29 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
great disappointment, November 10, 2003
This review is from: Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family, Volume 2, Lexicon (Hardcover)
joseph greenberg was a world-famous linguist best known for his contributions to the classification of african and amerindian languages. he has been working on the problem of possible relationships between indo-european and other old world language families, including uralic, altaic, and paleosiberian, and has been known as one of the principal defenders of the "nostratic" theory that exists in several variations across both sides of the atlantic (or rather pacific). the theory holds that all of the above languages (give or take a family or two in different versions) are related.
the problem with such a theory is that you have to know enough about over two hundred languages to write scholarly works on them, a feat no one can begin to dare. not only it is patently impossible to know all the two hundred odd languages in question, but merely to master the basics of each field and then keep up with the developments in all of them is beyond the powers of any one individual. if you actually attempt to do that, which greenberg has, you make a wealth of mistakes that an undergraduate studying any one of the languages concerned would not make while still at college.
this is precisely what happened to greenberg. i am a native speaker of turkish, and a student of the language currently writing a doctorate and teaching and studying turkish. i spotted over half a dozen howlers in both volumes of greenberg concerning turkish forms and etymologies without really trying. these range from consistent misspellings of words to mistaken etymologies that result in, for instance, comparing turkish "bir" (one) of turkish origin with turkish "beraber" (together), without of course realising that the latter is of persian origin! the two volumes appear to abound in mistakes of this sort, so much so that after a few pages you really put the book back to its shelf without reading further.
greenberg appears not to have consulted the primary works in the case of turkish if the bibliography in volume 2 is anything to go by, and the most important discovery in 20th century turkish linguistics, that of khalaj, a hitherto unknown turkic language discovered in iran, went totally unnoticed in his work. that discovery was important enough for much of turkish phonetics and phonology to be entirely rewritten, and any study of historical turkish without reference to it is just plain worthless.
greenberg also appears to have listed all words that sound similar in all of the languages concerned without attempting to establish sound laws. he does have a two-page account at the beginning of volume 2 that appears to justify this, and it is true that known sound laws do not always account for all forms, but they must be there and must account for some of them. this isn't the case with greenberg's title.
in brief, greenberg's book is a good example of why people shouldn't work on languages they know nothing about. the nostratic, or eurasiatic, theory, of course, is something else: there may be some truth in it, or it may be almost wholly true (or false), but one thing is without a doubt: the problem has to be tackled by a team of competent scholars who are experts in their own narrow fields rather than by any one scholar who has a superficial acquaintance with all branches concerned. greenberg's was a noble attempt, but doomed to failure. the nostratic question, a very interesting one, remains open.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A family within Nostratic, October 18, 2008
This review is from: Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family, Volume 2, Lexicon (Hardcover)
Joseph H Greenberg (1915 - 2001) was probably the most important linguist of the 20th century, well-known for his work in classification and typology. His classification of African languages into the 4 macro-families Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Khoisan and Niger-Kordofanian in the books Studies in African linguistic classification (1955) & Languages of Africa (1963) was almost universally rejected by the linguists at the time, then accepted by African specialists and universally accepted today.
The Danish linguist Holger Pedersen first proposed the idea of
Nostratic in 1903. Modern Nostraticists differ about the exact extent of this genetic grouping but it generally includes Afro-Asiatic (languages include Hebrew, Akkadian, Arabic, Egyptian & Coptic, Aramaic, Hausa & Somali), Kartvelian (Georgian), Indo-European (Italic, Celtic, Greek, Germanic, Baltic, Armenian etc.), Uralic (incl. Finnish & Hungarian), Dravidian (incl. Tamil & Telugu), Altaic (incl. Mongolian & Turkish) and Eskimo-Aleut. Nowadays there's growing support for the view that Nostratic had a Southern Cluster: Dravidian, Kartvelian & Afro-Asiatic and a Northern which corresponds closely with Eurasiatic.
