Niger-Kordofanian

[Alexis Manaster-Ramer]

Benji Wald now says I want to classify languages
on the basis of typological parallels.  I never have,
and I don't understand how this misunderstanding could
have arisen.  For the record, I was referring to the
Niger-Kordofanian relationship as being based primarily
on striking agreements between the paradigms of nominal
classes.  A good discussion of this appears in the
relevant chapter of the collective work Die Sprachen
Afrikas.  There is also some brief discussion in Baxter's
and my review of Ringe (1992) in Diachronica.

About "consensus" views and "classical" methods, Wald
appears to mean the views and methods espoused
(but not actually used!) by authors such as Goddard
and Campbell.  The very fact that they recognize
Comecrudan w/o the use of said methods is enough
to show that I am right to say that there is no
such "consensus" and the methods at issue are
only a small subset of the "classical" methods.
My published work on the history of language
classification work (esp. on Strahlenberg
and Sapir) offers more evidence that the
the set of "classical" methods is much larger than
these authors, or Wald, seem willing to grant.
Since I just recently posted a discussion of the
four (or more) different methodologies that have
been and continue to be used in real work on
language classification, I don't think I need
to add any more--except that if we took Goddard
or Campbell or Wald at their word, we would have
to conclude that the Indo-European language family
was discovered some time in the 1960's or later.

A "consensus" view of linguistic classification
would have to be which is held by at almost all
scholars who work in this field--and which they
actually follow in their own work.  And if we
go striclty by what people actually do and not
what they say, then I think that there IS a
"consensus" view, namely, the one I have been
defending.  It is almost only people who do no
work on classification themselves but like to
preach to those of us that do (I won't name
names) or those who actually do one thing and
preach something quite different (as we have
discussed here over the last few weeks) who
make claims along the lines of what Wald
calls the "consensus" view.

AMR