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On the Origin of Languages Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy
Since the mid 1980s there has been a reawakening of interest in the classification of languages and the implication of such a classification for the prehistory of the human species Each of the essays in this volume was written to answer a certain question to respond to a particular criticism or to assemble or develop material useful to those seeking to construct more comprehensive classifications of particular sets of human languages This series of studies challenges many of the prevailing conceptions of historical linguistics coming to the final conclusion that all human language shares a common origin This book presents a series of illuminating studies which conclusively demonstrates that the prevailing conception of historical linguistics is deeply flawed Most linguists today believe that there is no good evidence that the Indo European family of languages is related to any other language family or even any other language In like manner the New World is deemed to contain hundreds of language families among which there are no apparent links Furthermore it is claimed there are no known connections between the languages of the Old World and those of the Americas And finally the strongest belief of all is that there is no trace of genetic affinity nor could there be among the world s language families The author argues that all of these firmly entrenched and vigorously defended beliefs are false that they are myths propagated by a small group of scholars who have failed to understand the true basis of genetic affinity Twentieth century Indo Europeanists though not their nineteenth century forebears have confused the issue of genetic affinity which derives from classification with such traditional concerns of historical linguistics as reconstruction and sound correspondences Once it is recognized that taxonomy or classification must precede these traditional concerns the apparent conflict between the traditional view and that of Joseph
- GenresLinguistics
360 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 1994
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July 18, 2018
PSYCHOMECHANICS HAD BETTER UPGRADE ITS VISION
This book is a phenomenal and in its time revolutionary work. But it is also the best example we can find that shows time has to be taken into account when dealing with science and scientific works. Linguistic taxonomy is under the direct influence of progress in anthropology, archaeology and several other scientific disciplines that have made enormous discoveries over the last fifty years (some of those discoveries enabled this very book) and it has been accelerating over the last twenty years (these more recent discoveries are putting this book at a disadvantage).
I am going to essentially start from what was the revolutionary side of this book and open the criticism that comes only from what the author could not know at the time since it was developed and discovered after the publication of this book. But it is not a criticism of the author himself because I know in more recent books or articles he has integrated most of the new data.
It's only in the last article written with John D. Bengtson that the author finally gets to the global level of Greenberg’s theory that is behind the book. Greenberg devised what is called multilateral comparative linguistics. He started his career with a groundbreaking work on African languages that he topologically reunited within the Black African continent as mostly one family, at least in my own terms, the very similar development of all of them: synthetic-analytical third-articulation mostly class languages, with the special case of click consonants in Khoisan languages. Greenberg had proved that all languages contain some common roots for a good number of fundamental notions, both lexical like water, sun and mother, and syntactic like first and second person singular. Note Greenberg did not refer to the phylogeny of language that makes these languages of Black Africa third-articulation languages. His syntactic approach is only through a few words and not syntactic structures. This idea, developed in the last article of this book, was a revolution in two directions
1- All languages have only one geographical and linguistic origin;
2- This origin is Black Africa and their languages that are the modern living descendants of the original language or languages of Black Africa from which all other languages have derived.
Greenberg did not know how. He did not even try to understand how. He is not concerned by the phylogeny of language. To come back to the present book, I regret this global source is only touched in the last article. Of course, this is normal since it is a collection of articles that are older and that reflect states of development of the theory that are less advanced. But before entering the criticism of what is in the book, I have to repeat that this dimension of Greenberg’s theory and school was a revolution in its days and still is since internationally they speak of the “Out of Africa� theory instead of “Out of Black Africa� theory, so that the first migration corresponding to the first articulation of the phylogeny of language which was not out of Africa, but out of Black Africa to Northern Africa, is not considered as a migration since it is not out of Africa.
The book supports the Nostratic Theory, proposed in 1903 by the Danish linguist Holger Pedersen to encompass Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Afro-Asiatic, and possibly other language families under one broad category. This modern research was amplified by the Russian Vladislav M. Illich-Svitych in the mid-1960s adding Kartvelian and Dravidian. It brings together agglutinative, synthetic-analytical and root languages. It excludes Asian isolating languages (except if Dravidian that covers Tamil is considered as a character language, but it only concerns the Indian subcontinent), and most importantly all Black African, Polynesian, Melanesian all Amerindian and most Asian character languages, not to mention the agglutinative languages of the Eskimo-Aleut family. It is basically Europe-centered with a small expansion to Northern Africa and the Levant to include Hebrew and other Semitic languages. Officially Indo-European languages include Indo-Aryan and Indo-Iranian languages, which explain the addition of Kartvelian and Dravidian later on. It is thus centered on Eurasia (though rether limited as for Asia).
