Language and Anthropology in the Americas

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Alexis (manaster at umich.edu) wrote:
 
[on the difficulties of doing American Indian lxs, and the lack of
both human and material resources]
>
>The Austerlitz-Nichols position, which Miguel seems
>to be adopting, seems to be (this is expliclity
>stated by Austerlitz) based on the assumption that
>the opposite is teh case, that is, that American
>Indian languages HAVE been investigated as fully
>as Old World ones and that if there were easy
>linguistic relationships to be found (say comparable
>to IE or Uralic in depth) they would have been found.
 
But that's exactly what I was *not* saying:
 
>On Sat, 9 May 1998, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:
>
>> 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
 
i.e. there is still much work to be done...  You have explained this
in rather more detail.
 
>> (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?).
 
i.e. the genetic units that are currently recognized (the numbers are
from Campbell's "American Indian Languages") are mostly the
equivalent of Old World "short-range" families (Germanic, Slavic...).
 
Greenberg's Amerind is the "moral equivalent" of Nostratic (in the
sense that it's definitely "long-range"), although given the fact
that Nostratic is based on more or less regular sound
correspondences, it isn't equivalent in any formal sense, nor *can*
it be: the Nostratic theory is based on the further comparison of
"medium-range" (IE, Uralic, AA) language family reconstructions, and
in the Americas, with few exceptions, we don't have those
"medium-range" families, and we don't have the reconstructions.
 
 
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam