From: poser@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Bill Poser)
Subject: Re: Ted Holden on Linguistics and Evolution (long)
Organization: Stanford University CSLI
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1992 20:50:10 GMT


Matthew Wiener writes:

>It is, though, quite in order to point out that it is quite
>proper to criticize his critics for saying that phonology
>must be established first.  The relations could, in
>principle as you state, be established outside of the
>standard linguistical methods.

Few if any of Greenberg's critics have said that it is absolutely
necessary to establish phonological correspondances. Several
have indeed explicitly said that they would accept sufficient
morphological evidence. The methodological criticism of
Greenberg is not strictly that he has not established
phonological correspondances but rather that he has not used ANY
recognized technique. (The non-methodological criticism is that
his handling of the data is incredibly shoddy. When considering
the possibility of Greenberg being able to do some sort of
unconscious statistical evaluation because of his great
expertise, I suggest bearing in mind his questionable
expertise in the languages of the Americas.)

And please don't forget the point I made in the second part of
my previous message. Even if statistical or other non-standard
methods succeed in establishing a historical connection between
two languages, that doesn't mean that the connection is one of
genetic affiliation.  We still need to rule out diffusion. The
only techniques we currently have for doing that are the
traditional techniques of historical linguistics, including the
establishment of phonological correspondances, which allow us to
trace the actual history of the languages. So AT BEST
non-standard methods establish a historical connection but do
not tell us whether it is one of genetic affiliation.

>And the apparent similarity to genetic classification is
>one such method.  The latter is much easier to do--once you
>get the blood/cheek samples, it's all pretty much
>automatic--so this provides surprise on top of surprise.

Well, to begin with there is a huge difference, namely that in the
case of genetic classification the relationship is assumed and
the question is merely one of subgrouping. Although Greenberg
presents a classification, he gives no argument or evidence
whatever in favor of it, so that really isn't at issue here.

As to whether the claimed correlation of genetic and linguistic
classifications tells us anything, I would note several points:
First, the genetic classification is itself quite controversial.
Second, the genetic populations do not match linguistic groups
very well. For example, it is known that the so-called "Na-Dene"
population used in the genetic studies actually contained
samples from speakers of Na-Dene, Eskimo-Aleut, and "Amerind"
languages. Third, even if the genetic classification were
correct and corresponded perfectly to the linguistic one, it
wouldn't vindicate the linguistic one.  That's because, at the
top level, it is obvious that the two groups that are different
are Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene. Nobody with any knowledge of the
culture, archaeology, or for that matter geography is at all
surprised. Take a look at the map: except for the anomalous
Apacheans and the Pacific Coast Athapaskans you'll see a
northern band of Eskimo-Aleuts, then a Na-Dene band, and then
the rest.  It takes no linguistic insight at all to propose what
Greenberg proposed. Even if the "Amerind" languages are not all
related to each other, we would expect to find that the two
really different groups are Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene (neither of
which, by the way, is due to Greenberg).

>The pro-Greenberg camp is waiting to see such "extremely
>high" chance resemblances to appear in randomly chosen
>languages.  Has anyone, say, shown that some pattern of the
>`n-m for 1-2 persons' style shows up >10% of the time?  In
>the early part of the century, the Friedmans debunked the
>Bacon codes in Shakespeare by explicitly showing how
>anything could be found.  The question is, has Greenberg
>done the same thing?  Given his track record, and the
>secondary genetic similarity, a similar level of debunking
>is needed to back such claims as yours.

Well, to begin with, since it is Greenberg who is using a
non-standard technique, the burden of proof is on him to
demonstrate that it works, not the rest of us to demonstrate
that it doesn't. In any case, it is pretty obvious that if you
have very loose criteria for resemblances and can pick and
choose among lots of languages you can do whatever you want.
I've made calculations of this myself which I have not yet
published, but there is a nice treatment accessible to those
without much math in a recent monograph by Don Ringe (Ringe
1992).  Third, debunking studies are already available.
Several studies have shown that it is possible to "demonstrate"
affiliation, using techniques like Greenberg's, of languages not
generally considered to be related. Callaghan & Miller (1962) argue
that by Swadesh's criteria English is Macro-Mixtecan. Campbell
(1973) argues that using criteria proposed by Bender, Finnish,
Cakchiquel (a Mayan language), and Quechua are related. Campbell
(1988) argues that by Greenberg's criteria Finnish is Amerind.