The book widens this approach with Greenberg’s Eurasiatic hypothesis. The well-known and extensively studied Indo-European family of languages is but a branch of a much larger Eurasiatic family that extends from Europe across northern Asia to North America. Eurasiatic is seen to consist of Indo-European, Uralic-Yukaghir, Altaic (Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungus-Manchu), Japanese-Korean-Ainu (possibly a distinct subgroup of Eurasiatic), Gilyak, Chukotian, and Eskimo-Aleut. We can notice this family does not include the Semitic or Afro-Asiatic root languages, any African languages, most Isolating languages, Melanesian, Polynesian and Amerindian languages. It includes the Indo-Aryan and Indo-Iranian languages only as part of Indo-European languages, which is an approximation.
These two approaches are highly dubious because of what they exclude, especially for Greenberg’s Eurasiatic hypothesis since he is a specialist of African and Amerindian languages and his basic theory is that ALL languages came from Black Africa just like all Homo Sapiens came from Black Africa. Along that line, I will completely dismiss the parallel between languages and biology actually reduced to genetic biology. The reference to Darwin here is misguided. Darwin did not know much about languages and the selection of species has little to do with the phylogeny and life of languages. To accept the parallel, it would require from us to define genes, alleles, and other generic basic elements in linguistic terms first of all. Are words genes? Are phonemes alleles? And what are syntactic elements? Then it would be necessary to explain how the highly socialized process of selection of words, development of languages, life, and death of such is comparable, similar, why not identical to natural selection that requires haphazard mutations (and even if the question is open about motivated linguistic mutations, it is far from being closed since new words appear all the time and they are at least etymologically it not just semantically, hence socially, motivated) and it would be very reductive to reduce the social process that drives the “evolution� of a language to the natural process of the selection of genetic mutation through sexual reproduction. Every single element is different. When there is a similitude between the migrations of populations and the languages they speak, it is due to the fact that these populations take their languages along and it has nothing to do with their genes. Figure 4 (page 33) in the book is totally misguided not maybe as for the “facts� but as for the similitude that is turned into an explanation if not a cause with genetic elements. It is not because it looks alike, that it is the same thing and it is connected. Languages are not the Canada Dry of genetic natural selection.
The book totally lacks any notion about the phylogeny of language. It only considers words, semantic words and what it calls syntactic words, essentially the first and second person singular pronouns. These latter words are just as semantic as the former ones but they are connected to the structure of the sentence since they support the general spatial-temporal (reduced to nominal-verbal) architecture. But syntax cannot be reduced to a few words that are connected to it. Syntax has to do with phylogeny in this here perspective. And the book never asks the question of how languages appeared, developed and migrated. So the basic phylogenetic classification of languages is totally unknown and neglected. Language was born among Homo Sapiens as soon as 300,000 years ago, on the basis of the heritage of this new species from anterior species (for Homo Sapiens it is Homo Ergaster, and before Homo Erectus, though Homo Erectus had migrated to Asia before Homo Sapiens appeared and before these the great apes and other monkeys who all have some kind of vocal communication. Note Homo Sapiens is not a descendant of Homo Neanderthalensis, nor the Denisovans who they will meet later on when they leave Africa.
Asking the question of the origin and phylogeny of language is requires an answer.
