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Joseph Greenberg

Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages.

Joseph Greenberg
Born
Joseph Harold Greenberg

(1915-05-28)May 28, 1915
DiedMay 7, 2001(2001-05-07) (aged 85)
NationalityAmerican
SpouseSelma Berkowitz
Awards
  • Haile Selassie I Prize for African Research (1967)
  • Talcott Parsons Prize for Social Science (1997)
Academic background
Education
Academic work
DisciplineLinguist
Institutions
Doctoral studentsGeorge W. Grace
Main interests
InfluencedMerritt Ruhlen

Life edit

Early life and education edit

Joseph Greenberg was born on May 28, 1915, to Jewish parents in Brooklyn, New York. His first great interest was music. At the age of 14, he gave a piano concert in Steinway Hall. He continued to play the piano frequently throughout his life.

After graduating from James Madison High School, he decided to pursue a scholarly career rather than a musical one. He enrolled at Columbia College in New York in 1932. During his senior year, he attended a class taught by Franz Boas concerning American Indian languages. He graduated in 1936 with a bachelor's degree. With references from Boas and Ruth Benedict, he was accepted as a graduate student by Melville J. Herskovits at Northwestern University in Chicago and graduated in 1940 with a doctorate degree. During the course of his graduate studies, Greenberg did fieldwork among the Hausa people 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.

During 1940, he began postdoctoral studies at Yale University. These were interrupted by service in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II, for which he worked as a codebreaker in North Africa and participated with the landing at Casablanca. He then served in Italy until the end of the war.

Before leaving for Europe during 1943, Greenberg married Selma Berkowitz, whom he had met during his first year at Columbia University.[1]

Career edit

After the war, Greenberg taught at the University of Minnesota before returning to Columbia University in 1948 as a teacher of anthropology. While in New York, he became acquainted with Roman Jakobson and André Martinet. They introduced him to the Prague school of structuralism, which influenced his work.

In 1962, Greenberg relocated to the anthropology department at Stanford University in California, where he continued working for the rest of his life. In 1965 Greenberg served as president of the African Studies Association. That same year, he was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences.[2] He was later elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1973) and the American Philosophical Society (1975).[3][4] In 1996 he received the highest award for a scholar in Linguistics, the Gold Medal of Philology.[5]

Contributions to linguistics edit

Linguistic typology edit

Greenberg is considered the founder of modern linguistic typology,[6] a field that he has revitalized with his publications in the 1960s and 1970s.[7] Greenberg's reputation rests partly on his contributions to synchronic linguistics and the quest to identify linguistic universals. During the late 1950s, Greenberg began to examine 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 conceptualized the idea of "implicational universal", which has 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). Many scholars adopted this kind of research following Greenberg's example and it remains important in synchronic linguistics.

Like Noam Chomsky, Greenberg sought to discover the universal structures on which human language is based. Unlike Chomsky, Greenberg's method was functionalist, rather than formalist. An argument to reconcile the Greenbergian and Chomskyan methods can be found in Linguistic Universals (2006), edited by Ricardo Mairal and Juana Gil.

Many who are strongly opposed to Greenberg's methods of language classification (see below) acknowledge the importance of his typological work. In 1963 he published an article : "Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements".

Mass comparison edit

Greenberg rejected the opinion, prevalent among linguists since the mid-20th century, that comparative reconstruction was the only method to discover relationships between languages. He argued that genetic classification is methodologically prior to comparative reconstruction, or the first stage of it: one cannot engage in the comparative reconstruction of languages until one knows which languages to compare (1957:44).

He also criticized the prevalent opinion that comprehensive comparisons of two languages at a time (which commonly take years to perform) could establish language families of any size. He argued that, even for 8 languages, there are already 4,140 ways to classify them into distinct families, while for 25 languages there are 4,638,590,332,229,999,353 ways (1957:44). For comparison, the Niger–Congo family is said to have some 1,500 languages. He thought language families of any size needed to be established by some scholastic means other than bilateral comparison. The theory of mass comparison is an attempt to demonstrate such means.

Greenberg argued for the virtues of breadth over depth. He advocated restricting the amount of material to be compared (to basic vocabulary, morphology, and known paths of sound change) and increasing the number of languages to be compared to all the languages in a given area. This would make it possible to compare numerous languages reliably. At the same time, the process would provide a check on accidental resemblances through the sheer number of languages under review. The mathematical probability that resemblances are accidental decreases strongly with the number of languages concerned (1957:39).

Greenberg used the premise that mass "borrowing" of basic vocabulary is unknown. He argued that borrowing, when it occurs, is concentrated in cultural vocabulary and clusters "in certain semantic areas", making it easy to detect (1957:39). With the goal of determining broad patterns of relationship, the idea was not to get every word right but to detect patterns. From the beginning with his theory of mass comparison, Greenberg addressed why chance resemblance and borrowing were not obstacles to its being useful. Despite that, critics consider those phenomena caused difficulties for his theory.

Greenberg first termed his method "mass comparison" in an article of 1954 (reprinted in Greenberg 1955). As of 1987, he replaced the term "mass comparison" with "multilateral comparison", to emphasize its contrast with the bilateral comparisons recommended by linguistics textbooks. He believed that multilateral comparison was not in any way opposed to the comparative method, but is, on the contrary, its necessary first step (Greenberg, 1957:44). According to him, comparative reconstruction should have the status of an explanatory theory for facts already established by language classification (Greenberg, 1957:45).

Most historical linguists (Campbell 2001:45) reject the use of mass comparison as a method for establishing genealogical relationships between languages. Among the most outspoken critics of mass comparison have been Lyle Campbell, Donald Ringe, William Poser, and the late R. Larry Trask.

