Language and Anthropology in the Americas

[manaster at umich.edu]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Tue, 12 May 1998, Johanna Nichols wrote:
 
[snip]
>
> Not right.  My argument depends crucially on the assumption that the many
> language families for which no probative evidence of relatedness has been
> presented (despite the fact that such evidence has been sought by
> comparativists) are SEPARATE STOCKS.  A stock (the term isn't crucial; this
> is the one I use) is the oldest family-type grouping (clade in technical
> phylogenetic terms) for which  (a) genetic relatedness has been
> demonstrated
> and (b) reconstruction of ancestral grammar, vocabulary, and sounds is
> possible.
>
[snip]
>
> AMR gives a caricature of my position in the quote above.  My actual
> position (in *Language* 66, 1990 and later work) is this:  If the languages
> Greenberg groups together as "Amerind" descend from several ancestors, then
> Greenberg is wrong.  If they descend (or are assumed to descend) from a
> single ancestor, then Greenberg is wrong (because an immigration over
> 50,000 years ago is implausible, because just one immigration is
> implausible, and because Greenberg explicitly claims an age of about 11,000
> years for "Amerind").  (So anyone who assumes Greenberg is right about
> "Amerind" must believe he is wrong about "Amerind".)
 
With all due respect to Johanna, I think I was right because the
position I attribute to her is necessarily implicit in what she
says.  Much as she tries to reduce Greenberg's views ad absurdo
(in my viwe, quite incorrectly), I am doing the same with hers.
 
Indeed, unless she really holds, as Austerlitz (to whom
we must trace this approach) apparently did, that the Amerindian
stocks are unrelated, then the rest of what she says cannot be
maintained.  Thus I find a contradiction between her latest
statement, to wit, that
she is prepared to admit that they might be related and
her argument about the age of stocks and about the average
age of stocks.  In fact, I cannot admit that it is valid to talk about the
average age of a stock, defined as a group of languages where
(a) genetic relatedness has been demonstrated
and (b) reconstruction of ancestral grammar, vocabulary, and sounds is
possible.
 
POint (a) depends on what people accept at any given time.  Before
Uralic and Afroasiatic were accepted, the average was much lower
than it is today.  This is like trying to calcuate the murder
rate by counting how many people have been convicted of murder.
Point (b) is one where we have to somehow decide what is "possible".
Aha!   What is Nichols' basis for assuming that this is NOT possible
in the case of Amerind or say Nostratic?  This is where for her
argument to go through, she must assuming that Amerind (or
Nostratic) cannot be stocks.  For if they were, they could
be as young as 5K years!
 
Specifically, unless we assume that the reconstruction of
a Proto-Amerind is impossible, we must grant that
it may be possible.  And
if it is possible, then maybe it will be done.  And if so, then
the relatedness of these groups will be considered by most
linguists to have been "demonstrated".  And then her whole case
falls apart.  Which is why I said earlier that she is
committed to these language families being spurious.  If she
is not, then she is left adrift.  I hope that is clear enough.
 
But I would further like to ask how Prof. Nichols knows how
old Uralic or Chadic or any of her other "stocks" are. I have
spent more than a decade working on Uto-Aztecan and some years
working on Kartvelian or IE and I have no idea how old they
really are, except for some vague feeling about IE that it
must be quite a bit older than Vedic or Old Hittite but
yet not enormously much older. So what is the basis for the
dates she assumes?  I have not heard of any new way
of computing the ages of protolanguages since glotto-
chronology, which even Swadesh admitted was not always
right and which most of us surely think is often not
right.
 
So in effect Johanna seems to be comitted to the
unrelatedness of the Amerind languages or at the
very least to their relatednesss being impossible
in principle to demonstrate.  If she does not
hold this view, then I will be delighted, of course.
AMR