THE MOTHER TONGUE

By Pieter Uys

Note in honor of Professor Joseph H Greenberg 1915 – 2001.

Joseph Harold Greenberg of Stanford University was the greatest linguist of the 20th
century. He specialized in language typology and genetic classification.
The monogenetic (single) origin of languages is a controversial concept rejected by the
majority of linguists. A minority does believe that all human languages had a common
source but that because of word replacement and radical phonetic changes it would be
impossible to reconstruct it. There are many arguments against the idea of
monogenesis and the possibility of reconstructing the Mother Tongue.

But the formidable linguist Dr Joseph Greenberg had a different view. During his long
career he classified most of the world's languages, starting with those of Africa in the
1950s. His African genetic classification initially encountered fierce opposition but is
now accepted by all. His student Merritt Ruhlen has published what Greenberg
considered to be the world’s 12 major language families.*(see below)

Before his death in 2001 Dr Greenberg identified words that seem common to all of
the linguistic ‘superfamilies’ and might be distant echoes of the original Mother
Tongue.

FROM New York Times obituary by Nicholas Wade, May 15, 2001:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?

res=9C06E0DF143AF936A25756C0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewan

ted=all

“Though his work remained controversial within historical

linguistics, it was warmly embraced by population geneticists. From

analysis of DNA sequences, the geneticists have recently discovered

that modern humans expanded out of Africa in a series of

population splits that accords closely with the language divisions Dr.

Greenberg had inferred on purely linguistic evidence.

Dr. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, a population geneticist at Stanford

University, […] cited ''significant correspondences'' between what
Dr. Greenberg theorized and genetic findings.”
Map with key from Stanford University: http://greenberg-
conference.stanford.edu/
FROM WIKIPEDIA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Greenberg

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"
This kind of research was taken up by many scholars following Greenberg's example
and continues to be an important kind of data-gathering in synchronic linguistics.

Genetic Classification

African languages
Greenberg is widely known for his development of a new classification system for
African languages, which he published in 1963. The classification was for a time
considered very bold and speculative, especially in his proposal of a Nilo-Saharan
language family, but is now generally accepted among African historical specialists. In
the course of this work, Greenberg coined the term "Afroasiatic" to replace the earlier
term "Hamito-Semitic" after showing that Hamitic is not a valid language family.
Greenberg's classification was largely based on earlier classifications, making new
macrogroups by joining already established families - based on his method of mass
comparison. The classification has been used as a basis for further work and some
historical linguists have proposed even broader proposals of African language families.

Indo-Pacific languages
In 1971 Greenberg proposed the Indo-Pacific superfamily, which groups together the
Papuan languages (several language families spoken in Papua New Guinea and nearby
regions which are not Austronesian) together with the native languages of Tasmania
and the Andaman Islands, but excludes Australian Aboriginal languages.

Languages of the Americas** (see book review below)

Americanist linguists classify the native languages of the Americas into two large
families, Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dené, spoken in well-defined parts of North America,
and some 600 to 2000 other separate families (Diamond 1997:368), spoken in the rest
of North America and through Central and South America. Early on, Greenberg became
convinced that many of the reportedly unrelated languages could be classified into
larger groupings. In his 1987 book Language in the Americas, he supported the Eskimo-
Aleut and Na-Dené groupings, but proposed that all the other Native American
languages belonged to a single family. He termed this postulated family Amerind.

Eurasiatic languages*** (see book review below)

Later in his life, Greenberg proposed to join many language families of Europe and
Asia into a single group called Eurasiatic, fairly similar to Illich-Svitych's earlier
Nostratic proposal but differing in important ways - notably the exclusion of the Afro-
Asiatic languages, which has since become popular among Nostraticists as well.

Map of African languages http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Niger_Congo

http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Niger_Congo
“Joseph Greenberg was the first to identify the boundaries of this family,

which he called Niger-Congo, in a series of articles published between 1949

and 1954. Just before these articles were collected in final book form (The

Languages of Africa) in 1963, he amended his classification by adding

Kordofanian as a branch co-ordinate with Niger-Congo as a whole;

consequently, the family was renamed Niger-Kordofanian. Bennet and Sterk

(1977) presented a reclassification based on lexicostatistics that laid the

foundation for the influential classification in Bendor-Samuel 1989.

Kordofanian was thought to be one of several primary branches rather than

being co-ordinate to the phylum as a whole, prompting re-introduction of the

term 'Niger-Congo', which is in current use among linguists.”

