Talk:Joseph Greenberg

message: Scythian99 is quite right, I think, to make sure that readers will not get the impression that Greenberg's views on language comparison or on language families were mainstream.  Indeed, he was one of the most controversial linguists of his century, and not easy to write a NPOV article about.
I've tried to be a bit more positive than Scythian99 without glossing over the intellectual scandals.  My impression is that the early African work is indeed generally respected, and so were the early contributions to typological study.  It was in his later work that Greenberg got into the biggest controversy, to the point of people questioning his competence.
Opus33 01:26, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Greenberg & controversy

message: Dear colleagues, 
I've edited the article with the intent of making clearer that there really two objections to Greenberg's mass-comparison work:
*whether we can trust the basic method
*whether we can trust the data that Greenberg fed into the method
Both are important.  For instance, if it turns out that only the second criticism is valid, we can hope that future scholars will be able to apply the method with greater scholarly acceptance.  But both points should be made.
In connection with this, I've re-inserted User:Billposer's sentence:
:Many of them report errors in the majority of the items that they examined, and some even report that every form examined is erroneous. 
which strikes me as very important and relevant in this connection.  I hope this will not strike editor User:Jorge Stolfi as unfair.  Cheers, Opus33 22:29, 2 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Discussing recent edit

message: I an unhappy about the last round of edits chiefly becuse they moved the "data accuracy" criticisms into the section about the weaknesses of the methodology.  The two issues are largely independent and should be addressed as such. Besides,  I suppose that linguists have already tried to replicate Greenberg's analysis with corrected data, and it would be nice if someone reported on the results of such attempts.
Moreover, from the references given, it seems that that the "data accuracy" criticisms were directed mostly against the Amerind family work, whereas the Eurasian work is mostly rejected because of the methodology alone. (If that is not the case, then some references about errors in the Eurasian data are in order.)
Now, speaking as an outsider, I can appreciate (perhaps better than most linguists) the statistical and conceptual problems in Greenberg's method, and I cannot criticize those linguists who prudently reject it. Yet the strong feelings which I see in the debate, and the use of terms like "the community of historical linguists", make me think that the polemic may be fueled in no small part by academic socio-politics, rather than purely scientific issues.
That such "fuel" exists is undeniable.  Linguists who have been teaching for decades that the bogus lexical comparisons of armchair linguists are worthless pseudo-science may be understandably upset at seing the idea being given academic status.  Experts in the comparative method will undestandably feel a visceral antipathy for any development that threatens to make their expertise "old fashioned" if not obsolte, and make them followers rather than leaders. And so on.
These observations of course do not affect the valididity of the method and its criticisms, but weaken the significance of the "veredict" passed by "the community".
Having seen several such situations in my own field, I cannot avoid seeing parallels betweeh Greenberg's case and other "iconoclastic" revolutions in science, like Wegner's continental drift theory (which was strongly rejected by the "community" of geologists, before becoming a new dogma), Prusiner's prion theory (which took decades to be accepted), etc..
It is disturbing, for instance, that there seems to be little attempt by critics to separate (1) the data and methodology from (2) the proposed classification; on the contrary, it seems at times that some criticisms of (1) are chiefly motivated by "a priori" rejection of (2).
So in my opinion it is too early to pass judgement on the validity of Greenberg's method. At the very least, the article should explain the arguments for both sides, estimate the amount of support that each side has got, but leave the decision to the reader. IMHO, only a few decades from now we will be able to tell whether "mass lexical comparison" was another prion hypothesis, or another cold fusion affair.
All the best,
Jorge Stolfi 15:38, 3 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Unhappy about edits...

message: Hi Jorge,
I see your point, and would welcome further editing that made the article satisfactory from your point of view.  
My priorities for the article are these:
*Maintain NPOV--hard though that may be to do!  
*Make it clear that the "traditional historical linguists" are not just a bunch of fuddy-duddy humanities types poring over manuscripts.  They've got their own method, which is very rigorous and has accumulated an excellent track record over the last fifteen decades or so.
*Keep separate the evaluation of the mass-comparison method from the evaluation of the data that Greenberg fed into it--I think we are agreed on this point, and it's only a matter of what gets put where.  I now understand why you want to keep the Amerind and Asian discussions separate.
*Make clear that the quality of the data fed into the method was such that a lot of well-informed scholars were outraged (hence my restoring of User:Billposer's sentences).  Alas, I don't know of any attempts to rerun the method with better data since Greenberg published his work--perhaps people have been deterred by the huge amount of labor that would be involved.
I would welcome some rewriting on your part that maintained NPOV as you see it, fixing the problems you mentioned while respecting the goals laid out above, with which I suspect you would agree.
One last bit:  chucking all the stuff I put in about the "research community" I put in would be wise; that's just bullying and I regret having written it.
Yours very truly, Opus33 16:09, 3 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Reply for Jorge Stolfi

