin of Language ( ~ v r ilarge). t And this question can be answered only in terms of unverifiable speculations, gilren the fact that e l e n with the added time depth provided by reconstruction. our kno~vledgeof the history of human languages does not extend much beyond ca. 5000 BC. a small "slice" indeed out of the long prehistory of language.. ..
These writers do not explain how they arrived at their figures. but in addition to his claim of a limit on the capability of reconstn~ction,Hock adds the erroneous claim that proposals going beyond ca 5000 BC represent proto-world, that is, the question of "whether there was a single or multiple origin of Language (writ large)." Certainly there is a huge difference, which should be clarified here, between proposals like Nostratic (which represents only a small fraction of the world's languages) and claims of true proto-world reconstruction. Hock & Joseph also fail to make this distinction clear in their work. where they include a chapter entitled "Proto-World? The Question of Long-Distance Genetic Relationships" (Hock & Joseph 1996:485-506). The very title suggests that they do not distinguish between proto-world hypotheses based on mass comparison and more modest. but controversial proposals like Nostratic based on the traditional comparative method. In this chapter, Hock & Joseph offer some valid (as well as some straw-man) critiques of the proto-world proposal and Greenberg's techniques. But having dismissed proto-world efforts (in the chapter as a whole), they then quickly write off Nostratic and all other proposals of greater time depth with the same broad brush (Hock & Joseph 1996:495-96).
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But like so much else in recent work, the claim that the comparative method has gone as far as it can go is not a new one. More than a generation ago, Kroeber (1960:2 1) said without any references or argument, But there comes a point in the past-perhaps 10,000 years ago, perhaps less-at which the [sc. comparative] method no longer yields reliable results.. ..
Similarly, Lehmann (1962:49) wrote, Genealogical classification was admirably suited to determine the interrelationships of languages such as the Indo-European for which we have many records from several millennia. For languages attested only today we may be limited to classification based on typology.. . .
Haas (1966: 120) specifically addressed Lehmann's argument by pointing out that, "the work of Bloomfield on Algonkian, together with that of Sapir on Uto-Aztecan, Athapaskan, and other linguistic families" show how much can be determined about language families that do not have early written records. In the Old World, the well-established Uralic family, which has been reconstructed to a very large extent, demonstrates the same point. Languages without early written records have played an important role in historical linguistics, and the histories of many of them have been worked out in considerable detail. Early written records are extremely useful, but not always necessary for linguistic classification. Although all of these claims of ceilings on the capability of the comparative method are intended as approximate, not absolute thresholds, the point to stress here is that even approximate limits, if inherent in the method, must be relative at best. The varying rates of change affecting different features of a language preclude any universal cut-offs in the method, even approximate ones. In addition, there are other factors, such as the number of attested languages in the family, morphological constructions that produce highly recognizable alternations, and the like, that will make some families more amenable to reconstruction than others. Further, it is important to note that some families may be reconstructable to a greater level of detail than others, reflecting the difference in features retained. In fact, genetic affiliation can be demonstrated on the basis of a very small number of cognate fosms if they are truly convincing. Goddard (1986), for example, argues that only 35, or 18%, of the 196 morphemic and lexical comparisons proposed by Sapir (19 14) between Algonquian and Ritwan are definitely correct, and another 13, or 7%, are likely to be. Yet, after rejecting between 76% and 82% of Sapir's etymologies, Goddard, like all modem scholars who have considered these relationships, accepts Sapir's demonstration that Algonquian and Rituran are related, thanks to the work of Haas (1958). Moreover, comparative linguistics, especially the work on linguistic taxonomy, ap-
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pears to be learned by experience and example rather than from any explicit set of first principles. As a result, the chances of a probabilistic "killer" argument for or against any proposed linguistic classification seem remote. We consider it far more important to attennpt an application of the linguistic methods to the data we do have than to pronounce the effort a priori impossible (or, 011 the other extreme. rendered a priori unnecessary by some probabilistic shortcut). Furthermore. since \,cry few linguists now accept glottochronology as a reliable means of absolute dating of language splits (see Bergsland & Vogt 1963). it is very difficult to assign any firm dates to the proto-languages \ve are C ~ be confident of a date beyond which valid relationships supsure ot; I ~ L I less posedly cannot be identified. Another style of rejection of much new \vork attempts to propose mathematical tests ofthe number and distribution of the proposed cognates to determine whether a given set of languages can be considered dennonstrably related. This is the approach of Ringe (1992, 1995) but his work is based on flawed mathematics. as sIio\\-n in Manaster Ramer & Hitchcock (1996) and Baxter 8r Manaster Ranier (1 996). In fact, it shows complete disregard of the basic ideas of probability theory: It confuses the notion of a