Obituary for Greenberg

Wed May 16 04:13:12 UTC 2001

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> May 15, 2001
> Joseph Greenberg, Singular Linguist, Dies at 85
> By NICHOLAS WADE
> Dr. Joseph H. Greenberg, an eminent linguist and classifier of the world's
> languages, died on May 7 in Stanford, Calif. He was 85.
> The cause was cancer.
> Dr. Greenberg's effort to work out the historical relationships among most
> of the world's 5,000 languages is regarded as a monumental work of
> scholarship but still has critics.
> "Next to Chomsky, you have to say Greenberg is clearly the most important
> linguist we have had over the last 50 years, in terms of the quality,
> quantity and scope of his work," said Dr. Paul Newman, a linguist at Indiana
> University, referring to Noam Chomsky, the linguist and social critic from
> the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
> But many critics of Dr. Greenberg's work, particularly his analysis of
> American Indian languages, still reject his findings.
> Unlike many scholars, Dr. Greenberg was a synthesizer whose interests
> spanned the narrow fields of many specialists, not all of whom welcomed an
> outsider's interference in their domains. Working with voluminous
> handwritten notebooks, he was able to scan the grammar or vocabulary of
> hundreds of languages and recognize their relationships.
> Though his work remained controversial within historical linguistics, it was
> warmly embraced by population geneticists. From analysis of DNA sequences,
> the geneticists have recently discovered that modern humans expanded out of
> Africa in a series of population splits that accords closely with the
> language divisions Dr. Greenberg had inferred on purely linguistic evidence.
> Dr. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, a population geneticist at Stanford University,
> last year cited "significant correspondences" between what Dr. Greenberg
> theorized and genetic findings.
> Many critics "have attacked Greenberg cruelly," Dr. Cavalli- Sforza said. "I
> think frankly there is some jealousy behind it because he has been so
> successful."
> Dr. Greenberg's major works include his classification of the 1,500
> languages of Africa into four superfamilies, a work published in 1955;
> "Language in the Americas" (1987), in which he assigned the 650 native
> languages of North and South America to just three groups; and a study of
> Eurasiatic, the inferred ancestral tongue of a swath of languages from
> Japanese to Portuguese, the first volume of which appeared last year.
> He also made many other contributions to linguistics, including articles on
> typology, a field that concerns language universals like word order. His
> 1962 article on typology is said to be among the most widely cited papers in
> linguistics.
> Joseph Greenberg was born on May 28, 1915, in Brooklyn. His father, from
> Poland, was a pharmacist who lost his drugstore in the Depression and became
> an insurance salesman. The young Greenberg was exposed to many languages.
> His mother's family spoke German.
> "I heard Yiddish when my father's family came to the house, which was as
> seldom as my mother could arrange it," Dr. Greenberg said in a 1991
> interview published in Current Anthropology.
> Attracted at first to a career in music (he had perfect pitch and might have
> been a professional pianist), he decided while a student at Columbia
> University to become a social anthropologist. He did field work on the
> religion of the Hausa- speaking people of West Africa, receiving his Ph.D.
> from Northwestern University in 1940.
> He spent the war years in the Army Signal Intelligence Service, mostly
> decoding Italian signals, and on returning to academic life decided his true
> interest was in linguistics. He returned to Columbia and remained from 1948
> to 1962, becoming chairman of the department of anthropology. He then moved
> to Stanford, where he spent the rest of his career. Though he retired in
> 1985, he continued working until a few months before his death.
> African languages, the subject of his first foray into linguistics, were at
> that time the fief largely of British and French linguists.
> With the simplest of methods, Dr. Greenberg perceived an overarching pattern
> in African languages quite different from that espoused by the leading
> British authority.
> By comparing common words in different African languages, Dr. Greenberg saw
> that all could be assigned to one of four major superfamilies, which he
> named Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Khoisan and Niger- Kordofanian.
> The classification was furiously disputed when it appeared in 1955. Even 15
> years later, when Dr. Newman, the Indiana University linguist, visited the
> School of African and American Studies in London, he was told it was quite
> safe for him to go into the common room as long as he did not mention Dr.
> Greenberg's name, Dr. Newman said in an interview. But Dr. Greenberg's
> classification has since become widely accepted by students of African
> languages.
> Despite the success of Dr. Greenberg's comparative method in resolving the
> puzzle of African language relationships, when he applied the same method to
> the languages of the Americas in 1987, the specialists in the field derided
> his analysis.
> They asserted that Dr. Greenberg's method was unrigorous, noting that
> similarities between the words in different languages could arise for many
> reasons other than a common ancestral form.
> Dr. Greenberg responded that with the methods his critics insisted on,
> proving even the existence of an Indo-European language family - a widely
> accepted grouping - would be impossible. The debate was clouded by errors in
> Dr. Greenberg's 1987 book, which supporters termed trivial and critics
> called fatal.
