Trask on Dixon on African lgs--And extremism generally

[manaster at umich.edu]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Larry Trask says about the language families of Africa (posited by
Greenberg and
for the most part widely or even universally accepted by competent
observers): "...
it appears, the families are set up on the basis of a few recurring
grammatical
characteristics, characteristics which involve actual morphological
material in the
AA case but only typological features in the NC case."
 
I am not an "Africanist" and I certainly cannot pretend to have a cure for
whatever
troubles Dixon, whose book I have not read, but I really think that Larry
Trask
would do well not to lend credibility to the statements he is repeating
about African
language classification by repeating them without any criticism.
 
It is certainly true that some of Greenberg's proposed African language
families
have been questioned by competent scholars and in some cases are indeed
poorly
supported (and may well be wrong). Khoisan is the clearest example where
Greenberg's arguments are inadequate to establish the family.
However, what Larry says Dixon says about Niger-Kordofanian and
Afro-African is
just not right.
 
The topic of the validity of the Niger-Kordofanian language family is one
I know
something about and which was discussed in Baxter and Manaster Ramer
(1996),
following on the article by Schadenberg in the very useful 1981 compendium
Die
Sprachen Afrikas (sorry, I am not up to giving a fuller reference).  It is
true that as
of that time anyway there was very very little lexical evidence for this
family, but it
is completely erroneous to say that the evidence was typological.  Rather,
the
nominal class system of the major subfamilies agree in detail as to the
markers for
the different classes.  As a result, Baxter and MR use Niger-Kordofanian
as an
example of a well-established language family established purely on
morphological
grounds and hence contradicting the claims of Donald Ringe (and his many
admirers
in the linguistic community) that tests on Swadesh lists are sole way to
determine
linguistic kinship.
 
As for Afro-Asiatic, it is also a very well-established language family,
albeit there is
some dispute about one small subgroup (Omotic), but there are no competent
scholars who have disputed in modern times that Semitic, Egyptian, Berber,
Chadic,
and Cushitic are all related (although some people without the competence
in the
field, such as Gerhard Doerfer and a few Semitic philologists, HAVE
questioned
AA).  The relatedness of these languages is based on both morphological
and lexical
connections too numerous to list here, but it is certainly not true that
only
morphology is involved.
 
Finally, I find it a nice irony that the extremist critics of progress in
linguistic
classification (and even some more sober minds, like at times Meillet)
have
historically often insisted precisely that it is ONLY morphology
which can serve as the basis of linguistic classification.  The reason for
this is
obviously that many language families which they did not like were set up
on lexical
evidence alone.  Here we find the opposite situation, where the morphology
is
precisely the basis for classification, and now THIS is not good.  All
this seems to
indicate that the self-appointed critics are united by no coherent
intellectual position
other than rejectionism.
 
What we need in comparative linguistics is a recognition that some
proposed
language families are valid (e.g., Uto-Aztecan, Altaic, Afro-Asiatic,
Niger-
Kordofanian, Pakawan, etc.), others possible but still unproven (e.g.,
Nostratic,
Khoisan, Coahuiltecan, all theories regarding Tonkawa, etc.), others still
impossible
(e.g., Hungarian-Turkic), and that even with respect to families that are
valid it may
be that some of the work proposing them is itself invalid (usually because
it is
premature, e.g., the pre-Ramstedt work on Altaic or the pre-Hubschmann
work on
Armenian as an Indo-European language or Sapir's work on Coahuiltecan).
There
is it seems to me increasingly clearly a dichotomy between (a) linguists
who see
this, whether they agree about particular proposals or not, and (b)
linguists who do
not see this and who, usually without understanding the particular factual
issues,
either reject/accept any language family that they can get away with
rejecting/accepting. There is in my book no intellectual difference
between these
latter two kinds of extremists--and all the difference in the world
between both kinds
of extremism vs. real work in linguistic classification which has over the
course of
this century solved major problems esp. In African, East Asian,
Australian, and
North American linguistics (e.g., Uto-Aztecan, Algic, Sino-Tibetan,
Anatolian as
part of Indo-European, Vietnamese as part of Mon-Khmer, Afro-Asiatic,
Niger-Kordofanian,
etc. etc.) and which is
now producing new results (e.g., Vovin's Ainu-Austroasiatic, my Pakawan,
all the
work, e.g., Hayes's, on Austric, etc. etc.).  Can we not stop all the
madness?
 
AMR
 
William Baxter and AMR (1996) Review of Donald Ringe (1992).  Diachronica
13:371-389.