Genetic classification of languages edit

Languages of Africa edit

Greenberg is known widely for his development of a 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, The Languages of Africa, in 1955). He revised the book and published it again during 1963, followed by a nearly identical edition of 1966 (reprinted without change during 1970). A few more changes of the classification were made by Greenberg in an article during 1981.

Greenberg grouped the hundreds of African languages into four families, which he dubbed Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Niger–Congo, and Khoisan. During the course of his work, Greenberg invented the term "Afroasiatic" to replace the earlier term "Hamito-Semitic", after showing that the Hamitic group, accepted widely since the 19th century, is not a valid language family. Another major feature of his work was to establish the classification of the Bantu languages, which occupy much of Central and Southern Africa, as a part of the Niger–Congo family, rather than as an independent family as many Bantuists had maintained.

Greenberg's classification rested largely in evaluating competing earlier classifications. For a time, his classification was considered bold and speculative, especially the proposal of a Nilo-Saharan language family. Now, apart from Khoisan, it is generally accepted by African specialists and has been used as a basis for further work by other scholars.

Greenberg's work on African languages has been criticised by Lyle Campbell and Donald Ringe, who do not believe that his classification is justified by his data and request a re-examination of his macro-phyla by "reliable methods" (Ringe 1993:104). Harold Fleming and Lionel Bender, who were sympathetic to Greenberg's classification, acknowledged that at least some of his macrofamilies (particularly the Nilo-Saharan and the Khoisan macrofamilies) are not accepted completely by most linguists and may need to be divided (Campbell 1997). Their objection was methodological: if mass comparison is not a valid method, it cannot be expected to have brought order successfully out of the confusion of African languages.

By 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. Roger Blench (1995) suggests Niger–Congo is a subfamily of Nilo-Saharan.

The languages of New Guinea, Tasmania, and the Andaman Islands edit

During 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. This excludes the Austronesian languages, which have been established as associated with a more recent migration of people.

Greenberg's subgrouping of these languages has not been accepted by the few specialists who have worked on the classification of these languages.[citation needed] However, the work of Stephen Wurm (1982) and Malcolm Ross (2005) has provided considerable evidence for his once-radical idea that these languages form a single genetic unit. Wurm stated that the lexical similarities between Great Andamanese and the West Papuan and Timor–Alor families "are quite striking and amount to virtual formal identity [...] in a number of instances." He believes this to be due to a linguistic substratum.

The languages of the Americas edit

Most linguists concerned with the native languages of the Americas classify them into 150 to 180 independent language families. Some believe that two language families, Eskimo–Aleut and Na-Dené, were distinct, perhaps the results of later migrations into the New World.

Early on, Greenberg (1957:41, 1960) became convinced that many of the language groups considered unrelated could be classified into larger groupings. In his 1987 book Language in the Americas, while agreeing that the Eskimo–Aleut and Na-Dené groupings as distinct, he proposed that all the other Native American languages belong to a single language macro-family, which he termed Amerind.

Language in the Americas has generated lively debate, but has been criticized strongly; it is rejected by most specialists of indigenous languages of the Americas and also by most historical linguists. Specialists of the individual language families have found extensive inaccuracies and errors in Greenberg's data, such as including data from non-existent languages, erroneous transcriptions of the forms compared, misinterpretations of the meanings of words used for comparison, and entirely spurious forms.[8][9][10][11][12][13]

Historical linguists also reject the validity of the method of multilateral (or mass) comparison upon which the classification is based. They argue that he has not provided a convincing case that the similarities presented as evidence are due to inheritance from an earlier common ancestor rather than being explained by a combination of errors, accidental similarity, excessive semantic latitude in comparisons, borrowings, onomatopoeia, etc.

However, Harvard geneticist David Reich notes that recent genetic studies have identified patterns that support Greenberg's Amerind classification: the "First American” category. "The cluster of populations that he predicted to be most closely related based on language were in fact verified by the genetic patterns in populations for which data are available.” Nevertheless, this category of "First American" people also interbred with and contributed a significant amount of genes to the ancestors of both Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dené populations, with 60% and 90% "First American" DNA respectively constituting the genetic makeup of the two groups.[14]

The languages of northern Eurasia edit

Later in his life, Greenberg proposed that nearly all of the language families of northern Eurasia belong to a single higher-order family, which he termed Eurasiatic. The only exception was Yeniseian, which has been related to a wider Dené–Caucasian grouping, also including Sino-Tibetan. During 2008 Edward Vajda related Yeniseian to the Na-Dené languages of North America as a Dené–Yeniseian family.[15]

The Eurasiatic grouping resembles the older Nostratic groupings of Holger Pedersen and Vladislav Illich-Svitych by including Indo-European, Uralic, and Altaic. It differs by including Nivkh, Japonic, Korean, and Ainu (which the Nostraticists had excluded from comparison because they are single languages rather than language families) and in excluding Afroasiatic. At about this time, Russian Nostraticists, notably Sergei Starostin, constructed a revised version of Nostratic. It was slightly larger than Greenberg's grouping but it also excluded Afroasiatic.

Recently, a consensus has been emerging among proponents of the Nostratic hypothesis. Greenberg basically agreed with the Nostratic concept, though he stressed a deep internal division between its northern 'tier' (his Eurasiatic) and a southern 'tier' (principally Afroasiatic and Dravidian).

The American Nostraticist Allan Bomhard considers Eurasiatic a branch of Nostratic, alongside other branches: Afroasiatic, Elamo-Dravidian, and Kartvelian. Similarly, Georgiy Starostin (2002) arrives at a tripartite overall grouping: he considers Afroasiatic, Nostratic and Elamite to be roughly equidistant and more closely related to each other than to any other language family.[16] Sergei Starostin's school has now included Afroasiatic in a broadly defined Nostratic. They reserve the term Eurasiatic to designate the narrower subgrouping, which comprises the rest of the macrofamily. Recent proposals thus differ mainly on the precise inclusion of Dravidian and Kartvelian.