binoniial distribution Lvith randomness; it fails to test for significance: and above all it constructs arguments based on the (fallacious) notion that for a given set of languages to be related they must exhibit sonie pclrticz~lurproperty to a gi\.en degree. A glaring example ofthis reasoning is Ringe's central claim that t\vo languages can only be regarded as related if, given a particular list of 100 meanings. \ve find the words with these meanings, compare the initial consonants of the I\ ords with the same meaning across the t\vo languages, and find more matches between any such consonant in one language and in the other than ~vouldbe expected by chance. This ignores the possibility of relationships among other ~ v o r d sthan those in the particular 100-meanings list, relationships betlveen words with somelvhat different but relatable meanings (e.g. English holll~iiI\ ith Dutch honii, Lvhich means not "a hunting dog" but simply "dog," as the English word did once). as well as relationships involving \.owels or consonants in other than I\ ord-initial position. A further argument against the possibility of establishing linguistic affiliations older than those already settled is that recent nark in language contact points increasingly to the significance of such contact in the development of languages. The fact of language contact, borrolving, and other factors that make the genetic model messy have al~vaysbeen part of the picture. At the extreme. there are a handful of examples of "mixed languages" (see Bakker & Maarten 1994), such as East Armenian Romany (Armenian and Romany). Copper Island Aleut (Russian and Aleut). Mitchif (French and Cree), and Loshnekoudesh (Hebrew and Yiddish), for Lvhich we can identify the principal sources of the elements of each language, but cannot alnays say ~vhichis na-
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tive and which is borrowed because neither component is clearly dominant. For these cases, although there are very few of them, the simple genealogical model is not a successful means of describing linguistic development. That such factors are receiving more attention now (see e.g. Thomason & Kaufman 1988, Bakker & Maarten 1994) is a positive development in historical linguistics; it helps us to understand the total process of language change, and it helps us to identify spurious relationships or spurious elements in genuine relationships. But it is not a substitute for the study of genealogical developments that underlie most language relationships, even, as we mentioned above, for English, which has undergone such massive influences from Romance and other sources.
TOWARD AN EVALUATION SCHEME FOR PROPOSALS IN LINGUISTIC TAXONOMY But what of Greenberg's (and now others') method of mass comparison, intended to demonstrate relationship, not provide reconstruction? As we have observed, the distinction between the two is somewhat artificial, and further, every linguist knows how easy it is to construct word lists of more-or-less similar fonns with vaguely similar meanings from randomly chosen languages. As Greenberg himself points out, his findings should be seen as a first step in understanding the relationships of the languages he has dealt with. The relationships he posits are his best guess based on the data he has observed, and they may be refuted by positing a relationship that fits the data better. As Trask (1996:389) points out, there can be at least three reactions to Greenberg's work: ( a )Mass comparison is, all by itself, adequate to establish previously undetected genetic groupings; ( b )Mass comparison is not, of itself, adequate to establish genetic links, but it is none the less valuable in generating promising hypotheses for further investigation by conventional methods; (c) Mass comparison is worthless for any purpose, and is indeed pernicious and obstructive of serious work. In an intellectual environment where, for example, Campbell (in Greenberg et al 1986:488) calls for Greenberg's work to be "shouted down," even before Greenberg (1987) was published, Trask rightly laments that little attention has been paid to the possibilities offered by the second option listed above. Surely, significant further classificatory work can be done in the native American languages, and Greenberg's work, with all its flaws, is at the very least a useful tool in finding possibilities worth further investigation. Trask's observation that the intellectual climate has pushed too many scholars to the extremes is a valuable one, and the attempts of writers like Ringe (1992, 1995) on Nostratic, Campell (1988) on Amerind, or Doerfer (1973, 1993) on Nostratic have often sought to discredit carefully constructed, if im-
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perfect. hypotheses on the basis of isolated weaknesses. Doerfer's (19631975, 1966, and passini) work has addressed Altaic more systematically, but still with excessive prejudice and preconceptions (see Georg et al. manuscript in preparation). This approach has not helped the state of our knowledge in any of these areas. Rather than forcing oursel\,es to accept or reject each new proposal in toto. it would be niore useful to put our efforts into correcting the flaws in the niore promising proposals and see what we can build on their stronger points. Clearly. the probleni of how to e\,aluate the validity of the currently controversial proposals (or any future ones) is far from being solved. but just as clearly, progress is being made. The large-scale agreement regarding niethodological issues in Altaic, despite the fact that even the authors of this paper disagree about the likely ultimate resolution of the Altaic issue (Georg et al. manuscript in preparation), is one example. Campbell's (1996) pointed critique of Manaster Ramer's (1 996) specific arguments for Pakawan mark a similar turning point, rejecting many of the spurious criteria that ha\,e often been invented in the