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Joseph Greenberg | |
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 Greenberg c. 1967 | |
| Born | Joseph Harold Greenberg May 28, 1915 Brooklyn, New York, U.S. |
| Died | May 7, 2001 (aged 85) Stanford, California, U.S. |
| Spouse |
Selma Berkowitz (m. 1943) |
| Awards |
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| Academic background | |
| Education | |
| Melville J. Herskovits | |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Linguist |
| Institutions | |
Doctoral students | George W. Grace |
Main interests | |
| Influenced | Merritt Ruhlen |
Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages.
Joseph Greenberg was born on May 28, 1915, to Jewish parents in Brooklyn, New York. His first great interest was music. At the age of 14, he gave a piano concert in Steinway Hall. He continued to play the piano frequently throughout his life.
After graduating from James Madison High School, he decided to pursue a scholarly career rather than a musical one. He enrolled at Columbia College in New York in 1932. During his senior year, he attended a class taught by Franz Boas concerning American Indian languages. He graduated in 1936 with a bachelor's degree. With references from Boas and Ruth Benedict, he was accepted as a graduate student by Melville J. Herskovits at Northwestern University in Chicago and graduated in 1940 with a doctorate degree. During the course of his graduate studies, Greenberg did fieldwork among the Hausa people of Nigeria, where he learned the Hausa language. The subject of his doctoral dissertation was the influence of Islam on a Hausa group that, unlike most others, had not converted to it.
During 1940, he began postdoctoral studies at Yale University. These were interrupted by service in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II, for which he worked as a codebreaker in North Africa and participated with the landing at Casablanca. He then served in Italy until the end of the war.
Before leaving for Europe during 1943, Greenberg married Selma Berkowitz, whom he had met during his first year at Columbia University.[1]
After the war, Greenberg taught at the University of Minnesota before returning to Columbia University in 1948 as a teacher of anthropology. While in New York, he became acquainted with Roman Jakobson and André Martinet. They introduced him to the Prague school of structuralism, which influenced his work.
In 1962, Greenberg relocated to the anthropology department at Stanford University in California, where he continued working for the rest of his life. In 1965 Greenberg served as president of the African Studies Association. That same year, he was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences.[2] He was later elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1973) and the American Philosophical Society (1975).[3][4]
Greenberg said, "Let us assume even that accident resemblances between two languages can be rather high, say twenty percent. The chance that some single meaningful form will appear with similar sound and meaning is then 1/5."[5]
Greenberg has been described as a founder of modern linguistic typology.[6] His publications contributed to the development in the field through the 1960s and 1970s.[7] Greenberg's work in synchronic linguistics focused on identifying linguistic universals. During the late 1950s, Greenberg began to examine languages covering a wide geographic and genetic distribution. He identified a number of proposed linguistic universals and cross-linguistic tendencies.[8]
In particular, Greenberg conceptualized the idea of "implicational universal", which has the form, "if a language has structure X, then it must also have structure Y." For example, X might be "mid front rounded vowels" and Y "high front rounded vowels" (for terminology see phonetics). Many scholars adopted this kind of research following Greenberg's example and it remains important in synchronic linguistics.[8]
Like Noam Chomsky, Greenberg sought to discover the universal structures on which human language is based. Unlike Chomsky, Greenberg's method was functionalist, rather than formalist.[9]
Greenberg rejected the opinion, prevalent among linguists since the mid-20th century, that comparative reconstruction was the only method to discover relationships between languages. He argued that genetic classification is methodologically prior to comparative reconstruction, or the first stage of it: one cannot engage in the comparative reconstruction of languages until one knows which languages to compare (1957:44).
He also criticized the prevalent opinion that comprehensive comparisons of two languages at a time (which commonly take years to perform) could establish language families of any size. He argued that the number of possible classifications increases exponentially with the number of languages compared (1957:44). For comparison, the proposed Niger–Congo family is said to have some 1,500 languages. He thought language families of any size needed to be established by some scholastic means other than bilateral comparison. The theory of mass comparison is an attempt to demonstrate such means.
Greenberg argued for the virtues of breadth over depth. He advocated restricting the amount of material to be compared (to basic vocabulary, morphology, and known paths of sound change) and increasing the number of languages to be compared to all the languages in a given area. He hypothesised that this would make it possible to compare numerous languages reliably. At the same time, the process would provide a check on accidental resemblances through the sheer number of languages under review. .
Greenberg used the premise that mass "borrowing" of basic vocabulary is unknown. He argued that borrowing, when it occurs, is concentrated in cultural vocabulary and clusters "in certain semantic areas", making it easy to detect. With the goal of determining broad patterns of relationship, the idea was not to get every word right but to detect patterns. From the beginning with his theory of mass comparison, Greenberg addressed why chance resemblance and borrowing were not obstacles to its being useful. Despite that, critics consider those phenomena caused difficulties for his theory.
