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.
Life
Early life and education
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
Over a thousand indigenous languages are spoken by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. These languages cannot all be demonstrated to be related to each other and are classified into a hundred or so language families (including a large nu ...
. He graduated in 1936 with a bachelor degree. With references from Boas and
Ruth Benedict, he was accepted as a graduate student by
Melville J. Herskovits
Melville Jean Herskovits (September 10, 1895 – February 25, 1963) was an American anthropologist who helped to first establish African and African Diaspora studies in American academia. He is known for exploring the cultural continuity from Af ...
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
Islam (; ar, ۘالِإسلَام, , ) is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion centred primarily around the Quran, a religious text considered by Muslims to be the direct word of God (or '' Allah'') as it was revealed to Muhammad, the ...
on a Hausa group that, unlike most others, had not converted to it.
During 1940, he began postdoctoral studies at
Yale University
Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the w ...
. These were interrupted by service in the
U.S. Army Signal Corps during
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...
, 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.
[Croft, William. "Joseph Harold Greenberg." ]
Career
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 &
André Martinet
André Martinet (; Saint-Alban-des-Villards, 12 April 1908 – Châtenay-Malabry, 16 July 1999) was a French linguist, influential due to his work on structural linguistics.
Life and work
Martinet passed his ''agrégation'' in English and rece ...
. They introduced him to the
Prague school of
structuralism, which influenced his work.
In 1962, Greenberg relocated to the anthropology department at
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...
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. He was later elected to the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...
(1973) and the
American Philosophical Society (1975). In 1996 he received the highest award for a scholar in Linguistics, the Gold Medal of Philology.
Contributions to linguistics
Linguistic typology
Greenberg is considered the founder of modern
linguistic typology, a field that he has revitalized with his publications in the 1960s and 1970s. Greenberg's reputation rests partly on his contributions to
synchronic linguistics
Synchrony and diachrony are two complementary viewpoints in linguistic analysis. A ''synchronic'' approach (from grc, συν- "together" and "time") considers a language at a moment in time without taking its history into account. Synchronic l ...
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
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...
). 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
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
William J. Poser is a Canadian-American linguist who is known for his extensive work with the historical linguistics of Native American languages, especially those of the Athabascan family.
He got his B.A. from Harvard in 1979 and his Ph.D. fro ...
, and the late
R. Larry Trask.
Genetic classification of languages
Languages of Africa
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
''The Languages of Africa'' is a 1963 book of essays by the linguist Joseph Greenberg, in which the author sets forth a genetic classification of African languages that, with some changes, continues to be the most commonly used one today. It is a ...
'', 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 macrofamiles) 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
During 1971 Greenberg proposed the
Indo-Pacific macrofamily
In historical linguistics, a macrofamily, also called a superfamily or phylum, is a proposed genetic relationship grouping together language families (also isolates) in a larger scale classification. Campbell, Lyle and Mixco, Mauricio J. (2007), ...
, 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 Subgrouping in linguistics is the division of a language family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term ...
of these languages has not been accepted by the few specialists who have worked on the classification of these languages. However, the work of
Stephen Wurm
Stephen Adolphe Wurm ( hu, Wurm István Adolf, ; 19 August 1922 – 24 October 2001) was a Hungarian-born Australian linguist.
Early life
Wurm was born in Budapest, the second child to the German-speaking Adolphe Wurm and the Hungarian-sp ...
(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
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
Na-Dene (; also Nadene, Na-Dené, Athabaskan–Eyak–Tlingit, Tlina–Dene) is a family of Native American languages that includes at least the Athabaskan languages, Eyak, and Tlingit languages. Haida was formerly included, but is now considered ...
, 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
Na-Dene (; also Nadene, Na-Dené, Athabaskan–Eyak–Tlingit, Tlina–Dene) is a family of Native American languages that includes at least the Athabaskan languages, Eyak, and Tlingit languages. Haida was formerly included, but is now considered ...
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.
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.
The languages of northern Eurasia
Later in his life, Greenberg proposed that nearly all of the language families of northern
Eurasia
Eurasia (, ) is the largest continental area on Earth, comprising all of Europe and Asia. Primarily in the Northern and Eastern Hemispheres, it spans from the British Isles and the Iberian Peninsula in the west to the Japanese archipelag ...
