Hervas y Panduro and Vater as finders of language families

Lyle Campbell l.campbell at ling.canterbury.ac.nz
Sat Feb 9 16:50:35 UTC 2002


Does anyone know the answer to the following questions:

Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro (1800) made several successful family
classifications involving languages of Latin America, plus he repeated
several others in the Americas which at the time were known but not yet
fully established.  My question is, did he
discover/find/formulate/prove/make known for the first time any
languages families from other parts of the world in his massive survey? 
[Hervás y Panduro, [Don] Lorenzo. 1784-87.  Idea dell'universo:  che
contiene la storia della vita dell'uomo, elementi cosmografici, viaggio
estatico al mondo planetario, e storia de la terra e delle lingue. 
Cesena:  Biasini. 

_____. 1800-1805.  Catálogo de las lenguas de las naciones conocidas y
numeracion, division, y clases de estas segun la diversidad de sus
idiomas y dialectos.  Volumen I (1800): Lenguas y naciones Americanas. 
Madrid:  Administracion del Real Arbitrio de Beneficencia.  Hess, Thom.
1979.  Central Coast Salish words for deer:  their wavelike
distribution.  IJAL 45.5-16.]


Next, I would like to ask the same question about Johann Severin Vater
(cf. Vater 1810; also Adelung and Vater 1816).   Volume three of Adelung
and Vater (1816), written mostly by Vater, recognized the genetic
relationship among several Mayan languages, including Huastec, for the
first time, as well as several Uto-Aztecan relationships with accurate
cognates.  The question is, did he find/discover/formuate/prove any
others as well for language families anywhere else?  
[Adelung, Johann Christoph and Johann Severin Vater. 1816.  Mithridates
oder allgemeine Sprachenkunde mit dem Vater Unser als Sprachprobe in bey
nahe fünfhundert Sprachen und Mundarten.  (Dritten Theil, dritte
Abtheilung.)  Berlin:  Voss.]

Many thanks, 
Lyle

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