past as the basis for rejecting any and all new proposals regarding language classification. and identifying sonie of the strongest points of the Pakawan proposal, on which a re\,ised proposal could be (and is being) crafted. Together with such de\,elopments as the growing acceptance of several other proposals, notably Penutian. Na-Dene (without Haida, whose membership is still not uni\,ersally accepted), and Uralo-Yukaghir. these developments point to a possible future of con\.ergence of opinions in a number of significant areas. It seems essential to us to steer a middle course between these extremes, to grasp that linguistic taxonomy is an ongoing enterprise that is neither finished because we have reached a teniporal ceiling that cannot be exceeded for identifying relationships, nor finished because we have solved all the problenis. It seems essential to us to find a way to identify the issues that are neither proven nor hopeless, and to work toward their eventual solution. In this light, it niay be instructive to plot language affiliations (and proposed affiliations) on a sort of continuum, with decreasing degrees of transparency (and hence acceptability) for observers with different backgrounds and research interests. At the lolvest end of such a continuum. we may place different idiolects of the same speech community, followed by dialects or sociolects of what is still generally agreed on by all members of the conimunity to be the same language. The relationship of such lects is usually obvious, and forms part of the worldview of linguistically untrained speakers of natural languages all over the world. Next to this, we may put the dialect-continuum. where slight differences between adjacent dialects of the same language may lead to mutual unintelligibility at the opposite ends of this continuum. often, if political or other boundaries intervene, leading to the emergence of different standard languages as poles attracting the nonstandard dialects. Good examples are the
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Dutch-Low Gennan continuum or East Scandinavian (Norwegian and Swedish). Usually, the nonlinguist understands that these speech forms are somehow related, but not quite the same. The Slavic family illustrates a close-knit relationship with clearer, nongradual, language boundaries-not much mutual intelligibility, but still a transparent relationship. Thus, a speaker of. say, Russian can detect rather easily, without any linguistic background, that even though he or she may not fully understand, say, Czech, the language has many basic words, morphological elements, and processes in common with his own language, and that this relationship does not hold between Russian and German or Czech and Romanian. Knowledge that the latter languages are after all related, that is, the transition from close-knit Slavic to not-immediately-obvious Indo-European, may be marked as the threshold between relationships detectable by common sense alone and those where the methodology of comparative linguistics must be applied. Thus, the relationship of Hungarian to Finnish had to be detected by the application of linguistic sophistication, rather than forming part of the naive worldview of their speakers. Much the same can be said for the relation between Chuvash and other Turkic languages. Svan and Georgian within the Kartvelian language family, or bet~veenArabic and Tamazight (Berber) within Afroasiatic. In addition, most of the classifications, which have received general acceptance by linguistically trained scholars, have the additional probative criterion that the data from one language or branch can be used to explain or solve etymological questions in other branches. A well-known example is that of Vemer's Law (Vemer 1877), in which morphological and accentual data from Greek and particularly Sanskrit solved a problem in Gennanic phonology that could not be solved on the basis of the Germanic data alone. The next step in this continuum may be represented by alignments that are worked on intensively by a large number of researchers, but have not yet attained general or unanimous acceptance. Perhaps the best example of this step on the continuum is the still hotly debated question of the genealogical status of the Altaic languages, involving the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Korean, and, by some accounts, Japanese languages. Disregarding here the generations of debate on the Altaic question that have often revolved around irrelevant typological, ethnic, and political issues (for an account of which, see Georg et al, manuscript in preparation), we may now be at a point where the Altaic question can be investigated as would any other proposal in historical linguistics: on the basis of the data and the objectively based findings of the best researchers who have addressed the issue in the past. Here, proponents of the relationship have worked out phonological correspondences in some detail based on a thorough knowledge of the individual language families involved, and have identified a fair number of common morphological elements. At the same time, the more principled skeptics in this field point to the actual handling of
