OBIT: Joseph Greenberg

[Paul B. Gallagher]

New York Times, May 15, 2001 <http://www.nytimes.com>
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JOSEPH GREENBERG, SINGULAR LINGUIST, DIES AT 85
By Nicholas Wade

Dr. Joseph H. Greenberg, an eminent linguist and classifier of the
world's languages, died on May 7 in Stanford, Calif. He was 85.

The cause was cancer.

Dr. Greenberg's effort to work out the historical relationships among
most of the world's 5,000 languages is regarded as a monumental work of
scholarship but still has critics.

"Next to Chomsky, you have to say Greenberg is clearly the most
important linguist we have had over the last 50 years, in terms of the
quality, quantity and scope of his work," said Dr. Paul Newman, a
linguist at Indiana University, referring to Noam Chomsky, the linguist
and social critic from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

But many critics of Dr. Greenberg's work, particularly his analysis of
American Indian languages, still reject his findings.

Unlike many scholars, Dr. Greenberg was a synthesizer whose interests
spanned the narrow fields of many specialists, not all of whom welcomed
an outsider's interference in their domains. Working with voluminous
handwritten notebooks, he was able to scan the grammar or vocabulary of
hundreds of languages and recognize their relationships.

Though his work remained controversial within historical linguistics, it
was warmly embraced by population geneticists. From analysis of DNA
sequences, the geneticists have recently discovered that modern humans
expanded out of Africa in a series of population splits that accords
closely with the language divisions Dr. Greenberg had inferred on purely
linguistic evidence.

Dr. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, a population geneticist at Stanford University,
last year cited "significant correspondences" between what Dr. Greenberg
theorized and genetic findings.

Many critics "have attacked Greenberg cruelly," Dr. Cavalli- Sforza
said. "I think frankly there is some jealousy behind it because he has
been so successful."

Dr. Greenberg's major works include his classification of the 1,500
languages of Africa into four superfamilies, a work published in 1955;
"Language in the Americas" (1987), in which he assigned the 650 native
languages of North and South America to just three groups; and a study
of Eurasiatic, the inferred ancestral tongue of a swath of languages
from Japanese to Portuguese, the first volume of which appeared last
year.

He also made many other contributions to linguistics, including articles
on typology, a field that concerns language universals like word order.
His 1962 article on typology is said to be among the most widely cited
papers in linguistics.

Joseph Greenberg was born on May 28, 1915, in Brooklyn. His father, from
Poland, was a pharmacist who lost his drugstore in the Depression and
became an insurance salesman. The young Greenberg was exposed to many
languages. His mother's family spoke German.

"I heard Yiddish when my father's family came to the house, which was as
seldom as my mother could arrange it," Dr. Greenberg said in a 1991
interview published in Current Anthropology.

Attracted at first to a career in music (he had perfect pitch and might
have been a professional pianist), he decided while a student at
Columbia University to become a social anthropologist. He did field work
on the religion of the Hausa- speaking people of West Africa, receiving
his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1940.

He spent the war years in the Army Signal Intelligence Service, mostly
decoding Italian signals, and on returning to academic life decided his
true interest was in linguistics. He returned to Columbia and remained
from 1948 to 1962, becoming chairman of the department of anthropology.
He then moved to Stanford, where he spent the rest of his career. Though
he retired in 1985, he continued working until a few months before his
death.

African languages, the subject of his first foray into linguistics, were
at that time the fief largely of British and French linguists.

With the simplest of methods, Dr. Greenberg perceived an overarching
pattern in African languages quite different from that espoused by the
leading British authority.

By comparing common words in different African languages, Dr. Greenberg
saw that all could be assigned to one of four major superfamilies, which
he named Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Khoisan and Niger- Kordofanian.

The classification was furiously disputed when it appeared in 1955. Even
15 years later, when Dr. Newman, the Indiana University linguist,
visited the School of African and American Studies in London, he was
told it was quite safe for him to go into the common room as long as he
did not mention Dr. Greenberg's name, Dr. Newman said in an interview.
But Dr. Greenberg's classification has since become widely accepted by
students of African languages.

Despite the success of Dr. Greenberg's comparative method in resolving
the puzzle of African language relationships, when he applied the same
method to the languages of the Americas in 1987, the specialists in the
field derided his analysis.

They asserted that Dr. Greenberg's method was unrigorous, noting that
similarities between the words in different languages could arise for
many reasons other than a common ancestral form.

Dr. Greenberg responded that with the methods his critics insisted on,
proving even the existence of an Indo-European language family ≈ a
widely accepted grouping ≈ would be impossible. The debate was clouded
by errors in Dr. Greenberg's 1987 book, which supporters termed trivial
and critics called fatal.

The languages of the Americas, in his view, fell into three major
groups, which he named Na-Dene (a group of languages spoken in Alaska
and northeastern Canada); Eskimo- Aleut; and Amerind, which included all
the other languages.

In the course of this work, Dr. Greenberg realized that American
languages were related to languages of the Eurasian continent, as would
be expected if the Americas had been inhabited by people migrating from
Siberia. That was the basis of a project that occupied him for the rest
of his life: an ordering of the languages of Europe and Asia into a
superfamily he called Eurasiatic. His concept was similar to but
independent of the Nostratic language grouping developed by Russians.

The first volume of Dr. Greenberg's last work, on the grammar of
Eurasiatic, appeared last year, called "Indo-European and Its Closest
Relatives."

Dr. Merritt Ruhlen of Stanford, a longtime colleague, said Dr. Greenberg
had completed the manuscript of the second volume, on the vocabulary
relationships of Eurasiatic, in October last year, a day before his
pancreatic cancer was diagnosed.

Having grouped most of the languages of the world into some 12
superfamilies, Dr. Greenberg often considered the idea that all might be
descendants of a single ancestral human language, an idea supported by
the new findings from population genetics. He even constructed a
possible global etymology, derived from the universal human habit of
holding up a single finger to denote one.

He inferred that the human mother tongue had a word, "tik," which he saw
mirrored in each of the world's language superfamilies. The reflection
of "tik" in the Indo-European language group shows up in "daktulos,"
"digitus" and "doigt" ≈ Greek, Latin and French for finger, as well as
in the English word digital.

Dr. Newman, who spoke with him a few days before he died, said Dr.
Greenberg's only regret was that he never got around to classifying the
languages of Southeast Asia. "He looked at me almost with tears in his
eyes and said that without classifying them, he hadn't finished his work
with the world's languages," Dr. Newman said.

Dr. Greenberg is survived by his wife, Selma, and by a sister, Barbara
Weissbard of Las Vegas.

--
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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