message: OK, I have moved the data-quality criticisms back to the Amerind section. I have also kept User:Billposer's note that many critics found errors in most items that they checked, and also the "garbage in, garbage out" comment, which I believe accurately described the view that many linguists have of that work. (Was that phrase actually used in some of the articles?) Please check and fix as you may see fit.
Should we add that the method has yet to be re-run with corrected American Indian data?
Is it correct to say that the Eurasian work is rejected only because of the method, not because of the data?
Are there linguists who specifically disagree with Greenberg's trees and have proposed different (incompatible) groupings for those languages?  Or is it only a choice between "Greenberg's tree" vs. "no tree"?
All the best,Jorge Stolfi 18:21, 3 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Explain move, requests for more info

message: : I agree on creating a separate mass lexical comparison page.  Greenberg did a whole lot of work apart from mass comparison (his typology work, especially, is still very notable) and discussion of mass lexical comparison's merits and flaws belongs in its own page. - Mustafaa 16:40, 4 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: agree on separating mass lexical comparison

message: Timothy Usher asks what is the source for my comment "reported failure in joining North and South Caucasian".  That was another unattributed statement which I read in some Wikipedia page on Caucasian linguistics (the line is now in languages of the Caucasus), and apparently refers to Greenberg's Eurasian work.
The estimate of 10,000 years for the traditional method is my guess based on the apparent reluctance or inability of mainstream linguists to propose trees that extend that far in the past. I take it that Nostratic is not considered mainstream either, is that right? What is the oldest family that is considered "mainstream"?
I gather that there is a major debate about when exactly were the Americas inhabited -- some say "no more than 12,000 years ago", others belive that some South American sites are older than that, perhaps 20,000.  (A respected Brazilian archaeologist claims that there are several sites in Brazil which are older than 12,000 and show a very distinct population, more like the Pacific/Australian type than the Siberian/Mongolian one.) Anyway, the three waves recognized by Greenberg presumably came through Western Siberia. So we have three linguistic phyla in that small region that could not be connected by Greenberg's  method.  How much older could be their common root?
Jorge Stolfi 17:37, 5 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: how far back can we reach?