Greenberg continued to work on this project after he was diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer and until he died during May 2001. His colleague and former student Merritt Ruhlen ensured the publication of the final volume of his Eurasiatic work (2002) after his death.

Selected works by Joseph H. Greenberg edit

Books edit

  • Studies in African Linguistic Classification. New Haven: Compass Publishing Company. 1955. (Photo-offset reprint of the SJA articles with minor corrections.)
  • Essays in Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1957.
  • The Languages of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1963. (Heavily revised version of Greenberg 1955. From the same publisher: second, revised edition, 1966; third edition, 1970. All three editions simultaneously published at The Hague by Mouton & Co.)
  • Language Universals: With Special Reference to Feature Hierarchies. The Hague: Mouton & Co. 1966. (Reprinted 1980 and, with a foreword by Martin Haspelmath, 2005.)
  • Language in the Americas. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1987.
  • Keith Denning; Suzanne Kemmer, eds. (1990). On Language: Selected Writings of Joseph H. Greenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
  • Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family. Vol. 1: Grammar. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2000.
  • Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family. Vol. 2: Lexicon. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2002.
  • William Croft, ed. (2005). Genetic Linguistics: Essays on Theory and Method. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Books (editor) edit

  • Universals of Language: Report of a Conference Held at Dobbs Ferry, New York, April 13–15, 1961. Cambridge: MIT Press. 1963. (Second edition 1966.)
  • Universals of Human Language. Vol. 1: Method and Theory, 2: Phonology, 3: Word Structure, 4: Syntax. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1978.

Articles, reviews, etc. edit

  • Greenberg, Joseph H. (1940). "The decipherment of the 'Ben-Ali Diary': A preliminary statement". Journal of Negro History. 25 (3): 372–375. doi:10.2307/2714801. JSTOR 2714801. S2CID 149671256.
  • Greenberg (1941). "Some problems in Hausa phonology". Language. 17 (4): 316–323. doi:10.2307/409283. JSTOR 409283.
  • Greenberg, Joseph H. (1947). "Arabic loan-words in Hausa". Word. 3 (1–2): 85–87. doi:10.1080/00437956.1947.11659308.
  • Greenberg, Joseph H. (1948). "The classification of African languages". American Anthropologist. 50: 24–30. doi:10.1525/aa.1948.50.1.02a00050.
  • "Studies in African linguistic classification: I. Introduction, Niger–Congo family". Southwestern Journal of Anthropology. 5: 79–100. 1949. doi:10.1086/soutjanth.5.2.3628626. S2CID 149333938.
  • Greenberg, Joseph H. (1949). "Studies in African linguistic classification: II. The classification of Fulani". Southwestern Journal of Anthropology. 5 (3): 190–98. doi:10.1086/soutjanth.5.3.3628501. S2CID 164123099.
  • Greenberg, Joseph H. (1949). "Studies in African linguistic classification: III. The position of Bantu". Southwestern Journal of Anthropology. 5 (4): 309–17. doi:10.1086/soutjanth.5.4.3628591. S2CID 130651394.
  • Greenberg (1950). "Studies in African linguistic classification: IV. Hamito-Semitic". Southwestern Journal of Anthropology. 6 (1): 47–63. doi:10.1086/soutjanth.6.1.3628690. JSTOR 3628690. S2CID 163617689.
  • Greenberg, Joseph H. (1950). "Studies in African linguistic classification: V. The Eastern Sudanic Family". Southwestern Journal of Anthropology. 6 (2): 143–60. doi:10.1086/soutjanth.6.2.3628639. S2CID 163502465.
  • Greenberg, Joseph H. (1950). "Studies in African linguistic classification: VI. The Click languages". Southwestern Journal of Anthropology. 6 (3): 223–37. doi:10.1086/soutjanth.6.3.3628459. S2CID 147343029.
  • Greenberg, Joseph H. (1950). "Studies in African linguistic classification: VII. Smaller families; index of languages". Southwestern Journal of Anthropology. 6 (4): 388–98. doi:10.1086/soutjanth.6.4.3628564. S2CID 146929514.
  • Greenberg, Joseph H. (1954). "Studies in African linguistic classification: VIII. Further remarks on method; revisions and corrections". Southwestern Journal of Anthropology. 10 (4): 405–15. doi:10.1086/soutjanth.10.4.3628835. S2CID 162901139.
  • Greenberg, Joseph H. (1957). "The nature and uses of linguistic typologies". International Journal of American Linguistics. 23 (2): 68–77. doi:10.1086/464395. S2CID 144662912.
  • Anthony F.C. Wallace, ed. (1960). "The general classification of Central and South American languages". Selected Papers of the Fifth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. pp. 791–4. (Reprinted in Genetic Linguistics, 2005.)
  • Greenberg, Joseph H. (1962). "Is the vowel-consonant dichotomy universal?". Word. 18 (1–3): 73–81. doi:10.1080/00437956.1962.11659766.
  • . Cambridge: MIT Press. 1963. pp. 58–90. Archived from the original on 2010-09-20. (In second edition of Universals of Language, 1966: pp. 73–113.)
  • Greenberg (1966). "Synchronic and diachronic universals in phonology". Language. 42 (2): 508–17. doi:10.2307/411706. JSTOR 411706.
  • Greenberg, Joseph H. (1970). "Some generalizations concerning glottalic consonants, especially implosives". International Journal of American Linguistics. 36 (2): 123–145. doi:10.1086/465105. S2CID 143225017.
  • Thomas A. Sebeok; et al., eds. (1971). "The Indo-Pacific hypothesis". Current Trends in Linguistics, Volume 8: Linguistics in Oceania. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 807–871. (Reprinted in Genetic Linguistics, 2005.)
  • "Numeral classifiers and substantival number: Problems in the genesis of a linguistic type". Working Papers in Language Universals. 9: 1–39. 1972.
  • Greenberg (1979). "Rethinking linguistics diachronically". Language. 55 (2): 275–90. doi:10.2307/412585. JSTOR 412585.
  • Ralph E. Cooley; Mervin R. Barnes; John A. Dunn, eds. (1979). "The classification of American Indian languages". Papers of the Mid-American Linguistic Conference at Oklahoma. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Interdisciplinary Linguistics Program. pp. 7–22.
  • Joseph Ki-Zerbo, ed. (1981). "African linguistic classification". General History of Africa, Volume 1: Methodology and African Prehistory. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. pp. 292–308.
  • Ivan R. Dihoff, ed. (1983). "Some areal characteristics of African languages". Current Approaches to African Linguistics. Vol. 1. Dordrecht: Foris. pp. 3–21.
  • With Christy G. Turner II and Stephen L. Zegura (1985). "Convergence of evidence for peopling of the Americas". Collegium Antropologicum. 9: 33–42.
  • With Christy G. Turner II and Stephen L. Zegura (December 1986). "The settlement of the Americas: A comparison of the linguistic, dental, and genetic evidence". Current Anthropology. 27 (5): 477–97. doi:10.1086/203472. S2CID 144209907.
  • Greenberg, J. H. (1989). "Classification of American Indian languages: A reply to Campbell". Language. 65 (1): 107–114. doi:10.2307/414844. JSTOR 414844.
  • Greenberg, J. H. (1993). "Observations concerning Ringe's 'Calculating the factor of chance in language comparison'". Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 137 (1): 79–90. JSTOR 986946.
  • "Review of Michael Fortescue: Language Relations across Bering Strait: Reappraising the Archaeological and Linguistic Evidence". Review of Archaeology. 21 (2): 23–24. 2000.