Greenberg came to the conclusion that what he termed Eurasiatic languages are more closely related in time to one another, and as a family most closely related to the Amerind family of the Americas. In his view the Afro-Asiatic, Kartvelian and Dravidian families separated from Eurasiatic much earlier. In
Volume 1: Grammar, he investigates 72 grammatical etymologies. In this second volume, he explores the lexical evidence through 437 lexical etymologies.
Eurasiatic consists of Altaic, Chukotian, Eskimo-Aleut, Etruscan, Gilyak, Indo-European, Japanese-Korean-Ainu and Uralic-Yukaghir. Many of the relevant etymologies had already been published in the work of Nostraticists like Bomhard,
Dolgopolsky, Illich-Svitych and Kerns; that is why Greenberg emphasizes those involving Ainu, Gilyak, Chukotian & Eskimo-Aleut.
He speculates that the Eurasiatic & Amerind families may have separated around 15,000 BP with the melting of the Arctic ice cap. The root *ME demonstrates the closeness of Eurasiatic & Amerind, as it encompasses meanings like "hand" & "measure" in both families; compare Italian MANO to Algonquian MI or Uto-Aztecan MA, all meaning hand.
Greenberg's methodology is explained in chapter one of
Language in the Americas, his seminal work on Amerind. This methodology does not equate the regularity of sound correspondences with regular sound changes. There is no one-to-one relation since strict regularity is broken by for example analogy and lexical diffusion. Amongst the evidence provided is the following: English - Mother, Father, Brother versus German Mutter, Vater, Bruder. The brother breaks the pattern.
Further proof is available from the Turkic language group. Chuvash vowels do not correspond with those in Old Turkic and there are significant consonantal variations. The same holds true for the Dravidian languages of India & Pakistan where phonetic correspondences do not exist in etymological clusters. Yet the cognates are obvious in all the aforementioned cases.
The main body of the work consists of the 437 lexical etymologies with reference to a huge array of living and extinct languages like Ainu, Gilyak, Old Japanese, Eskimo-Aleut, Proto Indo-European, Altaic, Hittite, Armenian, Greek, Latin, Uralic and Lithuanian to mention just a few.
So exactly which living languages comprise Eurasiatic? They are:
Altaic (Mongolic, Turkic, Tungusic)
Chukotian (5 small languages of northeastern Siberia & the Kamchatka Peninsula)
Eskimo-Aleut (Spoken from Alaska to Greenland)
Gilyak (Spoken by about one thousand Nivkh people in far eastern Siberia & Sakhalin Island)
Indo-European (Albanian, Armenian, Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Italic & Slavic, representing the dominant languages of the Americas, Europe, southern Asia from Armenia eastwards through northern India to Bangladesh, plus Australia & New Zealand). To further elaborate on just two of these, the Italic family today comprises inter alia Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian & Romanian, whilst the Germanic includes English, Dutch, German, Danish, Swedish & Afrikaans to name a few.
Japanese-Korean-Ainu (Japan, Korean Peninsula)
Uralic-Yukaghir (Estonian, Finnish & Magyar of Europe plus the tiny Yukaghir group in Siberia).
The extinct families/languages include Anatolian of which Hittite was the most prominent, Etruscan which was spoken in Tuscany and surrounding areas of north-central Italy and the easternmost Indo-European language Tocharian of the Xingjian Uyghur region of China.
This fascinating book includes tables, maps, bibliographic references plus semantic & phonetic indexes. Together with volume one & Language in the Americas, it makes a valuable contribution to genetic classification and the study of mankind's unknown past. Although there is fierce opposition now, I have no doubt Greenberg will be proved correct as he was in the case of the languages of Africa. Just give it another 50 years.
I also recommend
Sprung from Some Common Source: Investigations Into the Prehistory of Languages edited by Sydney M Lamb,
The Nostratic Macrofamily: A Study in Distant Linguistic Relationship by Allan R Bomhard and
On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy by Merritt Ruhlen.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