The nest of Homo Sapiens is Black Africa. The first migration out of Black Africa probably starting around 220,000 BCE will go to Northern Africa and for a short period to the Levant and around 160, 000 BCE to Crete where these will get standed will not survive. The languages on this territory are Afro-Asiatic languages, including Semitic languages, all of them root-languages, first-articulation languages based on the simple rotation of vowels and consonants. The second migration around 120,000 BCE will follow the Southern Arabian Corridor and from Pakistan where they arrive will move to the whole of Asia where they will meet the Denisovans (they did not meet the Neanderthals who were at that time in the Middle East and in Europe). These people who went to South-East Asia and around only had one genetic encounter with Denisovans. The people of this migration who went to what is today China had two separate genetic encounters with Denisovans. These people are all speaking languages of the second articulation, that is to say, character or isolating languages, based on lexical items categorized as spatial or temporal (nominal or verbal in Indo-European terms) and these stems are invariable. The third and last migration out of Black Africa around 75,000 BCE will use the Southern Arabian Corridor and land in what is today Iran and the Middle East. This migration has two successive waves. Both are third-articulation linguistic migrations. The first wave will spread around the Caspian Sea and Turkey (or Anatolia), then cross the Caucasus and spread to Europe. All these people are speaking agglutinative languages known as Turkic and including Uralic-Yukaghir, Altaic (Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungus-Manchu) languages plus a good number in Northern America. The second wave will stay on the Iranian plateau till after the peak of the Ice Age. They will go down around 12,000 BCE to the west where Sumerian is the oldest language developed from the Indo-European matrix (note it is still partially agglutinative though already vastly engaged in what will become the main characteristics of the languages developed from this matrix, viz. synthetic-analytical syntax. At the same time, they move to the East and the oldest language evolved from the Indo-Aryan matrix (definitely the same as the Indo-European matrix on the Iranian plateau where Farsi is the modern language derived from it) is Sanskrit, a vastly synthetic-analytical language with some surviving agglutinative elements. These third-articulation languages are based on the development of fronds that integrate all functional marks on the spatial units known as nouns, and tense, mode, modal marks + eventually functional agreement marks connected to the spatial functional elements on the temporal units known as verbs.
It is the ignorance of this dimension that explains the method put forward by Greenberg and here by Ruhlen:
“Obviously the only way to begin is by the comparison of basic lexical items and grammatical formatives in all the languages, which inevitably leads to a classification of the languages into a certain number of groups defined by recurring similarities.� (page 285)
Obviously, they miss the phylogenetic point. We have to start by analyzing the three basic articulations of this phylogeny. Then we have to position in time the three migrations out of Black Africa that will occur every time when one articulation is reached in the Black African nest, and then we have to check for each of these migrations the territory to which it goes. Then we can check what’s the dominant characteristics of the languages of these various territories and we have the vaster classification possible on the basis of one linguistic nest in Black Africa but differentiated by the time when the migrations took place and the articulations that had been reached then in the nest. Then regrouping languages from any of these three vast families is just the result of the fact that all languages left the Black African nest at some time taking along some lexical elements and some “grammatical formatives� which are in fact grammatically specific lexical items.
The method to explain the common items in various languages is reduced in this book to three possibilities. �(1) common origin, (2) borrowing, or (3) convergence.� (page 278) The last one has to be cut up into two, as suggested, by the way, by the author: motivated convergence and accidental convergence. In the first case, two phylogenetic evolutions in two different languages bring two unconnected elements because of two different motivations to the very same result. In the first language, (Y) following the normal evolution in this language produces (Z). In the second language, (X) following the normal evolution of this language produces (Z) too. This can be called motivated convergence. Completely different is accidental convergence. In two languages two accidental evolution not justified by phylogenic elements produce the same result from two different unconnected elements. It is apparently similar on the outside except that in each language the evolution is accidental, unmotivated: (X) by accident becomes (Z); (Y) by accident becomes (Z). This accidental emergence might just be unexplained or unidentified motivated convergence. That leads us to four explanations:
(1) common origin;
(2) borrowing;
(3) motivated convergence;
(4) accidental convergence.
Apart from this suggestion, the reasoning in the book is correct. If you compare hundreds of languages, similar items have a fair chance to be from a common origin rather than the other three possibilities, and borrowing can be explained and identified clearly by circumstances, for example, spatial proximity for some time, the borrowed term connected being an essential invention that is borrowed along with its lexical items (name and action) like the invention of the wheel. And both convergences are highly improbable when dealing with hundreds of languages.
That leads me to what is essential if you want to understand the vast commonality of many words/concepts in all human languages. Greenberg chose multilateral comparison over vast geographic areas to get to a classification. Then he compared elements within or without the various groups. That leads him to cutting the languages in America in three. In the north two groups, the Na-Dene languages and the Eskimo-Inuit-Aleut languages. South of this Canada and northern part of the USA, what he called Amerind languages and this division was introduced because all and only Amerind languages build their first and second pronouns on the consonants /n/ for first person singular and /m/ for second person singular, whereas all Eurasiatic languages that include Na-Dene and Eskimo-Inuit-Aleut languages use the couple /m/ for first person singular, and /t/ for second person singular.