Bibliography edit

  • Blench, Roger. 1995. "Is Niger–Congo simply a branch of Nilo-Saharan?" In Fifth Nilo-Saharan Linguistics Colloquium, Nice, 24–29 August 1992: Proceedings, edited by Robert Nicolaï and Franz Rottland. Cologne: Köppe Verlag, pp. 36–49.
  • Campbell, Lyle (1986). "Comment on Greenberg, Turner, and Zegura". Current Anthropology. 27: 488. doi:10.1086/203472. S2CID 144209907.
  • Campbell, Lyle. 1997. American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509427-1.
  • Campbell, Lyle. 2001. "Beyond the comparative method." In Historical Linguistics 2001: Selected Papers from the 15th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Melbourne, 13–17 August 2001, edited by Barry J. Blake, Kate Burridge, and Jo Taylor.
  • Diamond, Jared. 1997. Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: Norton. ISBN 0-393-03891-2.
  • Gregersen, Edgar (1972). "Kongo-Saharan". Journal of African Languages. 11 (1): 69–89.
  • Mairal, Ricardo and Juana Gil. 2006. Linguistic Universals. Cambridge–NY: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-54552-5.
  • Ringe, Donald A. (1993). "A reply to Professor Greenberg". Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 137: 91–109.
  • Ross, Malcolm. 2005. "Pronouns as a preliminary diagnostic for grouping Papuan languages." In Papuan Pasts: Cultural, Linguistic and Biological Histories of Papuan-speaking Peoples, edited by Andrew Pawley, Robert Attenborough, Robin Hide, and Jack Golson. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, pp. 15–66.
  • Wurm, Stephen A. 1982. The Papuan Languages of Oceania. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.

See also edit

References edit

  1. ^ Croft, William. "Joseph Harold Greenberg." (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on July 9, 2008. Retrieved June 10, 2008.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  2. ^ "Joseph H. Greenberg". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved 2022-08-01.
  3. ^ "Joseph Harold Greenberg". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 2022-08-01.
  4. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2022-08-01.
  5. ^ . Archived from the original on 2016-03-03. Retrieved 2015-09-12.
  6. ^ Luraghi, S. (2010) Introduzione, in Crof & Cruise Linguistica cognitiva, Italian edition, p.19
  7. ^ Song, Jae Jung (2010). "Setting the Stage". doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199281251.013.0001. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  8. ^ Chafe, Wallace. (1987). [Review of Greenberg 1987]. Current Anthropology, 28, page 652-653.
  9. ^ Goddard, Ives. (1987). [Review of Joseph Greenberg, Language in the Americas]. Current Anthropology, 28, 656-657.
  10. ^ Goddard, Ives. (1990). [Review of Language in the Americas by Joseph H. Greenberg]. Linguistics, 28, 556-558.
  11. ^ Golla, Victor. (1988). [Review of Language in the Americas, by Joseph Greenberg]. American Anthropologist, 90, page 434-435.
  12. ^ Kimball, Geoffrey. (1992). A critique of Muskogean, 'Gulf,' and Yukian materials in Language in the Americas. International Journal of American Linguistics, 58, page 447-501.
  13. ^ Poser, William J. (1992). The Salinan and Yurumanguí data in Language in the Americas. International Journal of American Linguistics, 58 (2), 202-229. PDF
  14. ^ Reich, David. (2018). Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. Chapter 7. New York: Pantheon Books (2018).
  15. ^ (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on May 18, 2008. Retrieved 2009-03-17., University of Alaska Fairbanks
  16. ^ Starostin, George S.. “On the Genetic Affiliation of the Elamite Language.” (2005).