Greenberg first termed his method "mass comparison" in an article of 1954 (reprinted in Greenberg 1955). As of 1987, he replaced the term "mass comparison" with "multilateral comparison", to emphasize its contrast with the bilateral comparisons recommended by linguistics textbooks. He believed that multilateral comparison was not in any way opposed to the comparative method, but is, on the contrary, its necessary first step (Greenberg, 1957:44). According to him, comparative reconstruction should have the status of an explanatory theory for facts already established by language classification (Greenberg, 1957:45).
Most historical linguists (Campbell 2001:45) reject the use of mass comparison as a method for establishing genealogical relationships between languages. Among the most outspoken critics of mass comparison have been Lyle Campbell, Donald Ringe, William Poser, and the late R. Larry Trask.
Greenberg developed a classification system for the languages of Africa, which he published from 1949 to 1954. He revised the book and published it again during 1963, followed by a nearly identical edition in 1966 (reprinted without change during 1970). A few more changes of the classification were made by Greenberg in an article during 1981.
Greenberg grouped the hundreds of African languages into four families, which he dubbed Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo, and Khoisan. During the course of his work, Greenberg popularised the term "Afroasiatic", originally suggested by Maurice Delafosse, to replace the earlier term "Hamito-Semitic", after showing that the Hamitic group, accepted widely since the 19th century, is not a valid language family. Another feature of his work was to establish the classification of the Bantu languages, spoken in much of Central and Southern Africa, as a part of the Atlantic-Congo family, rather than as an independent family as many Bantuists had maintained.
Greenberg's work on African languages has been criticised by Lyle Campbell and Donald Ringe, who do not believe that his classification is justified by his data and request a re-examination of his macro-phyla by "reliable methods" (Ringe 1993:104). Harold Fleming and Lionel Bender, who were sympathetic to Greenberg's classification, acknowledged that at least some of his macrofamilies (particularly the Nilo-Saharan and the Khoisan macrofamilies) are not accepted completely by most linguists and may need to be divided (Campbell 1997). Their objection was methodological: if mass comparison is not a valid method, it cannot be expected to have brought order successfully out of the confusion of African languages.
By contrast, some linguists have sought to combine Greenberg's four African families into larger units. In particular, Edgar Gregersen (1972) proposed joining Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan into a larger family, which he termed Kongo-Saharan. Roger Blench (1995) suggests Niger-Congo is a subfamily of Nilo-Saharan.
During 1971 Greenberg proposed the Indo-Pacific macrofamily, which groups together the Papuan languages (a large number of language families of New Guinea and nearby islands) with the native languages of the Andaman Islands and Tasmania but excludes the Australian Aboriginal languages. Its principal feature was to reduce the manifold language families of New Guinea to a single genetic unit. This excludes the Austronesian languages, which have been established as associated with a more recent migration of people.
Greenberg's subgrouping of these languages has not been accepted by the few specialists who have worked on the classification of these languages.[citation needed] However, the work of Stephen Wurm (1982) and Malcolm Ross (2005) has given a small amount of mainstream support for his hypothesis. Wurm stated that the lexical similarities between the Great Andamanese, West Papuan, and Timor-Alor-Pantar families "are quite striking and amount to virtual formal identity [...] in a number of instances". He believes this to be due to a linguistic substratum.
Most linguists concerned with the native languages of the Americas classify them into 150 to 180 independent language families. Early on, Greenberg (1957:41, 1960) became convinced that many of the language groups considered unrelated could be classified into larger groupings. In his 1987 book Language in the Americas, while accepting the Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dené groupings as distinct, he proposed that all the other Native American languages belong to a single language macro-family, which he termed Amerind.
Language in the Americas has generated lively debate, but has been criticized strongly; it is rejected by most specialists of indigenous languages of the Americas and also by most historical linguists. Specialists of the individual language families have found extensive inaccuracies and errors in Greenberg's data, such as data cited from non-existent languages, erroneous transcriptions of the forms compared, misinterpretations of the meanings of words used for comparison, and entirely spurious forms.[10][11][12][13][14][15]
Historical linguists also reject the validity of the method of multilateral (or mass) comparison upon which the classification is based. They argue that he has not provided a convincing case that the similarities presented as evidence are due to inheritance from an earlier common ancestor rather than being explained by a combination of errors, accidental similarity, excessive semantic latitude in comparisons, borrowings, onomatopoeia, and other such causes.