message: Hello Jorge,
The quote in the Caucasian article is, 
"The South Caucasian and North Caucasian families are unrelated phyla even in Greenberg's deep classification of the world's languages."
This is a misinterpretation of Greenberg's position.  Greenberg believed, as do I, that all natural human languages share a common historical origin, from which they   subsequently evolved and diverged - evolution in the strict sense of "descent with modification".  
Greenberg saw Kartvelian - and this is also supported by Nostraticists such as Sergei Starostin - as being closer to Eurasiatic than it is to N.Caucasian, just as English is more closely related to German than it is to Hindi, Albanian or French. 
I don't know that he had any opinion as to whether the two Caucasian families were easily relatable (as opposed to related, which all languages are), but it's a moot point, since it would be more sensible to compare Caucasian with Eurasiatic as a whole, if one accepts this classification.
Supposing no descendent of Eurasiatic had survived, Kartvelian would still be placable in theory, although with less reliability, relative to the other languages of the world (Joe did have ideas about the outlines of such a classification, it's just that this was not the subject of his Eurasiatic book, as was erroneously suggested in earlier versions of this article).  The difference would be the lack of a Kartvelo-Eurasiatic node, just as if English were the only surviving and attested Germanic language, it would be considered an independent branch of Indo-European.
Timothy_Usher 
===single origin or multiple origins?===
Timothy, you say
:Greenberg believed, as do I, that all natural human languages share a common historical origin, from which they   subsequently evolved and diverged - evolution in the strict sense of "descent with modification".
I happen to believe that too, but there are other possibilities.
Consider the biological evolution of modern Homo sapiens.  The "seven Eves" popular theory notwithstanding, it is unlikely (indeed near impossible) that all modern humans descend from a single Adam and Eve pair.  The species presumably evolved from a population of proto-humans whose genetic makeup drifted far enough from that of other populations to become a separate species. All the while the members of this population remained interfertile and so the whole population would have been substantially homogeneous genetically (numerically at least, 20-30 generations -- 500 to 1000 years -- seem more than enough to do that for a nomadic population.)  The big question is how large was this initial population: one extreme camp thinks it was a small population in Africa which radiated only after evolving into modern humans, the other extreme says that the evolution happened over the entire world more or less simultaneously. The former view seems more popular, but the latter has not been ruled out AFAIK (genetic diffusion may be fast enough for that).
So the same thing may have happened with languages.  One can imagine that, sometime after the necessary genes diffused over the globe, language was "invented" independently in different areas, with onomatopoeic lexicons and a (very rudimentary) random grammar.  The result would be several proto-languages with no linguistic connection between them.  Each of these proto-languages could have evolved into an independent family with sophisticated syntax, and perhaps two or more of those families managed to survive to this day.
My guess is that the "small tribe in Africa" is more likely for biological evolution, and that all languages of today are descendant of the language of that tribe; but it is only a guess.
Anyway, language evolution is fundamentally different from genetic evolution, in such a way that even if there were two or more unrelated linguistic phyla 200,000 years ago, is its extremely unlikely that more than one of them would have survived to this day. For this reason, mainly, I believe that all languages of the world have a common ancestor that is substantially more recent than the first human language — perhaps as early as 80,000 to 100,000 years ago
On the other hand, I see the simple tree model of language evolution that is assumed by historical linguists as beeing way too simplistic and useless beyond a few millenia.  Languages don't just branch, they can mix, too. Saying that English is a Germanic language, or Persian is Indo-European, are attempts to arbitrarily binarize what should be a continuous measure: one should admit that English is X% Germanic, Y% Romance, an perhaps Z% Celtic (in grammar and morphology as well as in its lexicon). The "minor ingredients" can perhaps be ignored in studies spanning a few millennia, but for longer time periods they may cause the official "genetic" ancestor to become a completely irrelevant concept.  Of course, if linguists were to admit that languages can mix, they would no longer be able to draw those neat trees that look so nice in their papers...
Jorge Stolfi 14:20, 6 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Caucasian 

message: Timothy, you say
:Greenberg believed, as do I, that all natural human languages share a common historical origin, from which they   subsequently evolved and diverged - evolution in the strict sense of "descent with modification".
I happen to believe that too, but there are other possibilities.
Consider the biological evolution of modern Homo sapiens.  The "seven Eves" popular theory notwithstanding, it is unlikely (indeed near impossible) that all modern humans descend from a single Adam and Eve pair.  The species presumably evolved from a population of proto-humans whose genetic makeup drifted far enough from that of other populations to become a separate species. All the while the members of this population remained interfertile and so the whole population would have been substantially homogeneous genetically (numerically at least, 20-30 generations -- 500 to 1000 years -- seem more than enough to do that for a nomadic population.)  The big question is how large was this initial population: one extreme camp thinks it was a small population in Africa which radiated only after evolving into modern humans, the other extreme says that the evolution happened over the entire world more or less simultaneously. The former view seems more popular, but the latter has not been ruled out AFAIK (genetic diffusion may be fast enough for that).
So the same thing may have happened with languages.  One can imagine that, sometime after the necessary genes diffused over the globe, language was "invented" independently in different areas, with onomatopoeic lexicons and a (very rudimentary) random grammar.  The result would be several proto-languages with no linguistic connection between them.  Each of these proto-languages could have evolved into an independent family with sophisticated syntax, and perhaps two or more of those families managed to survive to this day.
My guess is that the "small tribe in Africa" is more likely for biological evolution, and that all languages of today are descendant of the language of that tribe; but it is only a guess.
Anyway, language evolution is fundamentally different from genetic evolution, in such a way that even if there were two or more unrelated linguistic phyla 200,000 years ago, is its extremely unlikely that more than one of them would have survived to this day. For this reason, mainly, I believe that all languages of the world have a common ancestor that is substantially more recent than the first human language — perhaps as early as 80,000 to 100,000 years ago
On the other hand, I see the simple tree model of language evolution that is assumed by historical linguists as beeing way too simplistic and useless beyond a few millenia.  Languages don't just branch, they can mix, too. Saying that English is a Germanic language, or Persian is Indo-European, are attempts to arbitrarily binarize what should be a continuous measure: one should admit that English is X% Germanic, Y% Romance, an perhaps Z% Celtic (in grammar and morphology as well as in its lexicon). The "minor ingredients" can perhaps be ignored in studies spanning a few millennia, but for longer time periods they may cause the official "genetic" ancestor to become a completely irrelevant concept.  Of course, if linguists were to admit that languages can mix, they would no longer be able to draw those neat trees that look so nice in their papers...
Jorge Stolfi 14:20, 6 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: single origin or multiple origins?