External links edit

  • by Nicholas Wade, New York Times (February 1, 2000)
  • Memorial Resolution
  • by William Croft (2003)

joseph, greenberg, director, yiddish, language, films, joseph, green, actor, this, article, needs, additional, citations, verification, please, help, improve, this, article, adding, citations, reliable, sources, unsourced, material, challenged, removed, find, . For the director of Yiddish language films see Joseph Green actor This article needs additional citations for verification Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources Unsourced material may be challenged and removed Find sources Joseph Greenberg news newspapers books scholar JSTOR January 2011 Learn how and when to remove this template message Joseph Harold Greenberg May 28 1915 May 7 2001 was an American linguist known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages Joseph GreenbergBornJoseph Harold Greenberg 1915 05 28 May 28 1915Brooklyn New York U S DiedMay 7 2001 2001 05 07 aged 85 Stanford California U S NationalityAmericanSpouseSelma BerkowitzAwardsHaile Selassie I Prize for African Research 1967 Talcott Parsons Prize for Social Science 1997 Academic backgroundEducationColumbia CollegeNorthwestern UniversityYale UniversityAcademic workDisciplineLinguistInstitutionsUniversity of MinnesotaColumbia UniversityStanford UniversityDoctoral studentsGeorge W GraceMain interestsLinguistic typologyGenetic classification of languagesAmerind languagesInfluencedMerritt Ruhlen Contents 1 Life 1 1 Early life and education 1 2 Career 2 Contributions to linguistics 2 1 Linguistic typology 2 2 Mass comparison 2 3 Genetic classification of languages 2 3 1 Languages of Africa 2 3 2 The languages of New Guinea Tasmania and the Andaman Islands 2 3 3 The languages of the Americas 2 3 4 The languages of northern Eurasia 3 Selected works by Joseph H Greenberg 3 1 Books 3 2 Books editor 3 3 Articles reviews etc 4 Bibliography 5 See also 6 References 7 External linksLife editEarly life and education edit Joseph Greenberg was born on May 28 1915 to Jewish parents in Brooklyn New York His first great interest was music At the age of 14 he gave a piano concert in Steinway Hall He continued to play the piano frequently throughout his life After graduating from James Madison High School he decided to pursue a scholarly career rather than a musical one He enrolled at Columbia College in New York in 1932 During his senior year he attended a class taught by Franz Boas concerning American Indian languages He graduated in 1936 with a bachelor s degree With references from Boas and Ruth Benedict he was accepted as a graduate student by Melville J Herskovits at Northwestern University in Chicago and graduated in 1940 with a doctorate degree During the course of his graduate studies Greenberg did fieldwork among the Hausa people 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 During 1940 he began postdoctoral studies at Yale University These were interrupted by service in the U S Army Signal Corps during World War II for which he worked as a codebreaker in North Africa and participated with the landing at Casablanca He then served in Italy until the end of the war Before leaving for Europe during 1943 Greenberg married Selma Berkowitz whom he had met during his first year at Columbia University 1 Career edit 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 Andre Martinet They introduced him to the Prague school of structuralism which influenced his work In 1962 Greenberg relocated to the anthropology department at Stanford University in California where he continued working for the rest of his life In 1965 Greenberg served as president of the African Studies Association That same year he was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences 2 He was later elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1973 and the American Philosophical Society 1975 3 4 In 1996 he received the highest award for a scholar in Linguistics the Gold Medal of Philology 5 Contributions to linguistics editLinguistic typology edit Greenberg is considered the founder of modern linguistic typology 6 a field that he has revitalized with his publications in the 1960s and 1970s 7 Greenberg s reputation rests partly on his contributions to synchronic linguistics and the quest to identify linguistic universals During the late 1950s Greenberg began to examine 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 conceptualized the idea of implicational universal which has 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 Many scholars adopted this kind of research following Greenberg s example and it remains important in synchronic linguistics Like Noam Chomsky Greenberg sought to discover the universal structures on which human language is based Unlike Chomsky Greenberg s method was functionalist rather than formalist An argument to reconcile the Greenbergian and Chomskyan methods can be found in Linguistic Universals 2006 edited by Ricardo Mairal and Juana Gil Many who are strongly opposed to Greenberg s methods of language classification see below acknowledge the importance of his typological work In 1963 he published an article Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements Mass comparison edit Main article Mass comparison Greenberg rejected the opinion prevalent among linguists since the mid 20th century that comparative reconstruction was the only method to discover relationships between languages He argued that genetic classification is methodologically prior to comparative reconstruction or the first stage of it one cannot engage in the comparative reconstruction of languages until one knows which languages to compare 1957 44 He also criticized the prevalent opinion that comprehensive comparisons of two languages at a time which commonly take years to perform could establish language families of any size He argued that even for 8 languages there are already 4 140 ways to classify them into distinct families while for 25 languages there are 4 638 590 332 229 999 353 ways 1957 44 For comparison the Niger Congo family is said to have some 1 500 languages He thought language families of any size needed to be established by some scholastic means other than bilateral comparison The theory of mass comparison is an attempt to demonstrate such means Greenberg argued for the virtues of breadth over depth He advocated restricting the amount of material to be compared to basic vocabulary morphology and known paths of sound change and increasing the number of languages to be compared to all the languages in a given area This would make it possible