Linguistic classification

[Scott DeLancey]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Fri, 6 Feb 1998 manaster at umich.edu wrote:
 
> I would still like to see whether there are really no historical
> linguists on this list who would be interested in discussing
> substantively either particular proposed linguistic classifications
> (e.g., Pakawa, Nostratic, Nadene, Altaic, Eskichatkan, Austro-Asiatic-
> Ainu, Penutian, etc.) or at least the real
> problems inherent in this kind of work.
 
I fun idea, but I'm not sure how practical it is.  "Discussing
substantively" means discussing data, and for any given proposal
that you list (or most others), how many of us are there likely
to be on the list who can do that?  After all, one reason why some
of these are so far from being "established" is that hardly anyone
works on them.  (And vice versa, of course).
 
Thinking about your suggestion, I start thinking about how to get
a discussion going on Penutian, and I don't really see how to do
it.  Here, I'll throw out a provocative statement -- It's time to drop
the notion of Takelman as a genetic unit; Takelma clearly belongs
with the Coast languages, and Kalapuya, if we really knew much about
it, is probably most closely related to the Plateau languages.
 
Now what?  How can we really talk about something like that on a
general list like this?
 
Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA
 
delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html