> The languages of the Americas, in his view, fell into three major groups,
> which he named Na-Dene (a group of languages spoken in Alaska and
> northeastern Canada); Eskimo- Aleut; and Amerind, which included all the
> other languages.
> In the course of this work, Dr. Greenberg realized that American languages
> were related to languages of the Eurasian continent, as would be expected if
> the Americas had been inhabited by people migrating from Siberia. That was
> the basis of a project that occupied him for the rest of his life: an
> ordering of the languages of Europe and Asia into a superfamily he called
> Eurasiatic. His concept was similar to but independent of the Nostratic
> language grouping developed by Russians.
> The first volume of Dr. Greenberg's last work, on the grammar of Eurasiatic,
> appeared last year, called "Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives."
> Dr. Merritt Ruhlen of Stanford, a longtime colleague, said Dr. Greenberg had
> completed the manuscript of the second volume, on the vocabulary
> relationships of Eurasiatic, in October last year, a day before his
> pancreatic cancer was diagnosed.
> Having grouped most of the languages of the world into some 12
> superfamilies, Dr. Greenberg often considered the idea that all might be
> descendants of a single ancestral human language, an idea supported by the
> new findings from population genetics. He even constructed a possible global
> etymology, derived from the universal human habit of holding up a single
> finger to denote one.
> He inferred that the human mother tongue had a word, "tik," which he saw
> mirrored in each of the world's language superfamilies. The reflection of
> "tik" in the Indo-European language group shows up in "daktulos," "digitus"
> and "doigt" - Greek, Latin and French for finger, as well as in the English
> word digital.
> Dr. Newman, who spoke with him a few days before he died, said Dr.
> Greenberg's only regret was that he never got around to classifying the
> languages of Southeast Asia. "He looked at me almost with tears in his eyes
> and said that without classifying them, he hadn't finished his work with the
> world's languages," Dr. Newman said.
> Dr. Greenberg is survived by his wife, Selma, and by a sister, Barbara
> Weissbard of Las Vegas.
>
>
> Ann Popplestone
>
> CCC TLC
> 216-987-3584
>
>
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> <P><B><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">May 15, 2001</FONT></B><FONT FACE="Times New Roman"> </FONT>
> <BR><B><FONT SIZE=5 FACE="Times New Roman">Joseph Greenberg, Singular Linguist, Dies at 85</FONT></B>
> <BR><B><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">By NICHOLAS WADE</FONT></B>
> <BR><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">Dr. Joseph H. Greenberg, an eminent linguist and classifier of the world's languages, died on May 7 in Stanford, Calif. He was 85.</FONT></P>
>
> <P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">The cause was cancer.</FONT>
> <BR><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">Dr. Greenberg's effort to work out the historical relationships among most of the world's 5,000 languages is regarded as a monumental work of scholarship but still has critics.</FONT></P>
>
> <P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">"Next to Chomsky, you have to say Greenberg is clearly the most important linguist we have had over the last 50 years, in terms of the quality, quantity and scope of his work," said Dr. Paul Newman, a linguist at Indiana University, referring to Noam Chomsky, the linguist and social critic from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.</FONT></P>
>
> <P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">But many critics of Dr. Greenberg's work, particularly his analysis of American Indian languages, still reject his findings.</FONT></P>
>
> <P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">Unlike many scholars, Dr. Greenberg was a synthesizer whose interests spanned the narrow fields of many specialists, not all of whom welcomed an outsider's interference in their domains. Working with voluminous handwritten notebooks, he was able to scan the grammar or vocabulary of hundreds of languages and recognize their relationships.</FONT></P>
>
> <P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">Though his work remained controversial within historical linguistics, it was warmly embraced by population geneticists. From analysis of DNA sequences, the geneticists have recently discovered that modern humans expanded out of Africa in a series of population splits that accords closely with the language divisions Dr. Greenberg had inferred on purely linguistic evidence.</FONT></P>
>
> <P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">Dr. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, a population geneticist at Stanford University, last year cited "significant correspondences" between what Dr. Greenberg theorized and genetic findings.</FONT></P>
>
> <P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">Many critics "have attacked Greenberg cruelly," Dr. Cavalli- Sforza said. "I think frankly there is some jealousy behind it because he has been so successful." </FONT></P>
>
> <P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">Dr. Greenberg's major works include his classification of the 1,500 languages of Africa into four superfamilies, a work published in 1955; "Language in the Americas" (1987), in which he assigned the 650 native languages of North and South America to just three groups; and a study of Eurasiatic, the inferred ancestral tongue of a swath of languages from Japanese to Portuguese, the first volume of which appeared last year.</FONT></P>
>
> <P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">He also made many other contributions to linguistics, including articles on typology, a field that concerns language universals like word order. His 1962 article on typology is said to be among the most widely cited papers in linguistics.</FONT></P>
>
> <P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">Joseph Greenberg was born on May 28, 1915, in Brooklyn. His father, from Poland, was a pharmacist who lost his drugstore in the Depression and became an insurance salesman. The young Greenberg was exposed to many languages. His mother's family spoke German.</FONT></P>
>