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?
res=9C06E0DF143AF936A25756C0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewan
ted=all

Joseph Greenberg, 85, Singular Linguist, Dies

By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: May 15, 2001

Dr. Joseph H. Greenberg, an eminent linguist and classifier of the

world's languages, died on May 7 in Stanford, Calif. He was 85.
[…]
Dr. Greenberg's effort to work out the historical relationships among
most of the world's 5,000 languages is regarded as a monumental
work of scholarship but still has critics.

http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/articles/archaeo-language.html
February 1, 2000

SCIENTIST AT WORK / Joseph H. Greenberg

What We All Spoke When the World Was Young

By NICHOLAS WADE

In the beginning, there was one people, perhaps no more than 2,000 strong, who had

acquired an amazing gift, the faculty for complex language.

Favored by the blessings of speech, their numbers grew, and from their cradle in the

northeast of Africa, they spread far and wide throughout the continent. One small

band, expert in the making of boats, sailed to Asia, where some of their descendants

turned westward, ousting the Neanderthal people of Europe and others east toward

Siberia and the Americas.

These epic explorations began some 50,000 years ago and by the time the whole world

was occupied, the one people had become many. Differing in creed, culture and even

appearance, because their hair and skin had adapted to the world's many climates in

which they now lived, they no longer recognized one another as the children of one

family. Speaking 5,000 languages, they had long forgotten the ancient mother tongue

that had both united and yet dispersed this little band of cousins to the four corners of

the earth.

Language in the Americas

by Joseph H Greenberg
MY REVIEW:

Milestone in historical linguistics

This book poses a mighty challenge to the orthodox view that there are up to

200 or at least several dozen independent families of indigenous languages in

the Americas, by asserting that there are no more than three: Eskimo-Aleut

which is related to the Eurasian macrofamily extending across Europe and

Northern Asia; Na-Dene which is concentrated in the south- and northwest of

North America, and Amerind, comprising about 90% of American languages.

In seeking to reconstruct the evolution of language groups and the relationships

among their component languages, linguists have become accustomed to

comparing a few languages across many words, but Professor Greenberg's

approach is the opposite -he looks at a large number of languages across a

smaller number of words. This book examines a vast amount of lexical

material, mostly Amerind.

Chapter 3 treats each of the 11 proposed subgroups of Amerind in a separate

section with an enumeration of its languages and their classification, plus a

brief history of previous taxonomic hypotheses and a set of characteristic

etymologies. The following two chapters present the evidence for Amerind as a

single macrofamily, with Chapter 4 providing about 1900 lexical etymologies

common to two or more subgroups and Chapter 5 pointing out more than 100

grammatical features found across the subgroups.

Other chapters discuss the unity and bounds of Amerind, classification

methodology and the problem of Na-Dene. The final chapter deals with the

historical implications for the settling of the Americas by three waves of

peoples. The book contains 3 maps, 4 appendices, a bibliography and 3 indices:

Amerind Etymologies, Language Names and General. Further interesting studies

on language in the Americas can be found in Merritt Ruhlen's "On The Origin Of

Languages".

Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The

Eurasiatic Language Family: Lexicon v. 2
by Joseph H Greenberg
MY REVIEW:

A family within Nostratic

Joseph H Greenberg (1915 - 2001) was probably the most important linguist of the
20th century, well-known for his work in classification and typology. His classification
of African languages into the 4 macro-families Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Khoisan and
Niger-Kordofanian in the books Studies in African linguistic classification (1955) &
Languages of Africa (1963) was almost universally rejected by the linguists at the time,
then accepted by African specialists and universally accepted today.

The Danish linguist Holger Pedersen first proposed the idea of Nostratic in 1903.
Modern Nostraticists differ about the exact extent of this genetic grouping but it
generally includes Afro-Asiatic (languages include Hebrew, Akkadian, Arabic, Egyptian
& Coptic, Aramaic, Hausa & Somali), Kartvelian (Georgian), Indo-European (Italic,
Celtic, Greek, Germanic, Baltic, Armenian etc.), Uralic (incl. Finnish & Hungarian),
Dravidian (incl. Tamil & Telugu), Altaic (incl. Mongolian & Turkish) and Eskimo-Aleut.
Nowadays there's growing support for the view that Nostratic had a Southern Cluster:
Dravidian, Kartvelian & Afro-Asiatic and a Northern which corresponds closely with
Eurasiatic.

Greenberg came to the conclusion that what he termed Eurasiatic languages are more
closely related in time to one another, and as a family most closely related to the
Amerind family of the Americas. In his view the Afro-Asiatic, Kartvelian and Dravidian
families separated from Eurasiatic much earlier. In Volume 1: Grammar, he
investigates 72 grammatical etymologies. In this second volume, he explores the
lexical evidence through 437 lexical etymologies.

