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Joseph H. Greenberg, one of the most original and influential linguists of the twentieth century, died at his home in Stanford, California, on May 7th, 2001, three weeks before his eighty-sixth birthday. Greenberg was a major pioneer in the development of linguistics as an empirical science. His work was always

founded directly on quantitative data from a single language or from a wide range of languages. His chief legacy to contemporary linguistics is in the development of an approach to the study of language—typology and univerals—and to historical linguistics. Yet he also made major contributions to sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, phonetics and phonology, morphology, and especially African language studies.

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. His father was a Polish Jew and his mother, a German Jew. His father’s family name was originally Zyto, but in one of those turn-of-thecentury immigrant stories, he ended up taking the name of his landlord. Joe Greenberg’s early loves were music and languages. As a child he sat fascinated next to his mother while she played the piano, and asked her to teach him. She taught him musical notation and then found him a local teacher. Greenberg ended up studying with a Madame Vangerova, associated with the Curtis Institute of Music. Greenberg even gave a concert at Steinway Hall at the age of 14, and won a city-wide prize for best chamber music ensemble. But after finishing high school, Greenberg chose an academic career instead of a musical one, although he continued to play the piano every evening until near the end of his life. Greenberg’s fascination with languages began equally early. He went to Hebrew school, which offered only an elementary education in Hebrew, essentially how to read the script. But Greenberg got hold of a Hebrew grammar and taught himself the language. He studied Latin and German at James Madison High School. He had a friend at the Erasmus High School who studied Classical Greek, but James Madison High School didn’t offer Greek. He learned as much Greek as he could from a parallel-text edition of Sophocles’s plays and the etymologies of the Oxford dictionary, and asked his father if he could transfer to Erasmus High School. They went to see the principal, who asked Joe why he wanted to study Greek, and he simply said “I’d like to study Greek”, and the principal refused his transfer. On the way home Joe cried and his father took him into town and bought him a Greek grammar and dictionary from a used-book store. So he taught himself Greek—in fact, that was the usual way he learned languages. When Greenberg began college at Columbia in 1932, he continued Latin and Greek and taught himself Classical Arabic. He also signed up for classes in obscure languages such as Akkadian and various Slavic languages, annoying professors who thought they could get away without teaching by offering classes they thought nobody would take. He discovered comparative linguistics in his junior year and anthropology in his senior year. In his senior year he also audited a class given by Franz Boas on American Indian languages, and on his own read all the Native American language grammars in Boas 1911, 1922. Because of his Classical and Semitic background, Greenberg entertained the idea of becoming a medieval historian specializing in contacts between Christianity and Islam in Africa. But opportunities in the humanities in the Depression were nonexistent, and his anthropology professor, Alexander Lesser, suggested he apply for a Social Science Research Council Ph.D. grant to study under Melville Herskovits, a major Africanist at Northwestern University, and obtained references for him from Boas and Ruth Benedict. Greenberg received the grant and studied with Herskovits at Northwestern. In his third year he did fieldwork among the Hausa in Nigeria (learning Hausa in the process), and wrote a dissertation on the influence of Islam on one of the few remaining non-Islamic Hausa groups. Greenberg’s intellectual interests continued to expand. Herskovits encouraged him to spend his second year at Yale (1937-38), where he studied with the anthropologists Spier and Lowie and the linguists Sturtevant and Edgerton. (He never met Sapir, who was ill at the time.) The linguistics courses were all on comparative Indo-European, It was not until he returned to Yale with a postdoctoral fellowship in 1940 that he made his acquaintance with American structuralism, auditing courses with Bloch, Trager and Whorf. Greenberg also met Bloomfield at around this time, though not at Yale. Bloomfield suggested to Greenberg that he read Carnap and thereby introduced Greenberg to logical positivism. Greenberg studied Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica, even taking it with him when he was drafted into the Army in 1940. Logical positivism had a significant influence on Greenberg, not only in the general rigor of its argumentation; he published axiomatizations of kinship systems (1949a) and phonology (1959). Greenberg took the postdoctoral position because there were no academic positions in the Depression, especially for Jews. Being drafted into the Army in 1940 solved the employment problem for five years. Before he left for the war, he married Selma Berkowitz, whom he had met when she was finishing high school and he was starting at Columbia; she remained his companion and support for the rest of his life. Greenberg entered the Army Signal Corps and was eventually sent to North Africa, participating in the landing at Casablanca. In North Africa, he and his colleagues got up in the middle of the night and had deciphered the German or Italian code by the early morning. After the Allied invasion of Italy, he was sent to Italy, where he remained until the end of the war—and he learned Italian, of course. Conditions for academic employment were completely different after World War II than during the Depression. The GI Bill offered funding for GIs to go to college, and universities expanded. The expansion continued as the postwar baby boom eventually made its way to college. Greenberg was appointed at the University of Minnesota in 1946 and moved to the anthropology department in Columbia University in 1948. Jakobson and Martinet had arrived from Europe and had founded the Linguistic Circle of New York. Through them, Greenberg was exposed to the structuralism of the Prague school, including Trubetzkoy’s work on markedness. (He also coedited Word from 1950 to 1954.) Thus, Greenberg’s intellectual roots included all of the major strands of linguistics, philosophy and anthropology at the time: American structuralism, Prague school structuralism, comparative historical linguistics, logical positivism and cultural anthropology. (Not to mention his Classical and Semitic background, or his awesomely broad reading, which continued to the end of his life.) At the time, the first linguistics departments in America were being established, and Greenberg was in a position to help shape the field of linguistics. Linguistics was still largely divided among philologists working on historical linguistics and anthropological field linguists working on ‘exotic’ languages. Linguistics was still in the process of declaring its academic and intellectual independence from philology and anthropology. Greenberg made major contributions to the independent establishment of linguistics as a field and as a science.

