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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