From MERRITT RUHLEN
Roger Lewin has provided a fine review of the recent conference on the
classification of American Indian languages held at the University of Colorado
(‘Ancestral voices at war,’ 16 June). A couple of points are, however, in
need of clarification. Lewin describes the debate, quite correctly, as contrasting
two different methodological approaches to language classification. Greenberg
and his followers use a top-down approach that relies on similarities in
sound and meaning to detect historically related forms (cognates). Greenberg’s
opponents, on the other hand, use a precise but painstaking method that
proceeds from the bottom up, relying on the discovery of regular sound correspondences
and reconstruction to ascertain cognates.
What Lewin fails to point out is that this latter method is so precise
that it has yet to make any contribution to liguistic taxonomy. In reality,
sound correspondences are discovered and reconstruction may begin, only
after a classifcation has been reached on other grounds. The Indo-European
family itself was discovered by Greenberg’s methods almost a century before
the preoccupation with sound correspondences and reconstruction appeared
in the late nineteenth century. In the America’s the precise bottom-up approach
advocated by Greenberg’s critics has yet to make its first discovery.
Second, the belief that the comparative method in linguistics has a
‘built-in limitation’ of 7000 years is simply a myth propagated by Indo-Europeanists
to provent Indo-European from being debased by less-worthy relatives. The
Soviet Nostratic shcool has demonstrated beyond any doubt that Indo-European
is intimately related to many other families, and Greenberg is currently
writing a book on the same topic.
Finally, the quote attributed to me that the comparative method can
take us ‘Back to the first language, the Mother Tongue,’ is something I
have never said. While I do believe that the comparative method can show
that all extant languages share a common origin (probably between 50,000
and 100,000 years ago), I do not think that this common source was in any
way ‘the first language.’ And I never use the term Mother Tongue, though
many of my colleagues do.
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Merritt Ruhlen Palo Alto California, US
