  merritt ruhlen (; born 1944) is an american linguist who has worked on the classification of languages and what this reveals about the origin and evolution of modern humans. amongst other linguists, ruhlen's work is recognized as standing outside the mainstream of comparative-historical linguistics. he is the principal advocate and defender of joseph greenberg's approach to language classification. ==biography== born frank merritt ruhlen, 1944,library of congress authorities ruhlen studied at rice university, the university of paris, the university of illinois and the university of bucharest. he received his phd in 1973 from stanford university with a dissertation on the generative analysis of romanian morphology. subsequently, ruhlen worked for several years as a research assistant on the stanford universals project, directed by joseph greenberg and charles ferguson. since 1994, he has been a lecturer in anthropological sciences and human biology at stanford and co-director, along with murray gell-mann and sergei starostin, of the santa fe institute program on the evolution of human languages.starostin 2004 since 2005, ruhlen has been on the advisory board of the genographic project and held appointment as a visiting professor at the city university of hong kong. ruhlen knew and worked with joseph greenberg for three-and-a-half decades and became the principal advocate and defender of greenberg's methods of language classification. ==books== ruhlen is the author of several books dealing with the languages of the world and their classifications. * a guide to the languages of the world (1975) provides information on the phonological systems and classifications of 700 languages, prefaced by background information for linguists as well as non-linguists. a greatly expanded version of this work was published in 2005 on the santa fe institute web site. * a guide to the worldâs languages, volume i: classification (1987) includes classification of the worldâs lang
1944_births American_linguists Living_people Paleolinguists Rice_University_alumni Stanford_University_Department_of_Anthropology_faculty Stanford_University_Department_of_Biology_faculty Stanford_University_alumni University_of_Illinois_at_UrbanaaChampaign_alumni University_of_Paris_alumni