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the relevant data by at least some proponents of Altaic, the lack of systematicity of the reconstructs proposed so far, the role of contact-induced similarities between the languages (or the lack of a proper distinction between these and the truly genetic material). and the lack of explanatory pol\ er of proto-Altaic as it stands for a better understanding of the lo\\ er-level languages. The ongoing debate on Altaic may currently be regarded as open. I\ ithout a clear consensus in the scholarly community, but capable of solution given a ~videspread consensus on the methodological apparatus to be employed. Proposals at this stage of the continuum rnay simply be labeled as "debated." One step further. proposals such as Nostratic may be posited in this idealized continuum as alignments that. although again based on observations and methods lvell within the range of generally accepted procedures of comparative linguistics, still meet I\ ith more reluctance than support. Again, much of the debate so far has focused on unproductive issues, such as preconceptions of I\ hat a valid language family must look like. or supposed temporal limits on the coniparative method, as we discussed above. We hope that. like Altaic. the Nostratic hypothesis can now be investigated objectively. and purely in light of the data available. whatever conclusions those data rnay lead us to. Proposals like Nostratic and even the considerably less well supported Dene-Caucasian have the virtue of being debatable or testable. They are argued on the basis of the traditional comparative method and are subject to refutation on the same basis. This scale. then. ranging from alignments that are obvious to even untrained persons familiar with the language to those that require the greatest depth of study to even begin to form an opinion. is not intended to describe the actual degrees of relationship that (may) obtain between the languages involved (although it rnay at times coincide with it). Rather, it seeks to present an evaluation-scheme for given proposals. Thus, we do not include in this scale the truly absurd and uninformed proposals, lacking any understanding of comparative linguistics or the known history of the languages involved. Often such proposals are simply impossible. such as those that try to connect Hungarian alone (without the rest ofUralic) to Sumerian, Tungusic, Basque, or any other candidates. For the proposals that can be taken seriously, then, we propose a continuum from the easiest to recognize to the most difficult. In a Greek mood. the authors of this paper have sometimes called the extremes of this continuum "rhadiocomparison" for the easiest, and "khalepo-comparison" for the most difficult. W e feel that this nomenclature has several virtues. For one thing, we hope these terms may replace the often emotion-laden prejudice of a dichotomy between "macro-" versus "micro-"comparison, or between "traditional" versus "long-range" comparison, much less the meaningless distinction of linguists working on language classification into "lumpers" and "splitters."
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We also hope these tenns will erase the idea that the study of more difficult comparison uses different methods or has different goals than work on the easier forms of comparison. In fact. the application of the comparative method, internal reconstruction, and the examination of early texts, when available, must be the same for comparative work in the most obvious or the most oblique comparisons. In addition, we wish to make it clear that difficulty of comparison is not (necessarily) a function of time depth or even geographic distance: In the case of Altaic. for example, it is precisely the mutual influence of neighboring languages, a factor agreed on by all including those who support the hypothesis. that has made the situation so difficult to interpret. Difficulty of comparison derives from the features of the languages and the amount and quality of infonnation available to us. ofwhich relative time depth is only one possibly relevant factor. Thus, statements about the placement of a particular grouping on this continuum are statements about our knolvledge of the languages, not about their plausibility or the degree of acceptance they have attained, much less about their actual degree of relationship. If coniparison of more difficult groupings yields less clear information about the relationships involved, the goal ofconiparative linguistics is precisely to clarify those relationships to the extent possible. Heated controversy in historical linguistics is as old as work on linguistic classification. And as we have seen, principled critiques of individual proposals serve a valuable purpose in separating the promising proposals from the misguided ones, as well as in refining those that are of value. In addition, most mainstream linguists have been understandably jaded by generations of uninformed claims of language origins, often based on nationalistic or reli,'olous agendas. Thus. despite the polarizing tone of much of the current debate, the goal now, as throughout the history of the discipline, is to consider each proposal on its merits and judge each one on the same standards that we apply to any serious proposal in linguistics. Linguistic classification today offers exciting visions and challenges. and those who dismiss new proposals all too easily (like those who accept them all too quickly) do not do the field much good. The current controversies in the study of linguistic relationships are only the continuation of historical linguistics as it has always been practised. Above all, it is a slow business. Such now universally recognized linguistic relationships as Algonquian-Ritwan (Algic), Indoeuropean-Anatolian, Mon-Khmer-Vietnamese (as part of Austro-asiatic). Tlingit-Eyak-Athapaskan (Na-Dene). or Aztec-Sonoran-Shoshonean (Utoaztecan) took anywhere from a decade to a half-century or more between the publication of the first substantive arguments for their validity and the advent of universal recognition. If the current trends toward more acceptance of Hokan, Penutian, Haida-NadCne, Altaic, Austric, and some other hitherto contro-
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versial linkages continue. and they do become universally accepted before the end of the millennium, the record will stretch to something close to a century. The process is difficult, sometimes infuriating, and occasionally truly rewarding as we find new understanding of the developments that produced the languages we find attested today.
I
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