Joseph Greenberg

person · earth

American linguist (1915–2001), whose work sits at both ends of this Journey's spectrum of evidential strength. His 1963 Languages of Africa replaced a tangled colonial-era literature with a four-family classification of the continent — Afroasiatic, Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan and Khoisan — that reshaped African linguistics and is, in its Afroasiatic and Niger-Congo components, broadly retained today. The method he used, multilateral or mass comparison, inspects large numbers of languages simultaneously for recurrent lexical and morphological resemblances and groups them without first establishing sound correspondences or reconstructing a proto-language. Applied to the Americas in Language in the Americas (1987), which reduced hundreds of families to three and proposed a vast Amerind grouping, the same method met near-unanimous rejection from Americanist specialists, who objected that resemblance without regular correspondence cannot distinguish inheritance from chance, borrowing or error, and documented substantial data problems in the sources. Greenberg is the field's standing case that a classification can be right and its method still be insufficient to establish it.

A person is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.