to compare numerous languages reliably At the same time the process would provide a check on accidental resemblances through the sheer number of languages under review The mathematical probability that resemblances are accidental decreases strongly with the number of languages concerned 1957 39 Greenberg used the premise that mass borrowing of basic vocabulary is unknown He argued that borrowing when it occurs is concentrated in cultural vocabulary and clusters in certain semantic areas making it easy to detect 1957 39 With the goal of determining broad patterns of relationship the idea was not to get every word right but to detect patterns From the beginning with his theory of mass comparison Greenberg addressed why chance resemblance and borrowing were not obstacles to its being useful Despite that critics consider those phenomena caused difficulties for his theory Greenberg first termed his method mass comparison in an article of 1954 reprinted in Greenberg 1955 As of 1987 he replaced the term mass comparison with multilateral comparison to emphasize its contrast with the bilateral comparisons recommended by linguistics textbooks He believed that multilateral comparison was not in any way opposed to the comparative method but is on the contrary its necessary first step Greenberg 1957 44 According to him comparative reconstruction should have the status of an explanatory theory for facts already established by language classification Greenberg 1957 45 Most historical linguists Campbell 2001 45 reject the use of mass comparison as a method for establishing genealogical relationships between languages Among the most outspoken critics of mass comparison have been Lyle Campbell Donald Ringe William Poser and the late R Larry Trask Genetic classification of languages edit Languages of Africa edit Greenberg is known widely for his development of a 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 The Languages of Africa in 1955 He revised the book and published it again during 1963 followed by a nearly identical edition of 1966 reprinted without change during 1970 A few more changes of the classification were made by Greenberg in an article during 1981 Greenberg grouped the hundreds of African languages into four families which he dubbed Afroasiatic Nilo Saharan Niger Congo and Khoisan During the course of his work Greenberg invented the term Afroasiatic to replace the earlier term Hamito Semitic after showing that the Hamitic group accepted widely since the 19th century is not a valid language family Another major feature of his work was to establish the classification of the Bantu languages which occupy much of Central and Southern Africa as a part of the Niger Congo family rather than as an independent family as many Bantuists had maintained Greenberg s classification rested largely in evaluating competing earlier classifications For a time his classification was considered bold and speculative especially the proposal of a Nilo Saharan language family Now apart from Khoisan it is generally accepted by African specialists and has been used as a basis for further work by other scholars Greenberg s work on African languages has been criticised by Lyle Campbell and Donald Ringe who do not believe that his classification is justified by his data and request a re examination of his macro phyla by reliable methods Ringe 1993 104 Harold Fleming and Lionel Bender who were sympathetic to Greenberg s classification acknowledged that at least some of his macrofamilies particularly the Nilo Saharan and the Khoisan macrofamilies are not accepted completely by most linguists and may need to be divided Campbell 1997 Their objection was methodological if mass comparison is not a valid method it cannot be expected to have brought order successfully out of the confusion of African languages By 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 Roger Blench 1995 suggests Niger Congo is a subfamily of Nilo Saharan The languages of New Guinea Tasmania and the Andaman Islands edit Main article Indo Pacific languages During 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 This excludes the Austronesian languages which have been established as associated with a more recent migration of people Greenberg s subgrouping of these languages has not been accepted by the few specialists who have worked on the classification of these languages citation needed However the work of Stephen Wurm 1982 and Malcolm Ross 2005 has provided considerable evidence for his once radical idea that these languages form a single genetic unit Wurm stated that the lexical similarities between Great Andamanese and the West Papuan and Timor Alor families are quite striking and amount to virtual formal identity in a number of instances He believes this to be due to a linguistic substratum The languages of the Americas edit Main article Amerind languages Most linguists concerned with the native languages of the Americas classify them into 150 to 180 independent language families Some believe that two language families Eskimo Aleut and Na Dene were distinct perhaps the results of later migrations into the New World Early on Greenberg 1957 41 1960 became convinced that many of the language groups considered unrelated could be classified into larger groupings In his 1987 book Language in the Americas while agreeing that the Eskimo Aleut and Na Dene groupings as distinct he proposed that all the other Native American languages belong to a single language macro family which he termed Amerind Language in the Americas has generated lively debate but has been criticized strongly it is rejected by most specialists of indigenous languages of the Americas and also by most historical linguists Specialists of the individual language families have found extensive inaccuracies and errors in Greenberg s data such as including data from non existent languages erroneous transcriptions of the forms compared misinterpretations of the meanings of words used for comparison and entirely spurious forms 8 9 10 11 12 13 Historical linguists also reject the validity of the method of multilateral or mass comparison upon which the classification is based They argue that he has not provided a convincing case that the similarities presented as evidence are due to inheritance from an earlier common ancestor rather than being explained by a combination of errors accidental similarity excessive semantic latitude in comparisons borrowings onomatopoeia etc However Harvard geneticist David Reich notes that recent genetic studies have identified patterns that support Greenberg s Amerind classification the