Language and Anthropology in the Americas

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Alexis (manaster at umich.edu) wrote:
 
>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).
>
>====
>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.
 
The "assessment" was of course deliberately charged.  (I don't think
it's *fair* to say that Johanna Nichols dismisses archaeology
either).
 
>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.
 
I have not read the article in 'Language', but it seems to me that
the underlying assumption is that the Amerind languages ARE related,
but at a time-depth of c. 35,000 years (or at least that there was a
relatively small number of genetic units on entry, say half a dozen
or less).
 
I *have* read "Language in the Americas", and for whatever it's worth
(I have no first hand experience with any American Indian language),
the impression I got was that Greenberg had plainly failed to make a
convincing case for Amerind.  That doesn't mean that Amerind *is*
invalid, of course.  But considering that the time-depth of
Proto-Afro-Asiatic might well be 10-12,000 years, I think
(impressionistically!) that the odds that Amerind is a genetic unit
at a comparable time-depth are very small indeed.  Whether the real
time-depth is 20 or 50,000 years is anybody's guess, and depends
largely on work that has yet to be done (how much more than 3 and how
much less than 58+17+118 is the real number of "medium-range" genetic
units in the Americas?).
 
 
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam