Joseph H. Greenberg

The Settlement of the Americas: A Comparison of the Linguistic, Dental, and Genetic Evidence [and Comments and Reply]

The classification of the indigenous languages of the Americas by Greenberg distinguishes three stocks, Amerind, Na-Dene, and Aleut-Eskimo. The first of these covers almost all of the New World. The second consists of Na-Dene as defined by Sapir and, outside of recent. Athapaskan extensions in California and the American Southwest, is found in southern Alaska and northwestern Canada. The third, Aleut-Eskimo, is the easternmost branch of the Eurasiatic language family located in northern Asia and Europe. These three linguistic stocks are found to agree well with the three dental groups proposed by Turner and the genetic divisions of the New World population advanced by Zegura. The three groups are hypothesized as representing the settlement of the New World by successive migrations from Asia. The earliest is in all probability the Amerind; the relative priority of Na-Dene to Aleut-Eskimo is less certain. The evidence regarding the absolute chronology of these proposed migrations is discussed.

The Measurement of Linguistic Diversity

1. The examination of any map of linguistic distributions for an extended area will show some regions of great diversity (e.g. New Guinea, the Nuba Hills in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan) and others of relative uniformity (e.g. the aboriginal Eastern Woodlands area of North America, the contemporary United States), while still others seem to be intermediate between these extremes. The problem considered here is that of developing quantitative measures of this diversity in order to render such impressions more objective, allow the comparing of disparate geographical areas, and eventually to correlate varying degrees of linguistic diversity with political, economic, geographic, historic, and other nonlinguistic factors.

Linguistic evidence regarding Bantu origins

This article has two related purposes. The first is to attempt a clarification of certain points raised by Professor Oliver in his article, ‘The Problem of the Bantu Expansion’, published in an earlier issue of this Journal , insofar as it concerns his discussion of the alternative theories of Professor Guthrie and the present writer regarding Bantu origins. The second and more general aim is to survey the basic assumptions of Guthries work on Bantu insofar as it relates to the same problem. In the course of the exposition, three types of evidence are considered: the internal Bantu linguistic evidence; the linguistic evidence external to Bantu, chiefly from West African languages; and the non-linguistic, chiefly geographic evidence. It is argued that Guthries assumption which underlies his theory of a central ‘nuclear’ area as the point of origin, namely that the linguistically most conservative area reveals the place of origin, is contrary to empirical evidence. It is rather the area of greatest internal divergence, in this case the north-western area, which points to the earliest differentiation and hence point of origin.

Synchronic and Diachronic Universals in Phonology

1. In spite of the influential Saussurean dichotomy of synchronic and diachronic studies, it has in fact not been possible to keep these two main aspects of linguistics in hermetically sealed compartments. The aim of this paper is to explore the theoretical relations between phenomena in the two fields in the context of the current interest in universals. The examples cited are not intended to be conclusive and are meant only as illustrations. It is also not within the scope of this paper to present a detailed historical account. My indebtedness to others who have worked in this area should be evident; but three lines of previous investigation should not go unmentioned. The first of these is the work of Bonfante, Hoenigswald, Marchand, Chafe, and others on internal reconstruction, a method by which synchronic data regarding morphophonemic alternations lead to diachronic conclusions about earlier sound changes.1 The second is the emphasis of Jakobson on the importance of synchronic universals in testing the validity of reconstructed phonological systems.2 The third is the work of Martinet, which not only calls attention to the importance of synchronic structure in understanding sound change, but also contains numerous observations regarding factors in diachronic phonology which are implicitly equivalent in some instances to universals of change.3

Islam and Clan Organization among the Hausa

O NE OF THE RESULTS of the conversion to Islam of the Hausa-speaking peoples of the western Sudan has been the loss of their aboriginal clan organization. The former existence of these units among the mass of Hausa before conversion is indicated by their existence in full vigor among the small groups of pagan Hausa still surviving, the presence of similar groupings among the close linguistic and cultural relatives of the Hausa, and certain widespread survivals of cultural elements connected with clan organization among the Moslem Hausa.1 The data on which this study is based consist of material from groups recently converted from paganism, a study of the fully functioning clan organization of the pagan Hausa, and observation of the social organization of the Moslem Hausa, both urban and rural. While field observation was confined to the Emirate of Kano, whose capital, the city of Kano, is the largest center in Hausa country, the fundamentals of the process were presumably similar throughout the Hausa-speaking area. In view of the lack of explicit condemnation of clan organizations in Moslem law, their disappearance among the Hausa poses a problem. This problem is pointed up by the survival of extended kinship groupings, the tribe and subtribe, among the Arabs in Arabia itself and elsewhere up to the present day. Likewise the Berbers, whose contacts with Islam begin in the 7th century AD, have preserved their tribal organization. There are, it is true, important differences between the Arab and Berber units on the one hand and the African on

