Talk:Amerind languages

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[edit] re: support of Greenberg

Not many specialists support Greenberg. In fact, many linguists have spent considerable effort to reverse the "damage" that Greenberg has done to popular knowledge.

But, I believe that some of Greenberg's students, such as Merritt Ruhlen, are in favor with Greenberg's proposals.

Cheers! — ishwar  (SPEAK) 03:27, 2005 Apr 4 (UTC) I hardly think that a comment from Mithun is an NPOV way of describing the current consensus on mass comparison. Please see my comment in Talk:Indigenous languages of the Americas#lumpers vs. splitters. Benwing 23:30, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

I disagree with both sentiments. It is true that many linguists do not support Greenberg. However, he has more support than one may think. The fact that the profession has risen up in a bizarre display of fury against Amerind is shameful and disgusting, and implies psychological defenses at work. Further, some of the world's top linguists are continuing to work on mass comparison, although not necessarily on Amerind. The notion that the only person who supports Greenberg is "one of his students", the acclaimed linguist Ruhlen, is typical of the scurrilous attacks the anti-Greenbergians deploy.
In the 20 years since publication of LIA, a number of qualified Americanists have started to dip into the Amerind pool. Many of them feel that Greenberg's thesis is warranted, at least in part, and these scholars are expanding upon Greenberg's work, in some cases even finding regular sound correspondences. The snide notion that there is "consensus" against Greenberg is yet another (sigh) example of the viciousness of the anti-Greenbergians. There is no "consensus" agreement that Greenberg is wrong, and saying so violates Wikipedia's neutrality principle.
The best analysis of the Greenberg controversy is to say that JG's proposal is still hotly debated in the profession, is wildly controversial, and is not yet proven or disproven.
I am hereby serving notice to all of the anti-Greenbergian guerrilla fighters who have invaded every Greenberg or mass comparison article Wikipedia that I am going to help mount a campaign against their insurgent project. The battle is on. Robert Lindsay 05:28, 21 March 2006 (UTC) (talk)

Battle is not a good idea. Moreover, this article needs NPOV edits. Rather than wasting your energy "battling" people whom you do not know, by all means take a few minutes to rewrite this article in something resembling encyclopedic style.

It seems clear that the article as currently written reads as a POV discussion of Greenberg and his critics, rather than talking about Amerind Languages. This is not really appropriate; if there is any place for detailed discussion of support for Joseph Greenberg's theories and critics in general terms, it would be the Joseph Greenberg article, specifically the #Languages of the Americas section, or a specialized article dealing with "lumpers" vs "splitters." I believe it is quite sufficient for this article to state that "Amerind Languages" refers to two things, namely "indigenous languages of the Americas" in generalized use and specifically to one of the three families Greenberg, who is controversial, divides the languages of the Americas into... as well as the details of the classification under question, and perhaps a mention of why it is considered controversial. As currently written, I found the Eskimo-Aleut languages and Na-Dené languages articles more informative as to precisely what Greenberg's theory actually says, with substantially less verbiage. Balancer 17:32, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
A major reason that the other two articles are different is that neither Eskimo-Aleut nor Na-Dene is due to Greenberg and neither is controversial, except for the inclusion of Haida in Na-Dene. Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene were proposed long before Greenberg - he had nothing to do with them other than accepting them.
User:Danny's removal of User:Robert Lindsay's rant takes care of the NPOV problem. I have added a short summary of the issues.Bill 09:16, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
Well, I was more thinking of the short paragraph about Greenberg's theory that's included in those two articles. Did I capture it accurately? Balancer 20:56, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
Yes, your summaries in those two articles are accurate. If I were to edit them, I think I would change "Native North America" to "the Americas", since Greenberg's classification includes all of the Americas, but that's quibble.Bill 21:25, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
In response to User:Benwing, I think he is confusing NPOV with "balance". The fact is that that only a tiny minority of professional historical linguists take Greenberg's work on Amerind seriously. Almost all of the people who support Amerind are either at the fringe of the field or entirely outside of it. The criticisms of LIA have mostly gone without substantive response. So, yes, Greenberg's theory should be mentioned and references given, but portraying the two sides as balanced would seriously misrepresent the state of the field, as would a balanced presentation of the idea that the earth is a sphere and the idea that it is flat. As someone in the field, who has formed a judgment on this question, Marianne Mithun is not a detached, neutral observer, but she is precisely the sort of expert whose views should be reflected in an encyclopedia: she is extremely knowledgable, she has carefully examined the arguments and the data, and she explains her judgment in a rational way. Indeed, there is very little possibility of finding a detached, neutral observer qualified to comment on the question because anybody who knows enough to have an opinion of any interest has already formed an opinion on the question.Bill 21:37, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
Irrespectively of if Greenberg's comparisons are correct or not, all Amerind groups have one common origin - which was proved by genetic research. The migration wave probably wasn't only one - judging from the different distribution of female lineages in America - , but the Siberian population was the same. Hence it is highly probable that all Amerind languages also come from one root. However, as for other Greenberg's hypothesis, they often make no sense from the genetic point of view. For example, based on genetic relationships, Na-Dene languages are almost certainly related to the Altaic family, Amerind languages are related to the languages of Kets, Yukaghirs, Nivkhs and probably even Eskimos and Aleuts, the Chino-Tibetan family stems from the same root like Austroasian and Austronesian families, Japanese and Korean. Similarly, based on similar genetic origin, the Uralic family must be related to the Chukotko-Kamtchatkan family. Dravidian belongs to a wide macrofamily together with Amerind languages and Burushaski. However, problems occur, when male genetic lineages mix with female genetic lineages of other distant groups - then it is not easy to decide, if the human group preserved their language. Hence Basque may be of Cro-Magnon origin and related to Amerind languages - but also of Middle Eastern origin. 82.100.61.114 08:05, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
That is pure original research and as such useless for Wikipedia. Moreover, your comments are confused: linguistic classifications can only be based on linguistic evidence, it is a category mistake to base them on genetic evidence. For example: speakers of Finnish are genetically more closely related to speakers of Swedish than they are to Saami people. However, Finnish and Saami are related whereas Finnish and Swedish are not. This already suffices to show that it is methodologically absolutely invalid to derive linguistic claims from genetic data. --AAikio 12:14, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Article reference list