The second method in the field of comparative linguistics is to compare one language to another language. The two languages may belong to the same group, like Russian and Armenian, both Indo-European synthetic-analytical languages. Or they can be from two different groups like Russian and Arabic, one an Indo-European synthetic-analytical frond language and the other a Semitic (or Afro-Asiatic) root language. That cannot lead to serious classification because most of the time the differences are set first and classification is best when based on similitudes at this level of individual languages.
The method I favor here is to start from the three phylogenic articulations in language, then map them onto the three migrations out of Black Africa, then define the territories reached by these migrations before the peak of the Ice Age, and that altogether gives three families from one nest.
A last remark is about the infamous Clovis theory about the arrival of Homo Sapiens in the USA. Today the arrival of Homo Sapiens from Siberia has been pushed in Canada and Alaska to at least 25,000 BCE. Some DNA studies of the populations in the Americas show that some basic old genetic elements have a higher frequency in the utmost Southern part of Latin America and this frequency decreases when we move north showing that it got diluted little by little by meeting another population. This is particularly clear from Central America to Northern America. That means the Monte Verde archaeological site in Chile whose excavation has reached the second layer in depth dated as being from 25,000 BCE, with a third layer underneath that has been tentatively dated as from 35-30,000 BCE is crucial in this perspective. A second route has to be stated in the Southern Pacific in connection with Easter Island and their gigantic stone competence. This stone civilization conquered South America, moved north to Mesoamerica, encountered in Northern America the Na-Dene population that arrived from Siberia, and mixed with them.
The clear linguistic elements given by Greenberg’s method go in that direction. In 1994 the present hypothesis was not even thinkable and we cannot be surprised that this book does not consider this evolution, though Greenberg’s results carry it. The question that can be raised is where did the /n/-/m/ pair come from and where did the people carrying this pair of pronominal roots come from? Necessarily from the West Southern Pacific and beyond from the west again, but the study has never been done.
Note I do not consider here an ancient migration from Africa to Brazil carried by the Gulf Stream but I certainly don’t reject it. It is another problem but that did not bring a massive number of people. It still has to be studied in depth but the Olmec clearly Negroid statues have to be explained by the presence of Black Africans there at the time. Is that migration before or after the Ice Age? That’s one more fundamental question. Strangely and surely enough, Greenberg’s multilateral (massive) comparative linguistics opened doors that are today materialized by archaeology and DNA research.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
This book is a phenomenal and in its time revolutionary work. But it is also the best example we can find that shows time has to be taken into account when dealing with science and scientific works. Linguistic taxonomy is under the direct influence of progress in anthropology, archaeology and several other scientific disciplines that have made enormous discoveries over the last fifty years (some of those discoveries enabled this very book) and it has been accelerating over the last twenty years (these more recent discoveries are putting this book at a disadvantage).
I am going to essentially start from what was the revolutionary side of this book and open the criticism that comes only from what the author could not know at the time since it was developed and discovered after the publication of this book. But it is not a criticism of the author himself because I know in more recent books or articles he has integrated most of the new data.
It's only in the last article written with John D. Bengtson that the author finally gets to the global level of Greenberg’s theory that is behind the book. Greenberg devised what is called multilateral comparative linguistics. He started his career with a groundbreaking work on African languages that he topologically reunited within the Black African continent as mostly one family, at least in my own terms, the very similar development of all of them: synthetic-analytical third-articulation mostly class languages, with the special case of click consonants in Khoisan languages. Greenberg had proved that all languages contain some common roots for a good number of fundamental notions, both lexical like water, sun and mother, and syntactic like first and second person singular. Note Greenberg did not refer to the phylogeny of language that makes these languages of Black Africa third-articulation languages. His syntactic approach is only through a few words and not syntactic structures. This idea, developed in the last article of this book, was a revolution in two directions
1- All languages have only one geographical and linguistic origin;
2- This origin is Black Africa and their languages that are the modern living descendants of the original language or languages of Black Africa from which all other languages have derived.
Greenberg did not know how. He did not even try to understand how. He is not concerned by the phylogeny of language. To come back to the present book, I regret this global source is only touched in the last article. Of course, this is normal since it is a collection of articles that are older and that reflect states of development of the theory that are less advanced. But before entering the criticism of what is in the book, I have to repeat that this dimension of Greenberg’s theory and school was a revolution in its days and still is since internationally they speak of the “Out of Africa� theory instead of “Out of Black Africa� theory, so that the first migration corresponding to the first articulation of the phylogeny of language which was not out of Africa, but out of Black Africa to Northern Africa, is not considered as a migration since it is not out of Africa.