Language in the Americas

This book is concerned primarily with the evidence for the validity of a genetic unit, Amerind, embracing the vast majority of New World languages. The only languages excluded are those belonging to the Na-Dene and Eskimo- Aleut families. It examines the now widely held view that Haida, the most distant language genetically, is not to be included in Na-Dene. It confined itself to Sapirs data, although the evidence could have been buttressed considerably by the use of more recent materials. What survives is a body of evidence superior to that which could be adduced under similar restrictions for the affinity of Albanian, Celtic, and Armenian, all three universally recognized as valid members of the Indo-European family of languages. A considerable number of historical hypotheses emerge from the present and the forthcoming volumes. Of these, the most fundamental bears on the question of the peopling of the Americas. If the results presented in this volume and in the companion volume on Eurasiatic are valid, the classification of the worlds languages based on genetic criteria undergoes considerable simplification.

Rethinking Linguistics Diachronically

Recent times have seen a marked growth of interest in historical linguistics, as well as an increased role for diachronic factors within synchronic theory. This suggests that a fundamental re-assessment of the relationship between synchrony and diachrony in linguistic theory is in order, particularly with regard to its role in linguistic explanation. A number of ways are indicated in which diachronic factors enter at various levels as integral and at least equal partners in the over-all explanatory structure of linguistic science.*

Anthropological linguistics : an introduction

Preface. Part I: Introduction 1. Introduction. Part II: The Evolution of Language 2. The Evolution of Language. Part III: Universalism: Innate Constraints of Mind 3. Mind, Universals and the Sensible World. 4. Structuralism. 5. Cognitive Anthropology. 6. Kinship. 7. Color. Part IV: Relativism: Cultural and Linguistic Constraints on Mind 8. On Relativist Understanding. 9. Models and Metaphors. 10. Linguistic Relativity and the Boasian Tradition. 11. Space. 12. Classifiers. Part V: The Ethnography of Speaking 13. Speaking as a Culturally Constructed Act: A Few Examples. 14. Politeness, Face and the Linguistic Construction of Personhood. 15. Language and Gender. 16. Language and Social Position. 17. Language and Socialisation. 18. Genre: Poetics, Ritual Languages and Verbal Art. Part VI: Culture and Language Change 19. Contact Induced Language Change. 20. Standard Language and Linguistic Engineering. 21. Literacy. References.Index.

Linguistic evidence for the influence of the Kanuri on the Hausa

The present study is intended both as a substantive historical contribution, and as an illustration of the possibilities and the limitations of one particular type of historical inferences that can be drawn from language, namely, the study of words borrowed from one language into another. Two other basic linguistic sources for culture-historical conclusions are not considered here, those based on the relationships and distribution of languages as such, and those based on the reconstructed vocabularies of particular Ursprachen , that is, the ancestral speech-forms of specific groups of genetically related languages. These latter two methods are not excluded either for dogmatic or methodological reasons, but simply because they do not yield relevant results for the particular problems being considered, although they are very useful in other connexions. It should, however, be mentioned that, as will appear at a number of points in the discussion, a valid linguistic classification furnishes an indispensible framework for nearly all inferences drawn from linguistic data including the interlinguistic contact phenomena which are the subject of the present study.

The Present Status of Markedness Theory: A Reply to Scheffler

H. Schefflers discussion of markedness particularly in relation to kinship terms is essentially an attack on the present authors work in this area. His statement that this work is superseded is refuted by reference to the proceedings of a recent conference on the subject in which it plays a central role. It is shown, moreover, that Scheffler did not understand that classical marking theory involves a cluster of logically independent attributes which pattern across languages in a way that indicates that the unmarked category is preferred to its marked opposite in a systematic fashion.