Incidentally, is it just me, or does the reference list seem rather long in relation to the article content, compared to other articles here? Balancer 08:23, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

Yes, it is unusually long. I'm probably mainly responsible for that. The reasons are that I wanted to include a reasonable range of the critical literature (there's more) without seeming unfair and removing the pro-Amerind references, and that I wanted to include both work specifically on the Amerind question and some more general background on the methodological issues.
The reason for the latter is that the article on mass lexical comparison is not very good and has no references. What I think needs to be done (and have a mind to do) is to improve that article and add references to it. Ringe (1992) at least could then be eliminated from this article since it is a general methodological reference, not specifically about Amerind. Ditto Ringe (1993), I think, though I'd have to check to be sure it doesn't discuss Amerind. The Sturtevant reference is not necessary - that's a wonderful set of volumes, but not specifically related to this article.Bill 21:25, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Footnotes

Please, make footnotes (Inline citations) in order that the readers can verify the information. Otherwise this may well look as a presentation of the editor's/s' opinions rather than of facts.--Pet'usek [petrdothrubisatgmaildotcom] 14:49, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] More Information

More pieces of information should be included in the article, such as:

  • Other people's contributions to the subject (such Merritt Ruhlen's Amerind Etymological Dictionary), as well as reviews thereof.
  • Internal classification (according to Greenberg/Ruhlen)
  • The evidence (real or alleged, but certainly commented) in favour of the hypothesis (and why that evidence is/isn't valid).

It doesn't matter whether Greenberg/Ruhlen's classification is valid or not. It should be a part of the description of the hypothesis. It is not enough to say that Amerind is a controversial family proposed by Greenberg and consisting of all language families in Americas but Na-Dené/Haida and Eskimo-Aleut. Being a reader of Wikipedia, I'd like to know why Greenberg thought the family existed.--Pet'usek [petrdothrubisatgmaildotcom] 14:24, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] reverting to less POV version


look at the history and you'll see that the (formerly) current highly POV version was due to a single user, Billposer. the previous version is shorter and much more objective. none of the added stuff by Billposer is relevant -- it's a lot of unsourced, disputed criticisms, and all relevant criticisms are already contained in the mass lexical comparison page. Benwing (talk) 03:47, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Given that Bill Poser actually has expert knowledge of the languages in the Amerind family, I think it's very unfortunate that you felt justified in deleting his contributions as not 'objective'. Unless you have any citations to prove that the acceptance of Amerind is greater than Bill said it is, I would advocate putting Bill's edits back in. Anon., June 5, 2008.