Indeed, there is a long sad history of people using techniques
like Greenberg's and arriving at results that no one believes.
For example, Sir William Jones, whom Greenberg claims as a
model, incorrectly classified Pahlavi, "Afghan" (presumably Dari
or Pashto), and Malay as Semitic, incorrectly classified Tibetan
and the rest of Austronesian as Indo-European, failed to
recognize that Malay is Austronesian, and vehemently denied that
Hindi was related to Sanskrit.  Franz Bopp, another of
Greenberg's models, thought that Indo-European,
Malayo-Polynesian, and Georgian were related.  (These examples
are discussed in Poser & Campbell 1992.)  A nice example of
methods indistinguishable from Greenberg's is Chase (1869),
which argues that Yoruba is related to everything from Egyptian
to Chinese to German and thus that all or nearly all languages
are related. He concludes with a moving appeal to the brotherhood
of mankind. In this century Paul Rivet, using methods just like
Greenberg's, arrived at many claims of affiliation that very few
people accept, including some claims that Greenberg himself
explicitly rejects (see _Language in the Americas_ p. 107).

What about Greenberg's track record? I take it that this refers
to his African classification. It isn't clear that Greenberg's
African classification really provides a good precedent. First,
there is the question of how original Greenberg's African
classification was. Greenberg and his fans often talk as if he
had started from scratch, in Africa and in the Americas, but in
fact in both cases there was a significant amount of previous
work, much of it rather bad in the case of Africa. Judging from
the discussion of the history of African classification on pp.
76-85 of Ruhlen (1987), it appears that his classification was
heavily dependent on previous work, especially that of
Westermann.  It appears that, as far as higher-level groupings
are concerned, Greenberg's original contribution to African
classification consisted primarily of two things:

(a) the flattening of Afro-Asiatic, with the elimination of the
	grouping of Egyptian, Berber, and Cushitic into the
	Hamitic subgroup of Hamito-Semitic.

(b) the splitting off of Nilo-Saharan from Niger-Congo, which
	Westermann had grouped together.

He also removed various incorrect affiliations that had been
based on non-linguistic or purely typological evidence.

However correct and important these contributions may have been,
neither is an argument for distant genetic affiliation of the
sort that is the subject of the current controversy. Greenberg's
role was actually that of a ``splitter'', not a ``lumper''.
Greenberg's work on the classification of African languages therefore
does not provide any precedent for his claims about American Indian
languages.

Note: Greenberg is also credited with the addition of Chadic to
Afroasiatic. However, although Greenberg did adduce additional
evidence, according to Ruhlen the credit for proposing this
affiliation and adducing the main evidence for it goes to Johannes
Lukas.

Second, there is the question of whether the classification was actually
correct. The word is apparently still not in. Here is what one well
known Africanist has to say (Heine 1992):

	Although Greenberg's work represents considerable progress
	over that of previous writers, it leaves a number of questions
	open. His approach is largely inadequate for the PROOF
	of genetic relationship; it can do little more than offer
	initial hypotheses, to be substantiated by more reliable
	techniques like the comparative method. In a number of
	instances,languages or language groups have been placed
	in a given family solely on the basis of a handful of
	`look-alikes', i.e. morphemes of similar sound shape and
	meaning. The Nilo-Saharan family, in particular, must be
	regarded as a tentative grouping, the genetic unity of which
	remains to be established.


In any case, if we're going to appeal to his track record, let's
consider all turns at bat (to mix a metaphor). In between his
African classification and LIA, Greenberg (1971) proposed his
Indo-Pacfic phylum, consisting of all of the Papuan
(non-Austronesian) languages of New Guinea, Tasmanian, and the
languages of the Andaman Islands. This phylum is generally
rejected by specialists.  Foley (1986), who devotes considerable
space to the classification and possible external affiliation of
the Papuan languages, doesn't even mention it. Another critic of
Indo-Pacific is Donald Laycock, who has devoted considerable
effort not only to the description of Papuan languages but to
issues of classification. Here's what he (Laycock 1976;57) has
to say:

        To date, it can safely be said that there is no real
        evidence to link the NAN [Non-Austronesian - WJP]
        languages of New Guinea with any other linguistic group,
        though some slight indications of possibilities are
        discussed elsewhere in this volume (see 2.16.). In
        particular, Greenberg's `Indo-Pacific Hypothesis' (1971)
        which would interrelate `the bulk of non-Austronesian
        languages of Oceania from the Andaman Islands on the west
        in the Bay of Bengal to Tasmania in the Southeast' is not
        only far from proven, but also based on inadequate and
        insufficiently-analysed data (for example, comparisons are
        all too frequently made only of items within large groups
        of languages --- such as the Trans-New-Guinea Phylum ---
        that are already known to be related, so that there is
        little support for the wider relationships postulated.)