The book supports the Nostratic Theory, proposed in 1903 by the Danish linguist Holger Pedersen to encompass Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Afro-Asiatic, and possibly other language families under one broad category. This modern research was amplified by the Russian Vladislav M. Illich-Svitych in the mid-1960s adding Kartvelian and Dravidian. It brings together agglutinative, synthetic-analytical and root languages. It excludes Asian isolating languages (except if Dravidian that covers Tamil is considered as a character language, but it only concerns the Indian subcontinent), and most importantly all Black African, Polynesian, Melanesian all Amerindian and most Asian character languages, not to mention the agglutinative languages of the Eskimo-Aleut family. It is basically Europe-centered with a small expansion to Northern Africa and the Levant to include Hebrew and other Semitic languages. Officially Indo-European languages include Indo-Aryan and Indo-Iranian languages, which explain the addition of Kartvelian and Dravidian later on. It is thus centered on Eurasia (though rether limited as for Asia).
The book widens this approach with Greenberg’s Eurasiatic hypothesis. The well-known and extensively studied Indo-European family of languages is but a branch of a much larger Eurasiatic family that extends from Europe across northern Asia to North America. Eurasiatic is seen to consist of Indo-European, Uralic-Yukaghir, Altaic (Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungus-Manchu), Japanese-Korean-Ainu (possibly a distinct subgroup of Eurasiatic), Gilyak, Chukotian, and Eskimo-Aleut. We can notice this family does not include the Semitic or Afro-Asiatic root languages, any African languages, most Isolating languages, Melanesian, Polynesian and Amerindian languages. It includes the Indo-Aryan and Indo-Iranian languages only as part of Indo-European languages, which is an approximation.
These two approaches are highly dubious because of what they exclude, especially for Greenberg’s Eurasiatic hypothesis since he is a specialist of African and Amerindian languages and his basic theory is that ALL languages came from Black Africa just like all Homo Sapiens came from Black Africa. Along that line, I will completely dismiss the parallel between languages and biology actually reduced to genetic biology. The reference to Darwin here is misguided. Darwin did not know much about languages and the selection of species has little to do with the phylogeny and life of languages. To accept the parallel, it would require from us to define genes, alleles, and other generic basic elements in linguistic terms first of all. Are words genes? Are phonemes alleles? And what are syntactic elements? Then it would be necessary to explain how the highly socialized process of selection of words, development of languages, life, and death of such is comparable, similar, why not identical to natural selection that requires haphazard mutations (and even if the question is open about motivated linguistic mutations, it is far from being closed since new words appear all the time and they are at least etymologically it not just semantically, hence socially, motivated) and it would be very reductive to reduce the social process that drives the “evolution� of a language to the natural process of the selection of genetic mutation through sexual reproduction. Every single element is different. When there is a similitude between the migrations of populations and the languages they speak, it is due to the fact that these populations take their languages along and it has nothing to do with their genes. Figure 4 (page 33) in the book is totally misguided not maybe as for the “facts� but as for the similitude that is turned into an explanation if not a cause with genetic elements. It is not because it looks alike, that it is the same thing and it is connected. Languages are not the Canada Dry of genetic natural selection.
The book totally lacks any notion about the phylogeny of language. It only considers words, semantic words and what it calls syntactic words, essentially the first and second person singular pronouns. These latter words are just as semantic as the former ones but they are connected to the structure of the sentence since they support the general spatial-temporal (reduced to nominal-verbal) architecture. But syntax cannot be reduced to a few words that are connected to it. Syntax has to do with phylogeny in this here perspective. And the book never asks the question of how languages appeared, developed and migrated. So the basic phylogenetic classification of languages is totally unknown and neglected. Language was born among Homo Sapiens as soon as 300,000 years ago, on the basis of the heritage of this new species from anterior species (for Homo Sapiens it is Homo Ergaster, and before Homo Erectus, though Homo Erectus had migrated to Asia before Homo Sapiens appeared and before these the great apes and other monkeys who all have some kind of vocal communication. Note Homo Sapiens is not a descendant of Homo Neanderthalensis, nor the Denisovans who they will meet later on when they leave Africa.
Asking the question of the origin and phylogeny of language is requires an answer.