> <P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">"I heard Yiddish when my father's family came to the house, which was as seldom as my mother could arrange it," Dr. Greenberg said in a 1991 interview published in Current Anthropology.</FONT></P>
>
> <P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">Attracted at first to a career in music (he had perfect pitch and might have been a professional pianist), he decided while a student at Columbia University to become a social anthropologist. He did field work on the religion of the Hausa- speaking people of West Africa, receiving his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1940.</FONT></P>
>
> <P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">He spent the war years in the Army Signal Intelligence Service, mostly decoding Italian signals, and on returning to academic life decided his true interest was in linguistics. He returned to Columbia and remained from 1948 to 1962, becoming chairman of the department of anthropology. He then moved to Stanford, where he spent the rest of his career. Though he retired in 1985, he continued working until a few months before his death.</FONT></P>
>
> <P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">African languages, the subject of his first foray into linguistics, were at that time the fief largely of British and French linguists.</FONT></P>
>
> <P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">With the simplest of methods, Dr. Greenberg perceived an overarching pattern in African languages quite different from that espoused by the leading British authority.</FONT></P>
>
> <P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">By comparing common words in different African languages, Dr. Greenberg saw that all could be assigned to one of four major superfamilies, which he named Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Khoisan and Niger- Kordofanian.</FONT></P>
>
> <P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">The classification was furiously disputed when it appeared in 1955. Even 15 years later, when Dr. Newman, the Indiana University linguist, visited the School of African and American Studies in London, he was told it was quite safe for him to go into the common room as long as he did not mention Dr. Greenberg's name, Dr. Newman said in an interview. But Dr. Greenberg's classification has since become widely accepted by students of African languages.</FONT></P>
>
> <P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">Despite the success of Dr. Greenberg's comparative method in resolving the puzzle of African language relationships, when he applied the same method to the languages of the Americas in 1987, the specialists in the field derided his analysis.</FONT></P>
>
> <P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">They asserted that Dr. Greenberg's method was unrigorous, noting that similarities between the words in different languages could arise for many reasons other than a common ancestral form.</FONT></P>
>
> <P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">Dr. Greenberg responded that with the methods his critics insisted on, proving even the existence of an Indo-European language family - a widely accepted grouping - would be impossible. The debate was clouded by errors in Dr. Greenberg's 1987 book, which supporters termed trivial and critics called fatal.</FONT></P>
>
> <P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">The languages of the Americas, in his view, fell into three major groups, which he named Na-Dene (a group of languages spoken in Alaska and northeastern Canada); Eskimo- Aleut; and Amerind, which included all the other languages.</FONT></P>
>
> <P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">In the course of this work, Dr. Greenberg realized that American languages were related to languages of the Eurasian continent, as would be expected if the Americas had been inhabited by people migrating from Siberia. That was the basis of a project that occupied him for the rest of his life: an ordering of the languages of Europe and Asia into a superfamily he called Eurasiatic. His concept was similar to but independent of the Nostratic language grouping developed by Russians.</FONT></P>
>
> <P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">The first volume of Dr. Greenberg's last work, on the grammar of Eurasiatic, appeared last year, called "Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives."</FONT></P>
>
> <P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">Dr. Merritt Ruhlen of Stanford, a longtime colleague, said Dr. Greenberg had completed the manuscript of the second volume, on the vocabulary relationships of Eurasiatic, in October last year, a day before his pancreatic cancer was diagnosed.</FONT></P>
>
> <P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">Having grouped most of the languages of the world into some 12 superfamilies, Dr. Greenberg often considered the idea that all might be descendants of a single ancestral human language, an idea supported by the new findings from population genetics. He even constructed a possible global etymology, derived from the universal human habit of holding up a single finger to denote one.</FONT></P>
>
> <P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">He inferred that the human mother tongue had a word, "tik," which he saw mirrored in each of the world's language superfamilies. The reflection of "tik" in the Indo-European language group shows up in "daktulos," "digitus" and "doigt" - Greek, Latin and French for finger, as well as in the English word digital.</FONT></P>
>
> <P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">Dr. Newman, who spoke with him a few days before he died, said Dr. Greenberg's only regret was that he never got around to classifying the languages of Southeast Asia. "He looked at me almost with tears in his eyes and said that without classifying them, he hadn't finished his work with the world's languages," Dr. Newman said.</FONT></P>
>
> <P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">Dr. Greenberg is survived by his wife, Selma, and by a sister, Barbara Weissbard of Las Vegas.</FONT>
> </P>
> <BR>
>
> <P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Ann Popplestone</FONT>
> </P>
>
> <P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">CCC TLC</FONT>
> <BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">216-987-3584</FONT>
> </P>
>
>
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