Joe Greenberg's influences

[Bill Croft]

      "I learned more from languages than from linguists", Joe used to
say to me. He also said that he got a better education in linguistics
by not being trained in a linguistics department. I think that accounts
for much of his originality.

     Joe's erudition was awesome, so it would indeed be hard to trace
his intellectual antecedents. Within linguistics, I would say it was
probably the great German historical linguists of the late 19th century.
He was particularly fond of the syntax part of the Grundriss, which
was written by Delbrueck. He also told Keith Denning he thought highly
of Baudouin de Courtenay. But he knew them all.

    Yet it is perhaps outside linguistics that his true influences
should be sought.
He liked Aristotle, he told me in a late conversation, in part
because nothing was
below scientific investigation for him. But he was also strongly influenced by
Whitehead & Russell's Principia Mathematica, which he took with him to
N Africa and Italy when he was drafted in World War II (quite a load,
I might add).
And I imagine, everything in between.

Bill Croft