The nest of Homo Sapiens is Black Africa. The first migration out of Black Africa probably starting around 220,000 BCE will go to Northern Africa and for a short period to the Levant and around 160, 000 BCE to Crete where these will get standed will not survive. The languages on this territory are Afro-Asiatic languages, including Semitic languages, all of them root-languages, first-articulation languages based on the simple rotation of vowels and consonants. The second migration around 120,000 BCE will follow the Southern Arabian Corridor and from Pakistan where they arrive will move to the whole of Asia where they will meet the Denisovans (they did not meet the Neanderthals who were at that time in the Middle East and in Europe). These people who went to South-East Asia and around only had one genetic encounter with Denisovans. The people of this migration who went to what is today China had two separate genetic encounters with Denisovans. These people are all speaking languages of the second articulation, that is to say, character or isolating languages, based on lexical items categorized as spatial or temporal (nominal or verbal in Indo-European terms) and these stems are invariable. The third and last migration out of Black Africa around 75,000 BCE will use the Southern Arabian Corridor and land in what is today Iran and the Middle East. This migration has two successive waves. Both are third-articulation linguistic migrations. The first wave will spread around the Caspian Sea and Turkey (or Anatolia), then cross the Caucasus and spread to Europe. All these people are speaking agglutinative languages known as Turkic and including Uralic-Yukaghir, Altaic (Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungus-Manchu) languages plus a good number in Northern America. The second wave will stay on the Iranian plateau till after the peak of the Ice Age. They will go down around 12,000 BCE to the west where Sumerian is the oldest language developed from the Indo-European matrix (note it is still partially agglutinative though already vastly engaged in what will become the main characteristics of the languages developed from this matrix, viz. synthetic-analytical syntax. At the same time, they move to the East and the oldest language evolved from the Indo-Aryan matrix (definitely the same as the Indo-European matrix on the Iranian plateau where Farsi is the modern language derived from it) is Sanskrit, a vastly synthetic-analytical language with some surviving agglutinative elements. These third-articulation languages are based on the development of fronds that integrate all functional marks on the spatial units known as nouns, and tense, mode, modal marks + eventually functional agreement marks connected to the spatial functional elements on the temporal units known as verbs.
It is the ignorance of this dimension that explains the method put forward by Greenberg and here by Ruhlen:
“Obviously the only way to begin is by the comparison of basic lexical items and grammatical formatives in all the languages, which inevitably leads to a classification of the languages into a certain number of groups defined by recurring similarities.� (page 285)
Obviously, they miss the phylogenetic point. We have to start by analyzing the three basic articulations of this phylogeny. Then we have to position in time the three migrations out of Black Africa that will occur every time when one articulation is reached in the Black African nest, and then we have to check for each of these migrations the territory to which it goes. Then we can check what’s the dominant characteristics of the languages of these various territories and we have the vaster classification possible on the basis of one linguistic nest in Black Africa but differentiated by the time when the migrations took place and the articulations that had been reached then in the nest. Then regrouping languages from any of these three vast families is just the result of the fact that all languages left the Black African nest at some time taking along some lexical elements and some “grammatical formatives� which are in fact grammatically specific lexical items.
The method to explain the common items in various languages is reduced in this book to three possibilities. �(1) common origin, (2) borrowing, or (3) convergence.� (page 278) The last one has to be cut up into two, as suggested, by the way, by the author: motivated convergence and accidental convergence. In the first case, two phylogenetic evolutions in two different languages bring two unconnected elements because of two different motivations to the very same result. In the first language, (Y) following the normal evolution in this language produces (Z). In the second language, (X) following the normal evolution of this language produces (Z) too. This can be called motivated convergence. Completely different is accidental convergence. In two languages two accidental evolution not justified by phylogenic elements produce the same result from two different unconnected elements. It is apparently similar on the outside except that in each language the evolution is accidental, unmotivated: (X) by accident becomes (Z); (Y) by accident becomes (Z). This accidental emergence might just be unexplained or unidentified motivated convergence. That leads us to four explanations:
(1) common origin;
(2) borrowing;
(3) motivated convergence;
(4) accidental convergence.
Apart from this suggestion, the reasoning in the book is correct. If you compare hundreds of languages, similar items have a fair chance to be from a common origin rather than the other three possibilities, and borrowing can be explained and identified clearly by circumstances, for example, spatial proximity for some time, the borrowed term connected being an essential invention that is borrowed along with its lexical items (name and action) like the invention of the wheel. And both convergences are highly improbable when dealing with hundreds of languages.