Eurasiatic consists of Altaic, Chukotian, Eskimo-Aleut, Etruscan, Gilyak, Indo-

European, Japanese-Korean-Ainu and Uralic-Yukaghir. Many of the relevant
etymologies of the larger families had already been published in the work of
Nostraticists like Bomhard, Dolgopolsky, Illich-Svitych and Kerns, so Greenberg
emphasizes those from languages not considered Nostratic like Ainu, Gilyak, Chukotian
or deserving of more attention like Eskimo-Aleut.

He speculates that the Eurasiatic & Amerind families may have separated around
15,000 BP with the melting of the Arctic ice cap. The root *ME demonstrates the
closeness of Eurasiatic & Amerind, as it encompasses meanings like "hand" & "measure"
in both families; compare Italian MANO to Algonquian MI or Uto-Aztecan MA, all
meaning hand.
Greenberg's methodology is explained in chapter one of Language in the Americas, his
seminal work on Amerind. This methodology does not equate the regularity of sound
correspondences with regular sound changes. There is no one-to-one relation since
strict regularity is broken by for example analogy and lexical diffusion. Amongst the
evidence provided is the following: English - Mother, Father, Brother versus German
Mutter, Vater, Bruder. The brother breaks the pattern.

Further proof is available from the Turkic language group. Chuvash vowels do not
correspond with those in Old Turkic and there are significant consonantal variations.
The same holds true for the Dravidian languages of India & Pakistan where phonetic
correspondences do not exist in etymological clusters. Yet the cognates are obvious in
all the aforementioned cases.

The main body of the work consists of the 437 lexical etymologies with reference to a
huge array of living and extinct languages like Ainu, Gilyak, Old Japanese, Eskimo-
Aleut, Proto Indo-European, Altaic, Hittite, Armenian, Greek, Latin, Uralic and
Lithuanian to mention just a few.

So exactly which living languages comprise Eurasiatic? They are:

Altaic (Mongolic, Turkic, Tungusic)

Chukotian (5 small languages of northeastern Siberia & the Kamchatka Peninsula)

Eskimo-Aleut (Spoken from Alaska to Greenland)

Gilyak (Spoken by about one thousand Nivkh people in far eastern Siberia & Sakhalin
Island)

Indo-European (Albanian, Armenian, Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Indo-Iranian,

Italic & Slavic, representing the dominant languages of the Americas, Europe, southern
Asia from Armenia eastwards through northern India to Bangladesh, plus Australia &
New Zealand). To further elaborate on just two of these, the Italic family today
comprises inter alia Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian & Romanian, whilst the
Germanic includes English, Dutch, German, Danish, Swedish & Afrikaans to name a
few.

Japanese-Korean-Ainu (Japan, Korean Peninsula)

Uralic-Yukaghir (Estonian, Finnish & Magyar of Europe plus the tiny Yukaghir group in
Siberia).

The extinct families/languages include Anatolian of which Hittite was the most
prominent, Etruscan which was spoken in Tuscany and surrounding areas of north-
central Italy and the easternmost Indo-European language Tocharian of the Xingjian
Uyghur region of China.

This fascinating book includes tables, maps, bibliographic references plus semantic &
phonetic indexes. Together with volume one & Language in the Americas, it makes a
valuable contribution to genetic classification and the study of mankind's unknown
past. Although there is fierce opposition now, I have no doubt Greenberg will be
proved correct as he was in the case of the languages of Africa. Just give it another 50
years.

I also recommend Sprung from Some Common Source: Investigations Into the
Prehistory of Languages edited by Sydney M Lamb, The Nostratic Macrofamily: A
Study in Distant Linguistic Relationship by Allan R Bomhard and On the Origin of
Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy by Merritt Ruhlen.

The World’s Language Families (1991) in

RUHLEN, MERRITT: A Guide to the World’s
Languages, Volume 1: Classification.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.
1 KHOISAN (Africa)
2 NIGER-KORDOFANIAN (Africa)
3 NILO-SAHARAN (Africa)
4 AUSTRALIAN (Australia)
5 INDO-PACIFIC (New Guinea, Melanesia)
6 AUSTRIC (India, SE Asia, Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia)
7 DENE-CAUCASIAN (Caucasus, Asia, North America)
8 AFRO-ASIATIC (Middle East, Africa)
9 ELAMO-DRAVIDIAN (Asia)
10 KARTVELIAN (Caucasus)
11 EURASIATIC (Asia, Europe)
12 AMERIND (North & South America)