Greenberg reduces Africa to four families

Assembled from 22 blocks · 1 evidence · 13 related

1. Story
2. The Languages of Africa proposed a classification of the continent's languages into four families — Afroasiatic, Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan and Khoisan — using multilateral comparison of large numbers of languages rather than prior reconstruction. The classification replaced a fragmented and partly racially framed colonial-era literature and reorganised African linguistics. Its Afroasiatic and Niger-Congo components are broadly retained; Nilo-Saharan and Khoisan are far less widely accepted, and the wider Niger-Congo grouping still lacks a reconstruction of the kind that underwrites Indo-European.
3. Knowledge
4. Afroasiatic
5. Niger-Congo
6. Joseph Greenberg
7. Greenberg reduces Africa to four families
8. Connections
9. Niger-Congo
10. Joseph Greenberg
11. Afroasiatic
12. The Bantu expansion
13. Greenberg reduces Africa to four families
14. The Bantu expansion begins in the Nigeria–Cameroon borderland
15. Afroasiatic
16. Greenberg reduces Africa to four families
17. Language in the Americas, and its rejection
18. The comparative method
19. Joseph Greenberg
20. Greenberg reduces Africa to four families
21. Evidence
22. Supports the four-family classification of African languages, including the establishment of Niger-Congo and Afroasiatic as currently understood, by multilateral comparison. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. The present standing of each of the four groupings is characterised from working knowledge of the subsequent literature, not from any survey retrieved in this session.