Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family, Volume 1, Grammar [Hardcover]

Joseph Greenberg (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0804738122 | ISBN-13: 978-0804738125 | Publication Date: February 1, 2000 | Edition: 1

The basic thesis of this book is that the well known and extensively studied Indo-European family of languages is but a branch of a much larger Eurasiatic family that extends from northern Asia to North America. Eurasiatic is seen to consist of Indo-European, Uralic-Yukaghir, Altaic (Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungus-Manchu), Japanese-Korean-Ainu (possibly a distinct subgroup of Eurasiatic), Gilyak, Chuckchi-Kamchatkan, and Eskimo-Aleut. The author asserts that the evidence for the validity of Eurasiatic as a single linguistic family, including the vocabulary evidence to be presented in Volume II on semantics, confirms his hypothesis since the numerous and interlocking resemblances he finds among the various subgroups can only reasonably be explained by descent from a common ancestor.

The evidence in this volume deals in great detail with the distribution of 72 grammatical elements and the forms they take in the various Eurasiatic languages. The book also contains a historical introduction and a discussion of certain phonological phenomena. Of these phenomena, the most important is the vocal-harmony system found in many of these languages that is the ancestor of the so-called Ablaut variations of vowels in Indo-European, still seen in English in such contrasts as “come”/”came.” The origin and earliest form of this system have long been a puzzle to Indo-Europeanists, but in this work they are shown to be the outcome of this original system.

An appendix deals with the vowel variation of Ainu, which resembles that of other languages in Eurasiatic. The origin of the Ainu has hitherto been considered a great mystery, and this volume shows a north Asian origin, not, as some have thought, one in Southeast Asia or the Pacific. The book also includes a Classification of Eurasiatic Languages and an Index of the Etymologies.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A very important book by a man whose work has been central to discussions of comparative linguistics throughout the second half of the 20th century.”—Carol Justus, University of Texas, Austin

From the Inside Flap

The basic thesis of this book is that the well known and extensively studied Indo-European family of languages is but a branch of a much larger Eurasiatic family that extends from northern Asia to North America. Eurasiatic is seen to consist of Indo-European, Uralic-Yukaghir, Altaic (Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungus-Manchu), Japanese-Korean-Ainu (possibly a distinct subgroup of Eurasiatic), Gilyak, Chuckchi-Kamchatkan, and Eskimo-Aleut. The author asserts that the evidence for the validity of Eurasiatic as a single linguistic family, including the vocabulary evidence to be presented in Volume II on semantics, confirms his hypothesis since the numerous and interlocking resemblances he finds among the various subgroups can only reasonably be explained by descent from a common ancestor.
The evidence in this volume deals in great detail with the distribution of 72 grammatical elements and the forms they take in the various Eurasiatic languages. The book also contains a historical introduction and a discussion of certain phonological phenomena. Of these phenomena, the most important is the vocal-harmony system found in many of these languages that is the ancestor of the so-called Ablaut variations of vowels in Indo-European, still seen in English in such contrasts as “come”/”came.” The origin and earliest form of this system have long been a puzzle to Indo-Europeanists, but in this work they are shown to be the outcome of this original system.
An appendix deals with the vowel variation of Ainu, which resembles that of other languages in Eurasiatic. The origin of the Ainu has hitherto been considered a great mystery, and this volume shows a north Asian origin, not, as some have thought, one in Southeast Asia or the Pacific. The book also includes a Classification of Eurasiatic Languages and an Index of the Etymologies.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 344 pages
• Publisher: Stanford University Press; 1 edition (February 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0804738122
• ISBN-13: 978-0804738125
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,687,547 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

81 of 87 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A difficult book that will go down in history, March 22, 2000

By 

Ben Thomas (Dallas, Texas, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family, Volume 1, Grammar (Hardcover)

This is no more a book for the casual reader than is Newton's _Principia_; but, like the _Principia_, it leaves its subject transformed forever. Greenberg argues that the Indo-European language family should be seen as part of a superfamily that also includes the Uralic, Altaic, Yukaghir, Gilyak, and Chukotian families; Korean, Japanese, and Ainu (seen as distantly related members of a single family); and the Eskimo-Aleut languages, another family. Plus Etruscan. This volume concentrates on "grammar"--mostly pronouns, suffixes and prefixes with grammatical functions, and other formatives; a second volume on vocabulary is planned.

Greenberg's methodology, focusing on the assessment of degrees of probable relationship rather than the quasi-mathematical demonstration of relationship via laws of sound change, is controversial. Yet he makes a strong case supporting the claim that the patterns he demonstrates are stronger than any of their individual data points. Even a small subset of the evidence he presents (for example, the material on first- and second-person pronouns and verb endings) is hard to account for except by genetic relationship of the languages involved.

