Language and Anthropology in the Americas

[manaster at umich.edu]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Miguel writes:
 
 
The great linguistic diversity of the Americas, however, is a major
problem for linguists, and leaves only two options open: either to
accept the archaeological dates and to hell with the linguistics (my
assessment of Greenberg's "Language in the Americas"), or to posit a
more reasonable date for the initial settlement and to hell with
archaeology (my assessment of Johanna Nichols' argument for a
time-depth of c. 35,000 years, which I share).
 
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I dont understand the basis for this assessement.  One may not
accept Greenberg's linguistics (I myself am a moderately well
known critic of his Amerind work and indeed one of the few
who discuss the actual content of the work and not merely
methods or typographical etc. errors), but it is unfair to
say that he throws the lx overboard.  Instead, he argues for
alinguistic hypothesis which whether right or not is certainly
not worthy of casual  dismissal.  As for Nichols, her agument
crucially depends on teh assumption that the many language families
which most linguists do not regard as provably related are in
fact UNrelated. For if they are related, then Greenberg is
right and everybody goes home happy.  And of course the
assumoption that languages not known for a certainty to
be related are UNrelated is the most elementary kind of
mistake anyone can make when trying to do comparative
linguistics, and one which Eric Hamp in particular has done
much (though clearly not enough) to combat over the years.
 
AMR