However, Harvard geneticist David Reich notes that recent genetic studies have identified patterns that support Greenberg's Amerind classification: the "First American” category. "The cluster of populations that he predicted to be most closely related based on language were in fact verified by the genetic patterns in populations for which data are available.”[16]
Later in his life, Greenberg proposed that nearly all of the language families of northern Eurasia belong to a single higher-order family, which he termed Eurasiatic. The only exception was Yeniseian, which he attached to a wider Dené–Caucasian grouping, also including Sino-Tibetan. During 2008 Edward Vajda proposed a relation between Yeniseian and the Na-Dené languages of North America as a Dené-Yeniseian family.[17]
The Eurasiatic grouping resembles the older Nostratic proposals of Holger Pedersen and Vladislav Illich-Svitych by including Indo-European, Uralic, Turkic, Tungusic, and Mongolic. It differs by including Nivkh, Japonic, Korean, and Ainu (which most Nostraticists had excluded from comparison because they are single languages rather than language families) and in excluding Afroasiatic. At about this time, Russian Nostraticists, notably Sergei Starostin, constructed a revised version of Nostratic. It was slightly larger than Greenberg's grouping but it also excluded Afroasiatic.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
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Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages.
Joseph Green (April 23, 1900 – June 20, 1996), born Yoysef Grinberg, a.k.a. Josef Grünberg, Joseph Greenberg and Joseph Greene, a Polish-born Jew who emigrated to the United States in 1924, was an actor in Yiddish theater and one of the few directors of Yiddish-language films. He made four Yiddish films that he shot on location in Poland, beginning in 1935: Yidl mitn fidl (Yiddle with his Fiddle; 1935), Der Purimspiler (The Jester; 1937), Mamele (Little Mother; 1938), and A brivele der mamen (A Little Letter to Mother; 1939). He also wrote the screenplays for the films, except for Mamele. Born in Łódź (Poland), then in Congress Poland, part of the Russian Empire, he attended a traditional Jewish cheder, or elementary school, and then a state gymnasium (high school). In 1915, during the First World War, he trained at the drama school of German theater director Walter Wassermann, who was then heading the Deutsches Theater in Lodz, and in 1916 he made his debut as an actor with the Lodz-based amateur troupe of Zalmen Zylbercweig. Green had small roles in The Jazz Singer, in 1927, and A Daughter of her People, in 1932. Also in 1932 he provided the Yiddish-language dubbing for the silent Italian film Joseph in the Land of Egypt. He died of emphysema at the age of 96 in Great Neck, Long Island, New York. Green was interviewed in the 1985 British documentary on Yiddish Films, Almonds and Raisins.
The American linguist Joseph Greenberg (1915–2001) proposed a set of linguistic universals based primarily on a set of 30 languages. The following list is verbatim from the list printed in the appendix of Greenberg's article "Some Universals of Grammar With Particular Reference to the Order of Meaningful Elements" in Universals of Language (1963) and "Universals Restated", sorted by context. The numbering is fixed to keep Greenberg's number associations as these are commonly referenced by number; e.g.: "Greenberg's linguistic universal number 12".
The Khoisan languages ( KOY-sahn; also Khoesan or Khoesaan) are a sprachbund of African languages once classified together, originally by Joseph Greenberg. Khoisan is defined as those languages that have click consonants and do not belong to other African language families. For much of the 20th century, they were thought to be genealogically related to each other, but this is no longer accepted. They are now held to comprise three distinct language families and two language isolates. All but two Khoisan languages are indigenous to southern Africa; these are classified into three language families. The Khoe family appears to have migrated to southern Africa not long before the Bantu expansion. Ethnically, their speakers are the Khoekhoe and the San (Bushmen). Two languages of eastern Africa, those of the Sandawe and Hadza, were originally also classified as Khoisan, although their speakers are ethnically neither Khoekhoe nor San. Before the Bantu expansion, Khoisan languages, or languages like them, were likely spread throughout southern and eastern Africa. They are currently restricted to the Kalahari Desert, primarily in Namibia and Botswana, and to the Rift Valley in central Tanzania. Most of the languages are endangered, and several are moribund or extinct. Most have no written record. The only widespread Khoisan language is Khoekhoe (also known as Khoekhoegowab, Nàmá or Damara) of Namibia, Botswana and South Africa, with a quarter of a million speakers; Sandawe in Tanzania is second in number with some 40–80,000, some monolingual; and the ǃKung language of the northern Kalahari spoken by some 16,000 or so people. Language use is quite strong among the 20,000 speakers of Naro, half of whom speak it as a second language. Khoisan languages are best known for their use of click consonants as phonemes. These are typically written with characters such as ǃ and ǂ. Clicks are quite versatile as consonants, as they involve two articulations of the tongue which can operate partially independently. Consequently, the languages with the greatest numbers of consonants in the world are Khoisan. The Juǀʼhoan language has 48 click consonants among nearly as many non-click consonants, strident and pharyngealized vowels, and four tones. The ǃXóõ and ǂHõã languages are even more complex.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Madam C.J. Walker