A virtue of the book is the testability of the relationships he alleges: it opens the way for further study which can strengthen or weaken his case.

It is hard to imagine that a common ancestor for Finnish, Sanskrit, Japanese, and the Eskimo languages--and most of the languages in between--could be more recent than the last ice age. I find it wonderful that elements of English that we use every day, in almost every sentence--the "m" of "am" and "me," the "g" of "ego" (buried just under the surface of "I"), the "th" of "the" (transformed from an earlier "t"), and the"sc" of "crescent" and "fluorescent"--could be shared across the whole northern cap of the planet, passed down to us from linguistic ancestors who witnessed perhaps ten thousand years of history.

Perhaps the most provocative element of the title is the word "closest." Greenberg argues here for only one linguistic superfamily, equal in status to a number of others--one galaxy, as it were, in the starry heavens. What, then, is the closest other galaxy to ours? The American Indian languages, from Canada to Patagonia.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A powerful proposition, August 5, 2010

By 

Thomas Ahlswede (Mt. Pleasant, MI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family, Volume 1, Grammar (Hardcover)

Reconstructing a proto-language, or establishing "sound laws", are not the only ways to demonstrate a relationship; in fact, both procedures *presuppose* a relationship. The unity of the Indo-European languages was established not by the reconstruction of proto-Indo-European (which was belated, and quite inaccurate when first attempted), but by the massive piling up of apparent correspondences - some of which turned out to be false.

That is what Greenberg has done for Eurasiatic. Some of his proposed correspondences will no doubt prove to be false, as he has predicted. His expectation (fully justified IMO) is that a sufficient number of them will *not* prove to be false - and, as full comparative studies are launched, will eventually be confirmed by the rigorous Comparative Method.

As he has said many times, Greenberg does not oppose the comparative method; he asserts, accurately, that it is a way of testing a proposed relationship, or more correctly a classification, rather than a way of *finding* relationships in the first place. Successful comparative studies have always been based on the presumption of a relationship. Who would bother to apply the comparative method to languages they did not believe were related?

So, in this volume and its successor, Greenberg has taken the first necessary step: pile up apparent correspondences in order to establish the presumption of a relationship. His method, while not "The Comparative Method", does successfully what it sets out to do, if nothing more. It establishes the presumption of a relationship, which can then be fleshed out more completely by future work.

4.0 out of 5 stars A pioneering effort, May 3, 2010

By 

CPT "cptaylor" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family, Volume 1, Grammar (Hardcover)

I admire very much the scholarship and hard work that went into this book, even if not every claim made is plausible. I also admire the author's courage in challenging the reigning orthodoxies of historical linguistics, which are nicely encapsulated in William Poser's review. I find the thinking in reviews like his quite irritating. The heart of the objection is that Greenberg and his ilk have not constructed a full proto-language for the proposed Eurasiatic family, nor tables of sound correspondences leading from the ancestral language to its many progeny. True enough; but given the great antiquity of the imagined proto-language it is hardly surprising that such a goal remains as yet unfulfilled. Before one can attempt to reconstruct a proto-language one must of course identify which languages are worth attempting to connect, and which words might serve as starting points. Once that initial step is made, then we can begin the laborious process of fleshing the hypothesis out. When William Jones first proposed the Indo-European family, he did not have a complete proto-language and a system of sound correspondences worked out; but one can hardly blame him for this failure, since even after two hundred years of work our understanding of Proto-Indo-European remains incomplete. Obviously, linguistics today would be in sorry shape if Jones' contemporaries had adopted the dismissive, perfectionist attitude towards the Indo-European hypothesis that Greenberg's contemporaries adopt.

The mainstream dogma of historical linguists, that one must either ignore or shout down any novel hypothesis that is not yet perfectly formed runs counter to the scientific method and stems, I believe, more from academic territoriality than any solid scholarly motives. It is interesting to note that Greenberg's work on African languages is now universally accepted, while specialists continue to decry his ideas about Eurasiatic and Amerind languages. (The party line in the latter case seems particularly ridiculous: archeological and genetic data confirm the idea of 3 main human migrations into the Americas within the past 20,000 years, and yet the official doctrine remains that dozens of "unrelated" families exist in the Americas --- corresponding to dozens of migrations, apparently. The eminently plausible project of finding larger groupings is declared prima facie impossible.) One suspects that the varying reactions to Greenberg's different projects depend largely on the relative numbers of American linguists invested in particular languages, rather than on the actual scientific merits of each case.