First American category The cluster of populations that he predicted to be most closely related based on language were in fact verified by the genetic patterns in populations for which data are available Nevertheless this category of First American people also interbred with and contributed a significant amount of genes to the ancestors of both Eskimo Aleut and Na Dene populations with 60 and 90 First American DNA respectively constituting the genetic makeup of the two groups 14 The languages of northern Eurasia edit Main article Eurasiatic languages Later in his life Greenberg proposed that nearly all of the language families of northern Eurasia belong to a single higher order family which he termed Eurasiatic The only exception was Yeniseian which has been related to a wider Dene Caucasian grouping also including Sino Tibetan During 2008 Edward Vajda related Yeniseian to the Na Dene languages of North America as a Dene Yeniseian family 15 The Eurasiatic grouping resembles the older Nostratic groupings of Holger Pedersen and Vladislav Illich Svitych by including Indo European Uralic and Altaic It differs by including Nivkh Japonic Korean and Ainu which the Nostraticists had excluded from comparison because they are single languages rather than language families and in excluding Afroasiatic At about this time Russian Nostraticists notably Sergei Starostin constructed a revised version of Nostratic It was slightly larger than Greenberg s grouping but it also excluded Afroasiatic Recently a consensus has been emerging among proponents of the Nostratic hypothesis Greenberg basically agreed with the Nostratic concept though he stressed a deep internal division between its northern tier his Eurasiatic and a southern tier principally Afroasiatic and Dravidian The American Nostraticist Allan Bomhard considers Eurasiatic a branch of Nostratic alongside other branches Afroasiatic Elamo Dravidian and Kartvelian Similarly Georgiy Starostin 2002 arrives at a tripartite overall grouping he considers Afroasiatic Nostratic and Elamite to be roughly equidistant and more closely related to each other than to any other language family 16 Sergei Starostin s school has now included Afroasiatic in a broadly defined Nostratic They reserve the term Eurasiatic to designate the narrower subgrouping which comprises the rest of the macrofamily Recent proposals thus differ mainly on the precise inclusion of Dravidian and Kartvelian Greenberg continued to work on this project after he was diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer and until he died during May 2001 His colleague and former student Merritt Ruhlen ensured the publication of the final volume of his Eurasiatic work 2002 after his death Selected works by Joseph H Greenberg editBooks edit Studies in African Linguistic Classification New Haven Compass Publishing Company 1955 Photo offset reprint of the SJA articles with minor corrections Essays in Linguistics Chicago University of Chicago Press 1957 The Languages of Africa Bloomington Indiana University Press 1963 Heavily revised version of Greenberg 1955 From the same publisher second revised edition 1966 third edition 1970 All three editions simultaneously published at The Hague by Mouton amp Co Language Universals With Special Reference to Feature Hierarchies The Hague Mouton amp Co 1966 Reprinted 1980 and with a foreword by Martin Haspelmath 2005 Language in the Americas Stanford Stanford University Press 1987 Keith Denning Suzanne Kemmer eds 1990 On Language Selected Writings of Joseph H Greenberg Stanford CA Stanford University Press Indo European and Its Closest Relatives The Eurasiatic Language Family Vol 1 Grammar Stanford Stanford University Press 2000 Indo European and Its Closest Relatives The Eurasiatic Language Family Vol 2 Lexicon Stanford Stanford University Press 2002 William Croft ed 2005 Genetic Linguistics Essays on Theory and Method Oxford Oxford University Press Books editor edit Universals of Language Report of a Conference Held at Dobbs Ferry New York April 13 15 1961 Cambridge MIT Press 1963 Second edition 1966 Universals of Human Language Vol 1 Method and Theory 2 Phonology 3 Word Structure 4 Syntax Stanford Stanford University Press 1978 Articles reviews etc edit Greenberg Joseph H 1940 The decipherment of the Ben Ali Diary A preliminary statement Journal of Negro History 25 3 372 375 doi 10 2307 2714801 JSTOR 2714801 S2CID 149671256 Greenberg 1941 Some problems in Hausa phonology Language 17 4 316 323 doi 10 2307 409283 JSTOR 409283 Greenberg Joseph H 1947 Arabic loan words in Hausa Word 3 1 2 85 87 doi 10 1080 00437956 1947 11659308 Greenberg Joseph H 1948 The classification of African languages American Anthropologist 50 24 30 doi 10 1525 aa 1948 50 1 02a00050 Studies in African linguistic classification I Introduction Niger Congo family Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 5 79 100 1949 doi 10 1086 soutjanth 5 2 3628626 S2CID 149333938 Greenberg Joseph H 1949 Studies in African linguistic classification II The classification of Fulani Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 5 3 190 98 doi 10 1086 soutjanth 5 3 3628501 S2CID 164123099 Greenberg Joseph H 1949 Studies in African linguistic classification III The position of Bantu Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 5 4 309 17 doi 10 1086 soutjanth 5 4 3628591 S2CID 130651394 Greenberg 1950 Studies in African linguistic classification IV Hamito Semitic Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 6 1 47 63 doi 10 1086 soutjanth 6 1 3628690 JSTOR 3628690 S2CID 163617689 Greenberg Joseph H 1950 Studies in African linguistic classification V The Eastern Sudanic Family Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 6 2 143 60 doi 10 1086 soutjanth 6 2 3628639 S2CID 163502465 Greenberg Joseph H 1950 Studies in African linguistic classification VI The Click languages Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 6 3 223 37 doi 10 1086 soutjanth 6 3 3628459 S2CID 147343029 Greenberg Joseph H 1950 Studies in African linguistic classification VII Smaller families index of languages Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 6 4 388 98 doi 10 1086 soutjanth 6 4 3628564 S2CID 146929514 Greenberg Joseph H 1954 Studies in African linguistic classification VIII Further remarks on method revisions and corrections Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 10 4 405 15 doi 10 1086 soutjanth 10 4 3628835 S2CID 162901139 Greenberg Joseph H 1957 The nature and uses of linguistic typologies International Journal of American Linguistics 23 2 68 77 doi 10 1086 464395 S2CID 144662912 Anthony F C