Linguists
Joseph Greenberg
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American linguist known for his work in linguistic typology and for proposing large-scale genetic classifications of the world's languages through his mass comparison method. His four-way classification of African languages into Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, Afro-Asiatic and Khoisan is widely used, but his later Amerind and Eurasiatic proposals, built on the same method, are rejected by most historical linguists.
Facts
RoleLinguist; developer of mass comparison and proposer of large-scale language classifications 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
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Why this is disputed. Greenberg proposed Khoisan as one of Africa's four basic language families (1949-1963); the genetic unity has not been confirmed and is rejected by specialists today.
Niger-Congo is one of the four African language families Greenberg proposed in The Languages of Africa (1963).
Greenberg established Nilo-Saharan as one of his four proposed African language families in The Languages of Africa (1963); it remains the least secure of the four.
Sources
Open Questions (1 open question)
Is Joseph Greenberg's Amerind grouping of the indigenous languages of the Americas a valid genetic family?
Greenberg's 1987 book Language in the Americas proposed that nearly all indigenous languages of the Americas outside Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene form one Amerind family, using his mass comparison method. Most historical linguists reject mass comparison as a method for establishing genetic relationships, and reviewers found extensive inaccuracies in the supporting data, so the proposal has generated lively debate but is rejected by most specialists.
What would resolve this Rigorous application of the standard comparative method, with reconstructed sound correspondences and paradigmatic morphology, to each of the many individual language families Amerind proposes to unite, verified independently of Greenberg's own cognate sets.
Historical and comparative linguisticsWikipedia: Joseph Greenberg
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