message: There are some cases of mixed languages that are pretty convincing on grammar and morphology as well as vocabulary (well, at least one: Michif language.) However, this seems pretty rare, and in the normal course of things pretty slow.  As far as I know, only one "grammatical" morpheme in English has been borrowed: they, from a closely related Scandinavian language, whose absorption was no doubt facilitated by its similarity to the previous English form (though this depends what you define as grammar vs other components.)  Lexicons mix a lot more easily. Of course, as you point out, even the small amount of basic-level mixing that exists will mess things up over a sufficient time scale; but I suspect that timescale is a lot longer than a few millenia (especially given that inter-communal communication has gone up, not down, in the interim, without creating all that many cases to compare.)  It would be interesting to try and extrapolate statistics. - Mustafaa 18:27, 6 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: language mixing?

message: Quote from the article: “Greenberg is also widely known and respected for his development of a new classification system for African languages, which he published in 1963. The classification was for a time considered very bold and speculative, especially in his proposal of a Nilo-Saharan language family, but is now generally accepted among African historical specialists.”
Why is there no reference indicating who the “African historical specialists” agreeing with this classification system are. Personally, I view it rather arbitrary. I find it hard to believe that Nigerians and people from Niger would speak languages from different language families considering that they share a border with one another, and many ethnic ties. I think good references from multiple sources should be provided before such free-wielding statements are made.
I study cultural Anthropology and based on the information one finds about Africa in this field, Greenberg’s classification system seems a little inconsistent and deleteriously fudged. His restrictive divisions seem to disregard overlap and inter-exchange; it all seems very whimsical. 
References and Cross-references would be nice…
:So would a signature. It would have been very easy for you to click on one of the links concerning African languages in this article before shooting from the hip. In this way you would have easily discovered that Greenberg's African-language classification is, in fact, generally accepted by historical linguists specializing in African languages. 
:As to your complaint that Greenberg doesn't pay enough attention to areal interaction, this is substantive, but note that even massive borrowing does not cancel out genealogical relationships, in the vast majority of cases. It is therefore not futile to seek these, whether or not you find the areal relationships more interesting. BalanceAngel (talk) 21:06, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Whimsical 

message: Greenberg excluded Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene from his larger group for emotional
reasons. His methods, with vague sound laws, could just as well have been used
to include them. He wanted to avoid a row with other linguists, who were working
on the two and would have objected to the implication that the linguists were wrong.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.143.5.71 (talk) 13:23, 1 May 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: It's certainly interesting that you claim to be inside Greenberg's head and to know what he was thinking. This is not acceptable scholarly procedure. The same remark applies to your claim regarding Finnish (could you supply a reference, please?). The fact is that Greenberg did not classify Finnish as an Amerind language, but as a Eurasiatic one. One of the many reasons he did so is (obviously) that the Finnish pronouns fit with other Uralic pronouns, and these fit with the pronouns of Eskimo-Aleut and the other languages he identifies as Eurasiatic, whereas the Na-Dene pronouns do not, and the Amerind pronouns form a class by themselves. So one can only conclude that Ringe was working with a caricature of Greenberg's method, not the method itself. Nothing prevents those concerned from informing themselves of the facts and mounting a sound critique, if one is possible, but in the meantime, the rest of us are justified in dismissing their claims as mere polemic. BalanceAngel (talk) 21:16, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Emotional 

message: In his 1963 work, Greenberg suggests that two of his four groups might be related.
The similarity between them, a causative s, is very slight, but Greenberg
had been using slight similarities in his career for some time.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.143.5.71 (talk) 13:44, 1 May 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The operative word here is "might". Greenberg noticed a similarity worth investigating and called it to the attention of future researchers. He did not take a position for or against it. This was a responsible course of action, and the only one to take. As for the "for some time", this causative s arose in the course of Greenberg's Africanist work, which resulted in a successful classification, now generally accepted. You may not agree with his methods, but you have to admit that in this case they worked, if you are honest with yourself - whether or not they did in others, and whatever epistemological challenges this  might pose for you. If you are going to keep making comments like this and want them to remain, please get a username. BalanceAngel (talk) 20:38, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  1963 