Linguistic typology

Greenberg's reputation rests partly on his contributions to synchronic linguistics and the quest to identify linguistic universals. During the late 1950s, Greenberg began to examine languages covering a wide geographic and genetic distribution. He located a number of interesting potential universals as well as many strong cross-linguistic tendencies.

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.

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. An argument to reconcile the Greenbergian and Chomskyan methods can be found in Linguistic Universals (2006), edited by Ricardo Mairal and Juana Gil .

Many who are strongly opposed to Greenberg's methods of language classification (see below) acknowledge the importance of his typological work. During 1963 he published an article that was extremely influential: "Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements".

Mass comparison

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: you cannot engage in the comparative reconstruction of languages until you know 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, even for 8 languages, there are already 4,140 ways to classify them into distinct families. For comparison, the 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. 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. The mathematical probability that resemblances are accidental decreases strongly with the number of languages concerned.

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 (1957:39). 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. 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. According to him, comparative reconstruction should have the status of an explanatory theory for facts already established by language classification.

Genetic classification of languages

The languages of Africa

Greenberg is known widely for his development of a classification system for the languages of Africa, which he published as a series of articles in the Southwestern Journal of Anthropology from 1949 to 1954 (reprinted together as a book during 1955). He revised the book and published it again during 1963, followed by a nearly identical edition of 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 invented the term "Afroasiatic" 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 major feature of his work was to establish the classification of the Bantu languages, which occupy much of sub-Saharan Africa, as a part of the Niger–Congo language family, rather than as an independent family as many Bantuists had maintained.

Greenberg's classification rested largely in evaluating competing earlier classifications. For a time, his classification was considered bold and speculative, especially the proposal of a Nilo-Saharan language family. Now, apart from Khoisan, it is generally accepted by African specialists and has been used as a basis for further work by other scholars.

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; they request a reexamination of his macro-phyla by "reliable methods" (Ringe 1993:104). Harold Fleming and Lionel Bender, who are sympathetic to Greenberg's classification, acknowledge that at least some of his macrofamilies (particularly Nilo-Saharan and Khoisan) are not accepted completely by most linguists and may need to be divided (Campbell 1997). Their objection is 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.

The languages of New Guinea, Tasmania, and the Andaman Islands

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. However, the work of Stephen Wurm (1982) and Malcolm Ross (2005) has provided considerable evidence for his once-radical idea that these languages form a single genetic unit. Wurm stated that the lexical similarities between Great Andamanese and the West Papuan and Timor–Alor 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.

The languages of the Americas.

Most linguists concerned with the native languages of the Americas classify them into 150 to 180 independent language families. Some believe that two language families, Eskimo–Aleut and Na-Dené, were distinct, perhaps the results of later migrations into the New World.

Early on, Greenberg 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 agreeing that 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 including data from non-existent languages, erroneous transcriptions of the forms compared, misinterpretations of the meanings of words used for comparison, and entirely spurious forms.

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, etc.

The languages of northern Eurasia.

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 has been related to a wider Dené–Caucasian grouping, also including Sino-Tibetan. During 2008 Edward Vajda related Yeniseian to the Na-Dené languages of North America as a Dené–Yeniseian family.[8]

The Eurasiatic grouping resembles the older Nostratic groupings of Holger Pedersen and Vladislav Illich-Svitych by including Indo-European, Uralic, and Altaic. It differs by including Nivkh, Japonic, Korean, and Ainu (which the 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.

Recently, a consensus has been emerging among proponents of the Nostratic hypothesis. Greenberg basically agreed with the Nostratic concept, though he stressed a deep internal division between its northern 'tier' (his Eurasiatic) and a southern 'tier' (principally Afroasiatic and Dravidian).

The American Nostraticist Allan Bomhard considers Eurasiatic a branch of Nostratic, alongside other branches: Afroasiatic, Elamo-Dravidian, and Kartvelian. Similarly, Georgiy Starostin (2002) arrives at a tripartite overall grouping: he considers Afroasiatic, Nostratic and Elamite to be roughly equidistant and more closely related to each other than to any other language family.[9] Sergei Starostin's school has now included Afroasiatic in a broadly defined Nostratic. They reserve the term Eurasiatic to designate the narrower subgrouping, which comprises the rest of the macrofamily. Recent proposals thus differ mainly on the precise inclusion of Dravidian and Kartvelian.

Greenberg continued to work on this project after he was diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer and until he died during May 2001. His colleague and former student Merritt Ruhlen ensured the publication of the final volume of his Eurasiatic work (2002) after his death.

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