Wallace ed 1960 The general classification of Central and South American languages Selected Papers of the Fifth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press pp 791 4 Reprinted in Genetic Linguistics 2005 Greenberg Joseph H 1962 Is the vowel consonant dichotomy universal Word 18 1 3 73 81 doi 10 1080 00437956 1962 11659766 Universals of Language Cambridge MIT Press 1963 pp 58 90 Archived from the original on 2010 09 20 In second edition of Universals of Language 1966 pp 73 113 Greenberg 1966 Synchronic and diachronic universals in phonology Language 42 2 508 17 doi 10 2307 411706 JSTOR 411706 Greenberg Joseph H 1970 Some generalizations concerning glottalic consonants especially implosives International Journal of American Linguistics 36 2 123 145 doi 10 1086 465105 S2CID 143225017 Thomas A Sebeok et al eds 1971 The Indo Pacific hypothesis Current Trends in Linguistics Volume 8 Linguistics in Oceania The Hague Mouton de Gruyter pp 807 871 Reprinted in Genetic Linguistics 2005 Numeral classifiers and substantival number Problems in the genesis of a linguistic type Working Papers in Language Universals 9 1 39 1972 Greenberg 1979 Rethinking linguistics diachronically Language 55 2 275 90 doi 10 2307 412585 JSTOR 412585 Ralph E Cooley Mervin R Barnes John A Dunn eds 1979 The classification of American Indian languages Papers of the Mid American Linguistic Conference at Oklahoma Norman Oklahoma University of Oklahoma Interdisciplinary Linguistics Program pp 7 22 Joseph Ki Zerbo ed 1981 African linguistic classification General History of Africa Volume 1 Methodology and African Prehistory Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press pp 292 308 Ivan R Dihoff ed 1983 Some areal characteristics of African languages Current Approaches to African Linguistics Vol 1 Dordrecht Foris pp 3 21 With Christy G Turner II and Stephen L Zegura 1985 Convergence of evidence for peopling of the Americas Collegium Antropologicum 9 33 42 With Christy G Turner II and Stephen L Zegura December 1986 The settlement of the Americas A comparison of the linguistic dental and genetic evidence Current Anthropology 27 5 477 97 doi 10 1086 203472 S2CID 144209907 Greenberg J H 1989 Classification of American Indian languages A reply to Campbell Language 65 1 107 114 doi 10 2307 414844 JSTOR 414844 Greenberg J H 1993 Observations concerning Ringe s Calculating the factor of chance in language comparison Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 137 1 79 90 JSTOR 986946 Review of Michael Fortescue Language Relations across Bering Strait Reappraising the Archaeological and Linguistic Evidence Review of Archaeology 21 2 23 24 2000 Bibliography editBlench Roger 1995 Is Niger Congo simply a branch of Nilo Saharan In Fifth Nilo Saharan Linguistics Colloquium Nice 24 29 August 1992 Proceedings edited by Robert Nicolai and Franz Rottland Cologne Koppe Verlag pp 36 49 Campbell Lyle 1986 Comment on Greenberg Turner and Zegura Current Anthropology 27 488 doi 10 1086 203472 S2CID 144209907 Campbell Lyle 1997 American Indian Languages The Historical Linguistics of Native America New York Oxford University Press ISBN 0 19 509427 1 Campbell Lyle 2001 Beyond the comparative method In Historical Linguistics 2001 Selected Papers from the 15th International Conference on Historical Linguistics Melbourne 13 17 August 2001 edited by Barry J Blake Kate Burridge and Jo Taylor Diamond Jared 1997 Guns Germs and Steel The Fates of Human Societies New York Norton ISBN 0 393 03891 2 Gregersen Edgar 1972 Kongo Saharan Journal of African Languages 11 1 69 89 Mairal Ricardo and Juana Gil 2006 Linguistic Universals Cambridge NY Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 54552 5 Ringe Donald A 1993 A reply to Professor Greenberg Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 137 91 109 Ross Malcolm 2005 Pronouns as a preliminary diagnostic for grouping Papuan languages In Papuan Pasts Cultural Linguistic and Biological Histories of Papuan speaking Peoples edited by Andrew Pawley Robert Attenborough Robin Hide and Jack Golson Canberra Pacific Linguistics pp 15 66 Wurm Stephen A 1982 The Papuan Languages of Oceania Tubingen Gunter Narr See also editLinguistic universal Moscow School of Comparative Linguistics Monogenesis linguistics Nostratic languagesReferences edit Croft William Joseph Harold Greenberg Archived copy PDF Archived from the original PDF on July 9 2008 Retrieved June 10 2008 a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint archived copy as title link Joseph H Greenberg www nasonline org Retrieved 2022 08 01 Joseph Harold Greenberg American Academy of Arts amp Sciences Retrieved 2022 08 01 APS Member History search amphilsoc org Retrieved 2022 08 01 Ancient Medal Winners International Society of Philology Votre Slogan ici Archived from the original on 2016 03 03 Retrieved 2015 09 12 Luraghi S 2010 Introduzione in Crof amp Cruise Linguistica cognitiva Italian edition p 19 Song Jae Jung 2010 Setting the Stage doi 10 1093 oxfordhb 9780199281251 013 0001 a href Template Cite journal html title Template Cite journal cite journal a Cite journal requires journal help Chafe Wallace 1987 Review of Greenberg 1987 Current Anthropology 28 page 652 653 Goddard Ives 1987 Review of Joseph Greenberg Language in the Americas Current Anthropology 28 656 657 Goddard Ives 1990 Review of Language in the Americas by Joseph H Greenberg Linguistics 28 556 558 Golla Victor 1988 Review of Language in the Americas by Joseph Greenberg American Anthropologist 90 page 434 435 Kimball Geoffrey 1992 A critique of Muskogean Gulf and Yukian materials in Language in the Americas International Journal of American Linguistics 58 page 447 501 Poser William J 1992 The Salinan and Yurumangui data in Language in the Americas International Journal of American Linguistics 58 2 202 229 PDF Reich David 2018 Who We Are and How We Got Here Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past Chapter 7 New York Pantheon Books 2018 Edward Vajda PDF Archived from the original PDF on May 18 2008 Retrieved 2009 03 17 University of Alaska Fairbanks Starostin George S On the Genetic Affiliation of the Elamite Language 2005 External links editJoseph Greenberg at work a portrait of himself What we all spoke when the world was young by Nicholas Wade New York Times February 1 2000 Memorial Resolution Complete bibliography of the publications of Joseph H Greenberg by William Croft 2003 Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Joseph Greenberg amp oldid 1183998245, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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