That leads me to what is essential if you want to understand the vast commonality of many words/concepts in all human languages. Greenberg chose multilateral comparison over vast geographic areas to get to a classification. Then he compared elements within or without the various groups. That leads him to cutting the languages in America in three. In the north two groups, the Na-Dene languages and the Eskimo-Inuit-Aleut languages. South of this Canada and northern part of the USA, what he called Amerind languages and this division was introduced because all and only Amerind languages build their first and second pronouns on the consonants /n/ for first person singular and /m/ for second person singular, whereas all Eurasiatic languages that include Na-Dene and Eskimo-Inuit-Aleut languages use the couple /m/ for first person singular, and /t/ for second person singular.
The second method in the field of comparative linguistics is to compare one language to another language. The two languages may belong to the same group, like Russian and Armenian, both Indo-European synthetic-analytical languages. Or they can be from two different groups like Russian and Arabic, one an Indo-European synthetic-analytical frond language and the other a Semitic (or Afro-Asiatic) root language. That cannot lead to serious classification because most of the time the differences are set first and classification is best when based on similitudes at this level of individual languages.
The method I favor here is to start from the three phylogenic articulations in language, then map them onto the three migrations out of Black Africa, then define the territories reached by these migrations before the peak of the Ice Age, and that altogether gives three families from one nest.
A last remark is about the infamous Clovis theory about the arrival of Homo Sapiens in the USA. Today the arrival of Homo Sapiens from Siberia has been pushed in Canada and Alaska to at least 25,000 BCE. Some DNA studies of the populations in the Americas show that some basic old genetic elements have a higher frequency in the utmost Southern part of Latin America and this frequency decreases when we move north showing that it got diluted little by little by meeting another population. This is particularly clear from Central America to Northern America. That means the Monte Verde archaeological site in Chile whose excavation has reached the second layer in depth dated as being from 25,000 BCE, with a third layer underneath that has been tentatively dated as from 35-30,000 BCE is crucial in this perspective. A second route has to be stated in the Southern Pacific in connection with Easter Island and their gigantic stone competence. This stone civilization conquered South America, moved north to Mesoamerica, encountered in Northern America the Na-Dene population that arrived from Siberia, and mixed with them.
The clear linguistic elements given by Greenberg’s method go in that direction. In 1994 the present hypothesis was not even thinkable and we cannot be surprised that this book does not consider this evolution, though Greenberg’s results carry it. The question that can be raised is where did the /n/-/m/ pair come from and where did the people carrying this pair of pronominal roots come from? Necessarily from the West Southern Pacific and beyond from the west again, but the study has never been done.
Note I do not consider here an ancient migration from Africa to Brazil carried by the Gulf Stream but I certainly don’t reject it. It is another problem but that did not bring a massive number of people. It still has to be studied in depth but the Olmec clearly Negroid statues have to be explained by the presence of Black Africans there at the time. Is that migration before or after the Ice Age? That’s one more fundamental question. Strangely and surely enough, Greenberg’s multilateral (massive) comparative linguistics opened doors that are today materialized by archaeology and DNA research.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
October 30, 2017
A startling collection of essays that argues for the monogenesis of language. Starting with a review of the historical currents that influence the majority of scholars in the field today, Ruhlen shows how many of the assumptions on which current historical linguistics is based are the result of accident and prejudice. Establishing first the fundamental principles for a sound approach to the question of the relationships between the world's languages and then working through the application of these to a number of specific questions, Ruhlen shows how it is possible to conclude that all the extant human languages share a common source.
The book as presented is a collection of essays spanning a number of years. Inevitably, a number of technical terms are used in the book without definition, and extensive use is made of the IPA and other phonological notations. While it is not necessary for understanding the general thesis of the book to be across these details, a good working knowledge of these is required to properly verify the claims made. A good attempt at synthesis is made in the beginning and ending chapters, but some readers may find this book a difficult introduction to an exciting field.
The book as presented is a collection of essays spanning a number of years. Inevitably, a number of technical terms are used in the book without definition, and extensive use is made of the IPA and other phonological notations. While it is not necessary for understanding the general thesis of the book to be across these details, a good working knowledge of these is required to properly verify the claims made. A good attempt at synthesis is made in the beginning and ending chapters, but some readers may find this book a difficult introduction to an exciting field.
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