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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The authoritative reference book on this topic, July 3, 2006
This is now the standard reference on this topic, the best place to go for an understanding of what mainstream historical linguists know about the genetic relationships of the native languages of the Americas as well as for an evaluation of proposals of remoter relationships. It is a comprehensive survey by one of the very few scholars with such a breadth of knowledge. In addition to the main content, the survey of the languages and language families of the Americas, it contains discussions of the methodology of historical linguistics and a review of proposals ranging from the extreme fringe to proposals considered plausible but for one reason or another not clearly established. Campbell rates the subjective likelihood of the proposals discussed on a scale from -100 to 100, where 0 means that he is agnostic as to whether the proposal is valid, -100 means that he is certain that it is invalid, and 100 means that he is certain that it is valid. Contrary to another reviewer's comments, there is nothing idiosyncratic in his understanding of probabilities - he is simply presenting his evaluation in a clear and easily understood fashion that happens not to be the usual probability scale. Any book such as this will seem dry to those looking for interesting facts about American Indian languages. It is a reference book, aimed primarily at scholars and at students and others who want to look up what is known about the genetic affiliation of particular languages. Contrary to another reviewer's comments, one should not expected it to be full of data. A review of the details of the evidence with the scope of this book would require thousands of pages. Those looking for a survey of the languages themselves are more likely to be satisfied with Marianne Mithun's Languages of Native North America, or, if they are more interested in social and cultural aspects of languages, with Shirley Silver and Wick Miller's book American Indian Languages: Cultural and Social Contexts. The book devotes considerable attention to the work of Joseph Greenberg because Greenberg's book Language in the Americas has received a great deal of attention from non-linguists, many of whom do not understand that Greenberg's methodology is a throwback to pre-scientific historical linguistics. It happens that at present the popular, uninformed view is one that lumps together languages without justification, so any critique appears to be negative. In sum, this book is not only the most authoritative reference on the classification of the languages of the Americas, but it contains useful discussions of how such classifications are created and evaluated and evaluations of proposed relationships that will be useful both to those who need to decide what to believe and to students and others choosing research projects.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Scholarly. Difficult. Conservative., April 4, 2007
This review is from: American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America (Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics) (Paperback)
About every branch of science has two types of people: the "splitters" and the "lumpers." The splitters are those who separate everything (plants, animals, etc.) into many different groups and doubt they are connected or related. The lumpers find reasons to believe that everything is related. So it is with languages. A linguist named Greenberg grouped all American Indians languages on both continents into three groups: Amerind, Na-Dine (i.e. Apaches), and Eskimo-Aleut. That's a lumper at work. By contrast, Campbell, the author of this book is a splitter, finding reasons why North American Indian languages are not related. He asserts there are dozens -- maybe over a hundred -- American Indian language families which are either unrelated or a relationship cannot be proven. Who's right? I don't know, but it makes for heated debate -- and the correct answer is important the who, where, when, and how of the first people to inhabit the Americas. The virtue of Campbell's book is that he briefly discusses virtually every American Indian language and language family, including those that are proposed but unproven. This sounds pretty dull and technical and beyond the comprehension of the average reader. So it is -- if I qualify as an average reader --but through the fog of technical linguistic discussion comes some wonderfully interesting speculations. For example, how is that two small tribes in northern California speak languages that are related to the Algonquin spoken by dozens of tribes thousands of miles away in Canada, the Great Lakes, and the eastern United States. Did the Algonguins originate in California and migrate eastward? Or the reverse? And, how is that the Uto-Aztecan language family can encompass Indians from El Salvador to Nevada and include both the urbanized Aztecs and the simple hunting gathering groups of the desert? Campbell imparts an enormous amount of information about American Indian languages and their relationships with each other. He discusses the history of American linguistics and the techniques linguists have used in attempting to establish relationships among languages, and he examines the many theories of linguistic relationships, refuting Greenberg and the other lumpers in detail. One of the better features of this 500 page book are maps of tribal locations and linguistic families. Want to know the name and something about the language of the tribe that inhabited the region of Brazilia? Look up the Xakriaba. "American Indian Languages" is not easy reading but as a thorough reference book I doubt that it is matched in its field. Smallchief (Kansa tribe, Dheghia language group, Siouan language family)
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33 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Where's the Data?, April 22, 2002
This book never delivers on its title. Thoroughly miserable, its focus is purely negative: an ad hoc piecemeal attack on the author's apparent bugbear, Joseph Greenberg. Buy it only if you wish to be told what to believe, without being given any evidence upon which to judge yourself. Rather than offering his own arguments in support of any genetic relationships, Campbell spends his time attacking portions of the evidence that other classifiers offer. He never addresses the overall context of any circumstance. He remains silent in the face of any evidence he can't refute. The supposed cognates he disputes are almost never given for the reader to judge. Native forms in general are quite rare, and those spread throughout the book might fill two pages of the total work, three at most. Whether one proposes three, two-dozen, or the over 50 "un-relatable" North American stocks that Campbell clings to, any book that purports to study the "Historical Linguistics of Native America" should at least be chock-full of native words or texts, with grammatical sketches and detailed phonetic transcriptions, if not cladograms or posited family trees. Campbell gives us almost nothing. For the majority of "isolates" or families we get a mere list of phonemes without the context of even one single native word. (What would a mere list of the phonemes of English tell you about its history or relationships? Except for Hungarian rounded front vowels and English interdental fricatives, the palatal versus the velar nasal, and /w/, the phonemes of English and Hungarian overlap almost completely. German and Hungarian look like siblings, phonetically. Comparing phonemes alone, one might think Japanese and Spanish were close relatives, while French might appear to come from West Africa.) In a few families case endings or pronouns are given, but never once any full paradigms. The maps given are available elsewhere. There is not one full sketch, brief text, or even partial lexicostatistical wordlist! This book's fatal flaw is its exclusively negative focus. Pages upon pages list references in English to secondary and tertiary sources, but the subject languages themselves are studiously ignored. Never making any positive argument of his own, he never feels obliged to provide the one thing a thinking reader wants, the evidence. Campbell further embarrasses himself with his uniquely idiosyncratic system of probability analysis. He cites various theories of distant relationships proposed by other scholars. He then (admittedly subjectively) grades the likeliness of these theories, not on a scale of 0% to 100% as is universally accepted, but rather on a scale of positive to negative (!) 100%, with a 0% probability on his scale indicating an actual probability of 50%. For example, he finds the Tlingit-Eyak-Athabaskan hypothesis to have a +75% probability, by which he means that it is actually 87.5% likely. But to the Na Dene hypothesis (the above family linked to Haida) he gives a 0% probability, by which means an actual 50% likelihood. Any link between Zuni and Penutian (however constituted) he gives a -80% probability. Yes, that's a "negative eighty percent," by which he means an actual possibility of 10%. Confused? Then don't buy this book. Marianne Mithun's "The Languages of North America" is an excellent general source for north of the Rio Grande, with a conservative classification, a well-specimened typological overview of the documented variation, and at least a phonology, sketch, and brief text of each language family. Maps of North America are as good as Campbell's. Campbell may be the most "respected" authority in his field, as were Ptolemy, St. Augustine, and the Malleus Maleficarum in their days. But this evidence-free work certainly gives no evidence as to why. I would suggest that those students of Campbell's giving him such glowing reviews refute me by providing just one set of comparative texts or paradigms from this vacuous pseudo-academic pontification.
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