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Language in the Americas, and its rejection

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Greenberg applied multilateral comparison to the indigenous languages of the Americas, reducing the many families recognised by specialists to three and proposing a vast Amerind grouping covering most of the hemisphere. The reception among Americanists was overwhelmingly negative: critics argued that resemblance without demonstrated regular correspondence cannot separate common descent from chance, borrowing or transcription error, and documented substantial problems in the underlying data. The episode is the field's clearest statement of the difference between a proposal and a demonstration, and it is why this Journey treats the comparative method as the definition of a family rather than as one option among several.

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Assembled narrative · 1

Assembled from 29 blocks · 1 evidence · 33 related

  1. Story
  2. Greenberg applied multilateral comparison to the indigenous languages of the Americas, reducing the many families recognised by specialists to three and proposing a vast Amerind grouping covering most of the hemisphere. The reception among Americanists was overwhelmingly negative: critics argued that resemblance without demonstrated regular correspondence cannot separate common descent from chance, borrowing or transcription error, and documented substantial problems in the underlying data. The episode is the field's clearest statement of the difference between a proposal and a demonstration, and it is why this Journey treats the comparative method as the definition of a family rather than as one option among several.
  3. Knowledge
  4. The comparative method
  5. Contact, borrowing and the limits of resemblance
  6. Joseph Greenberg
  7. Language in the Americas, and its rejection
  8. Connections
  9. The comparative method
  10. Joseph Greenberg
  11. Contact, borrowing and the limits of resemblance
  12. Language death
  13. Contact, borrowing and the limits of resemblance
  14. The regularity of sound change
  15. Bayesian phylogenetic dating of language families
  16. Sino-Tibetan
  17. Afroasiatic
  18. Proto-Indo-European
  19. Sir William Jones
  20. The Neogrammarian doctrine: sound laws admit no exception
  21. Glottochronology proposes to date language splits arithmetically
  22. Language in the Americas, and its rejection
  23. Afroasiatic
  24. Greenberg reduces Africa to four families
  25. Language in the Americas, and its rejection
  26. The comparative method
  27. Language in the Americas, and its rejection
  28. Evidence
  29. Supports the existence and content of the Amerind proposal, and is cited here as the object of the methodological criticism described, not as support for the classification itself. 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 reception is summarised from a large critical literature; no individual review is cited because none could be retrieved.
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/atlas?object=EVT_LF_GREENBERG_AMERIND_1987&experience=EVT_LF_GREENBERG_AMERIND_1987