Why isn't the failure of Indo-Pacific to gain acceptance as much of a
precedent as Africa? Greenberg's batting average is at best 0.500,
not 1.000.

As for the claim that first and second person morphemes in
n and m are widespread in Amerind and not elsewhere, well, 
we don't really know what is going on there. The observation
goes back to Sapir (it isn't at all original to Greenberg).
We don't know exactly what the distribution of n/m is. Nobody
has ever done a really careful study of the distribution of n/m.
That includes Greenberg. LIA doesn't really give sufficient detail,
and since we know that Greenberg's morphological analyses cannot
be relied upon (Berman 1992, Campbell 1988, Poser 1992),
the examples he cites need to be checked. Whether
n/m are really as widespread within the Americas as G says they
are is controversial, as is the question of whether they occur
outside of the Americas. (Goddard & Campbell to appear and
Campbell to appear).

The other issue with n/m is its source. That is, if it is real,
is it due to genetic affiliation, diffusion, or a statistical tendancy
for such pronominal elements to be drawn from a restricted set of
segments (a position for which there is evidence.)? Scholars have
long been skeptical of arguments based on pronouns precisely because
they often seem to be similar even when there is otherwise no evidence
of affiliation. For example, here is Bloomfield (1904;14),
commenting on Knudtzon's argument that the language of the Arzawa
letters, now known to be Hittite, is Indo-European:

	If mi and ti really express `mine' and `thine' ...
	we seem to have one of those mischievous accidents
	which we may call the standard snag of universal
	linguistic comparisons.

						Bill


REFERENCES

Berman, Howard (1992)
``A comment on the Yurok and Kalapuya data in Greenberg's
Language in the Americas,''
International Journal of American Linguistics
58.2.230-233.

Bloomfield, Maurice (1904)
``On Some Alleged Indo-European Languages in Cuneiform Character,''
American Journal of Philology
25.1.1-14.

Callaghan, Catherine A. & Wick R. Miller (1962)
``Swadesh's Macro Mixtecan hypothesis and English,''
Southwestern Journal of Anthropology
18.278-285.

Campbell, Lyle (1973)
``Distant genetic relationship and the Maya-Chipaya hypothesis,''
Anthropological Linguistics
15.3.113-135.

Campbell, Lyle (1988)
Review of Language in the Americas.
Language
64.591-615.

Campbell, Lyle (to appear)
``The classification of American Indian languages and its implications
for the earliest peopling of the Americas,''
in Allan Taylor (ed.)
The Classification and Prehistory of American Indian Languages.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Chase, Pliny Earle (1869)
``On the comparative etymology of the Yoruba language,''
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society
13.35-68.

Foley, William A. (1986)
The Papuan Languages of New Guinea.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Goddard, Ives &  Lyle Campbell (to appear)
``The history and classification of American Indian languages: what are
the implications for the peopling of the Americas,''
in Robson Bonnichsen (ed.)
The Peopling of the Americas.

Greenberg, Joseph H. (1971)
``The Indo-Pacific hypothesis,''
in Thomas F. Sebeok (ed.)
Current Trends in Linguistics, vol. 8.
The Hague: Mouton. pp. 807-871.

Heine, Bernd (1992)
``African Languages''
In William Bright (ed.)
International Encyclopedia of Linguistics.
Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vol. 1, pp.31-36.

Laycock, Donald A. (1976)
``History of Papuan Linguistic Research,''
in Steven A. Wurm (ed.)
New Guinea Area Languages and Language Study. Vol. 1: Papuan Languages
and the New Guinea Linguistic Scene.
Canberra: Department of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies,
The Australian National University.
(= Pacific Linguistics Series C, no. 38).

Poser, William J. (1992)
``The Salinan and Yurumangui data in Language in the Americas,''
International Journal of American Linguistics
58.2.202-229.

Poser, William J. & Lyle Campbell (1992)
``Indo-European practice and historical methodology,''
to appear in the Proceedings of the 18th Annual Meeting of the
Berkeley Linguistics Society.

Ringe, Donald A. Jr. (1992)
``On Calculating the Factor Chance in Language Comparison,''
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society
82.1. (separatum)

Ruhlen, Merrit (1987)
A Guide to the World's Languages: Volume I: Classification.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Newsgroups: sci.lang