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
Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese languages. ...
. During 2008
Edward Vajda
Edward J. Vajda ( Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, September 10, 1958 as Edward M. Johnson; changed his name in 1981) is a historical linguist at Western Washington University.
He is known for his work on the proposed Dené–Yeniseian language f ...
related Yeniseian to the
Na-Dené
Na-Dene (; also Nadene, Na-Dené, Athabaskan–Eyak–Tlingit, Tlina–Dene) is a family of Native American languages that includes at least the Athabaskan languages, Eyak, and Tlingit languages. Haida was formerly included, but is now considered ...
languages of North America as a
Dené–Yeniseian family.
The Eurasiatic grouping resembles the older
Nostratic groupings of
Holger Pedersen and
Vladislav Illich-Svitych by including
Indo-European
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Du ...
,
Uralic
The Uralic languages (; sometimes called Uralian languages ) form a language family of 38 languages spoken by approximately 25million people, predominantly in Northern Eurasia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian lan ...
, 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
Allan R. Bomhard (born 1943) is an American linguist.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, he was educated at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Hunter College, and the City University of New York, and served in the U.S. Army from 1964 to 1966. He current ...
considers Eurasiatic a branch of Nostratic, alongside other branches: Afroasiatic,
Elamo-Dravidian
The Elamo-Dravidian language family is a hypothesised language family that links the Dravidian languages of Pakistan, and Southern India to the extinct Elamite language of ancient Elam (present-day southwestern Iran). Linguist David McAlpin ...
, 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.
[Starostin, George S.. �]
On the Genetic Affiliation of the Elamite Language
” (2005). 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
Books
* (Photo-offset reprint of the ''SJA'' articles with minor corrections.)
*
* (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.)
* (Reprinted 1980 and, with a foreword by Martin Haspelmath, 2005.)
*
*
*
*
*
Books (editor)
* (Second edition 1966.)
*
Articles, reviews, etc.
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
* (Reprinted in ''Genetic Linguistics'', 2005.)
*
* (In second edition of ''Universals of Language'', 1966: pp. 73–113.)
*
*
* (Reprinted in ''Genetic Linguistics'', 2005.)
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
Bibliography
*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. 1997. ''American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America.'' New York: Oxford University Press. .
*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. .
*
*Mairal, Ricardo and Juana Gil. 2006. ''Linguistic Universals.'' Cambridge–NY: Cambridge University Press. .
*
*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
*
Linguistic universal
*
Moscow School of Comparative Linguistics
*
Monogenesis (linguistics)
Monogenism or monogenesis is the theory of human origins which posits a common descent for all human races.
Monogenism or monogenesis may also refer to:
* Recent African origin of modern humans
* Asexual reproduction, which involves only one pa ...
*
Nostratic languages
References
External links
Joseph Greenberg at work; a portrait of himselfby Nicholas Wade, ''New York Times'' (February 1, 2000)
"Complete bibliography of the publications of Joseph H. Greenberg"by William Croft (2003)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Greenberg, Joseph H.
1915 births
2001 deaths
20th-century linguists
20th-century American anthropologists
20th-century American Jews
20th-century non-fiction writers
Anthropological linguists
American social scientists
Linguists from the United States
American Africanists
Jewish American military personnel
Paleolinguists
Columbia College (New York) alumni
Columbia University faculty
James Madison High School (Brooklyn) alumni
Stanford University Department of Anthropology faculty
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
United States Army soldiers
United States Army personnel of World War II
American expatriates in Nigeria
People from Brooklyn
Linguists of Eskaleut languages
Linguists of Hokan languages
Jewish scientists
Linguists of Papuan languages
Linguists of Amerind languages
Linguists of Andamanese languages
Linguists of Tasmanian languages
Linguists of Niger–Congo languages
Linguists of Afroasiatic languages
Linguists of Eurasiatic languages
Linguistic Society of America presidents
Linguists of indigenous languages of the Americas
Long-range comparative linguists
Members of the American Philosophical Society
Presidents of the African Studies Association