message: It was Greenberg's policy to give the impression that he had made a discovery without
making a false statement. He did this with his 1950 article on Semitic consonants
in  stems. Much of what he said had already been said by German Protestants in the
1880's and 1890's. Basically, in a form of dissimilation, similar or identical
consonants are banned in 2- and 3-consonant stems.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.149.117.81 (talk) 11:20, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Policy 

message: This sentence is quite misleading:
Even Fleming and Lionel Bender, who are sympathetic to Greenberg's classification, acknowledge that at least some of his macrofamilies (particlularly Nilo-Saharan and Khoisan) are not fully accepted by the linguistic community and may need to be split up (Campbell 1997).
Bender does not at all question th validity of Nilosharan.  (I am not familiar with Fleming).  But as written, the sentence makes it seem that both Fleming and Bender think both Nilo-Saharan and Khoisan need to be split up. The sentence itself should be split up.  And why is Campbell cited as a source for Bender's opinion?  I suggest whoever wrote this try rewriting it.  Kjaer (talk) 06:07, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Because Lyle Campbell discusses it and quotes Bender at large (and in quotes that quite obviously question the validity of N-S ) - and the reason I quote from Campbell is because this is the source I used when I wrote it, and not Benders original because it is not in my library.·Maunus·ƛ· 05:07, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Bender & Nilo Saharan

message: I have followed the studies related to human genetics.  They routinely confirm most of Greenberg's hypotheses, showing that the ethnic groups he considered *linguistically* more closely related were also *genetically* more closely related.  (Obviously, this was not always the case, but it's been right several times.)  In the Americas in particular, the genetic studies essentially confirmed the Eskimo-Aleut; Na-Dene; Everyone Else split, although there is debate over the degree of relationship among "everyone else", and whether it's really one group, two, or maybe another very small number.
I'm not sure where the best source for these are; the articles are scattered all over the place.  I realize many linguists ignore out-of-field evidence, but there really ought to be some mention of this in the article.  Any volunteers?
67.244.55.57 (talk) 23:06, 4 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Outside evidence from comparative genetics

message: In the article, Campbell and Ringe are said to be not African specialists.
If an African specialist is someone who knows every language in Africa, then there are no African specialists.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.177.254.83 (talk) 14:09, 17 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Thats a good sound that that is probably not what that means.·Maunus·ƛ· 14:16, 17 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  No specialists 

message: Using methods similar to those of Greenberg, Roman Stopa proved that the Bushman languages of Southern Africa are related to Indo-European ones.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.154.3.117 (talk) 08:14, 2 August 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Note that the late Roman Stopa was a man.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.157.67.11 (talk) 12:50, 18 August 2012 (UTC)
replies: text:  Note that people occasionally make typing errors and the fact that you wished to make a snide comment about it whilst also not addressing the point previously made makes you, and your views, look fraudulent. 94.7.253.254 (talk) 18:47, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Roman Stopa 

message: I have never edited a Wikipedia article before and am not sure the best way to fix this error. From the mass comparison section of the article, "He pointed out that, even for 8 languages, there are already 4,140 ways to classify them into distinct families, while for 25 languages there are 4,749,027,089,305,918,018 ways (1957:44)." As has recently come to my attention, 4,749,027,089,305,918,018 is not the correct number. It is the number that Greenberg came up with, but is incorrect. The professor of mine that discovered this error is currently preparing a paper to bring this to light. An early draft can be found here. Since I have never edited a Wikipedia article before, I will leave it to experienced editors to make any changes that they deem necessary.
Mathstudent2 (talk) 02:04, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Since that link is dead, I thought I'd provide an alternative link: https://arxiv.org/abs/1309.5883 Umimmak (talk) 17:39, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Error in Greenberg's Number 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: These links might be of use.
Obit in the New York Times; obit in Language and the corrections. — Wug·a·po·des​ 02:04, 15 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Obit in the Stanford Report and Los Angeles Times — Wug·a·po·des​ 22:08, 15 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Links