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[Lyle Campbell]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
        Miguel Carrasquer asked about pan-Americanisms and I'd like to
offer a bit in that connection; I'll address this directly to Miguel, but
send it out generally.
        I was glad to see you did not regret buying the "American Indian
languages" book -- pity it cost so much; I tried everything I could to get
the Press to come down on the price.
        As for your question (reservations) about "pan-Americanisms," I
agree with you that the whole business, on the surface, does have an
uncomfortable feel to it.  Still, I would defend the need to treat the
topic more or less as I did.  I'll say a couple of general things about it
before getting to your specific question.
        Let me start by repeating that the term is not mine; I read it
somewhere as a student (I thought in writings of Swadesh's), but have never
been able to find it again.  I'd be grateful to anyone who could (re)locate
the source of the term.  I wish the whole notion did not exist, or at least
that it had a less confusing name, since several people have misunderstood
it badly (not you).
        You ask if a block of 23 "pan-Indo-Europeanisms" found in Germanic
as a group would be significant (for demonstrating a closer relationship)?
The answer, I would say, has to do with the fact that in IE and in the
Americas we are on rather different ground, or, better said, there are more
straightforward considerations and more convoluted considerations, and each
is important to the overall stance that should be taken in answering a
question such as yours.  The answer would depend on the nature of the 23
things compared and on the nature of the languages in which they are
compared (though probably "no" in both instances).  Let's take up the
nature of the items compared first.
        The so-called pan-Americanisms are a pretty messy, shaggy, muddled
lot (probably of something between 25 and 100 forms, depending on who is
looking); it is not even clear that a number of the forms compared as
"pan-Americanisms" are worth comparing.  Let me for illustration's sake
just mention one case, perhaps the best known of all of them, the one for
'hand'.  Greenberg's (1987:229-30) list under his proposed 'hand' Amerind
"etymology" can be used to illustrate the problem.  He lists forms from
various languages he compares which include:  imak, amik, hemik, mEgeh,
e-me, maka, ma, min, mane, maki, mux, imik, imi, ami, etc.; these have
glosses which involve in addition to straight 'hand' also 'right hand, left
hand, give, take, bring, palm, branch, finger, carry, five, etc.'  He
believes these to involve something more or less like //ma// or //mV//,
often with //-kV// -- that is, minimally all they really need to share to
fit this set (a supposed pan-Americanism) is //m//, but, then, apparently
not even //m// is really necessary, since some m-less forms also show up in
the set (ba, nwan).  It will be noticed that this is a pretty ragged
assembly; how could you tell what is a legitimate comparison (even if some
of the compared languages might prove to be related) and what is just
accidental ( -- keep in mind the sort of accidental, non-etymological IE
similarities such as English day/Spanish día 'day' or French feu/German
Feuer 'fire')?  And since we don't know in advance which languages may be
related and which not (which ones might legitimately be compared), should
we throw into the mix such things as Old Japanese  migi 'right (hand)'
(form from Miller, no idea whether it's accurate, but then, this is using
sources as Greenberg did), or maybe some IE, as in Spanish (and other
Romance languages) mano 'hand'?  In fact we know that some of the forms
which were thrown into the 'hand' mix don't fit at all; for example, Rama
mukuik  is really mu- 'your' + kwik 'hand', where the real root for 'hand'
(kwik) has nothing of the //mV(-kV)// which was the target of the set.
        With this you may begin to get an idea of why I say that the answer
to your question would depend on the nature of the 23 pan-Americanisms or
pan-IEisms involved.  The pan-Americanisms I had in mind are not quite as
ragged and unconstrained as several of the forms Greenberg listed in this
particular set, but still there are a number of possible reasons for
whatever phonetic similarity they share which should be investigated before
we place any stock in them as indicators of a possible genetic connection.
        I had originally intended to publish an appendix of the more
commonly repeated pan-Americanisms in the book, but was advised against
that by several reviewers (and by the Press, who were pressing me on the
book being too long) -- it probably would have just given ammunition to
wild imaginations, anyway, so perhaps it was good I didn't do that.  On the
whole, though, they are something like Greenberg's 'hand' set, only
sometimes more possibly onomatopoeic, sometimes with greater semantic
latitude, and so on, and generally not as plausible as the 'hand' example,
which is one of the better ones (the best?).
        Let me move on now to the nature of the languages in which a block
of pan-IEisms may be compared.  There really is no analogue in IE studies
to this phenomenon; perhaps the closest is something like the handful of
Wanderwörter across Northern Eurasia -- but these are not really to be
identified specifically as IE things, rather as similarities found across a
number of families, presumably due to diffusion, though perhaps some have
other explanations, too.  If there were an Old World analogue in these to
the pan-Americanisms, it would probably play itself out at the level of
Nostratic or Proto-World hypotheses -- that is, where the evidence for
genetic relationship, in spite of daring hypotheses, is not compelling.  In
such a context, similarities found among the set of languages compared may
just be accidental or due to diffusion, onomatopoeia, or a random
collection of these and other factors.  Since we don't yet know whether the
compared languages are related, we also don't know whether it is possible
that some of these may prove to be legitimate cognates, inherited from an
earlier common ancestor and as such evidence of relationship, or are due to
other things.  So it goes in the Americas.  We have a handful of forms
thought to recur in (more or less) similar shape in a number of different
Native American families -- and it is important to emphasize that
"pan-American" doesn't mean that these show up even in most of the language
families, just in more than a couple --, but we really don't know to what
they are attributed.
        Now to the question of whether a block of 23 pan-IEisms found as a
group in Germanic and only Germanic might be evidence of closer kinship
among the Germanic languages than other IE languages, this really has us
standing on different soil.  That is, if we are within a language family
for which we have pretty good evidence of genetic relationship and are
trying to sort out the subgrouping arrangements (which languages are more
closely related to one another within this family), then this is not at all
like the American Indian situation.  However, even within this clearer (or
at least more narrowly circumscribed) situation, it is unlikely that a
block of 23 forms found to be shared by all and only the Germanic languages
would suffice for adequate subgrouping, for showing that these languages
belong together in a branch as opposed to all other IE languages.  If they
were pan-IEisms, then I take it it's OK to assume they are probably
legitimate cognates, since individual borrowings mostly didn't make it to
all the branches (nor did accidental similarities), and we're pretty good
at weeding out accidents and other stuff based on the known sound
correspondences.  This being the case, the fact that some set of 23 shows
up as a block in each of the Germanic languages but not necessarily in
others could be an accident.  That is, if they are legitimate IE cognates,
then they had a legitimate chance to be preserved and show up in any of the
branches, not just Germanic, and indeed, some would have to show up in a
number of other branches, since otherwise they would not be considered
"pan-IEisms."  This being the case, the set of 23 would simply be a subset
of all those that were available for showing up.  Of course, it is possible
that the set indeed reflects Germanic as a group, but this could be shown
only on the basis of sound correspondences, and then it wouldn't really
matter whether Germanic preserved the whole set of 23 or whether some
Germanic languages managed to lose or replace some of them.  In short, I
don't see how a shared block does anything more than any other cognates,
whether shared by all or only some, to establish the subgrouping.
        It was an interesting question; thanks for asking.  I suspect
others might have some different feelings about it.  As I see it, within
IE, the question hinges on whether blocks of lexical items are sufficient
by themselves for establishing subgrouping (family branching) -- I don't
think so.
        Lyle
 
Lyle Campbell (Professor)
Dept. of Linguistics
University of Canterbury
Private Bag 4800
Christchurch, New Zealand
Fax:   64-3-364-2969
Phone: 64-3-364-2242