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56-771: The Eskaleut language family is divided into two branches: Eskimoan and Aleut . The Aleut branch consists of a single language, Aleut, spoken in the Aleutian Islands and the Pribilof Islands . Aleut is divided into several dialects . The Eskimoan languages are divided into two branches: the Yupik languages , spoken in western and southwestern Alaska and in Chukotka, and the Inuit languages , spoken in northern Alaska, Canada and Greenland. Inuit languages, which cover

112-443: A big boat’ There are a total of three affixes internal to the word 'angyagh.' The root (or free morpheme) 'angyagh' and the inflection '-tuq' on the right consist of the indicative mood marker plus third person singular. The enclitic –lu ‘also’ follows the inflection. Following the postbases are non-lexical suffixes that indicate case on nouns and person and mood on verbs. The number of cases varies, with Aleut languages having

168-438: A book, The Languages of Africa , in 1955). He revised the book and published it again during 1963, followed by a nearly identical edition of 1966 (reprinted without change during 1970). A few more changes of the classification were made by Greenberg in an article during 1981. Greenberg grouped the hundreds of African languages into four families, which he dubbed Afroasiatic , Nilo-Saharan , Niger–Congo , and Khoisan . During

224-419: A combination of errors, accidental similarity, excessive semantic latitude in comparisons, borrowings, onomatopoeia, etc. However, Harvard geneticist David Reich notes that recent genetic studies have identified patterns that support Greenberg's Amerind classification: the "First American” category. "The cluster of populations that he predicted to be most closely related based on language were in fact verified by

280-455: A doctorate degree. During the course of his graduate studies, Greenberg did fieldwork among the Hausa people of Nigeria, where he learned the Hausa language . The subject of his doctoral dissertation was the influence of Islam on a Hausa group that, unlike most others, had not converted to it. During 1940, he began postdoctoral studies at Yale University . These were interrupted by service in

336-533: A form of extreme agglutination , which allows single words to carry the same information that another language expresses in whole clauses. For example, in Central Alaskan Yupik , one can say: qayar- kayak- pa- big- li- make- qa- Proto-Eskimoan language Proto-Eskimoan , Proto-Eskimo , or Proto-Inuit-Yupik , is the reconstructed ancestor of the Eskimo languages . It

392-561: A greatly reduced case system compared to Eskimoan. The Eskimoan languages are ergative–absolutive in nouns and in Yup'ik languages, also in verbal person marking. All Eskaleut languages have obligatory verbal agreement with agent and patient in transitive clauses, and there are special suffixes used for this purpose in subordinate clauses , which makes these languages, like most in the North Pacific, highly complement deranking . At

448-536: A huge range of territory, are divided into several varieties. Neighbouring varieties are quite similar , although those at the farthest distances from the centre in the Diomede Islands and East Greenland are quite divergent. The proper place of one language, Sirenik , within the Eskimoan family has not been settled. While some linguists list it as a branch of Yupik, others list it as a separate branch of

504-545: A scholarly career rather than a musical one. He enrolled at Columbia College in New York in 1932. During his senior year, he attended a class taught by Franz Boas concerning American Indian languages . He graduated in 1936 with a bachelor's degree. With references from Boas and Ruth Benedict , he was accepted as a graduate student by Melville J. Herskovits at Northwestern University in Chicago and graduated in 1940 with

560-515: A single genetic unit. This excludes the Austronesian languages , which have been established as associated with a more recent migration of people. Greenberg's subgrouping of these languages has not been accepted by the few specialists who have worked on the classification of these languages. However, the work of Stephen Wurm (1982) and Malcolm Ross (2005) has provided considerable evidence for his once-radical idea that these languages form

616-625: A single genetic unit. Wurm stated that the lexical similarities between Great Andamanese and the West Papuan and Timor–Alor families "are quite striking and amount to virtual formal identity [...] in a number of instances." He believes this to be due to a linguistic substratum . Most linguists concerned with the native languages of the Americas classify them into 150 to 180 independent language families. Some believe that two language families, Eskimo–Aleut and Na-Dené , were distinct, perhaps

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672-409: A special neutral root (in the case of Central Alaskan Yup'ik and Inuktitut pi ) is used. The basic word schema is as follows: root-(affixes)-inflection-(enclitic). Below is an example from Central Siberian Yupik . angyagh-(gh)lla-ng(e)-yug-tuq-lu boat-big-acquire-want.to- IND . 3S -also angyagh-(gh)lla-ng(e)-yug-tuq-lu boat-big-acquire-want.to-IND.3S-also ‘also, he wants to acquire

728-643: A teacher of anthropology . While in New York, he became acquainted with Roman Jakobson and André Martinet . They introduced him to the Prague school of structuralism , which influenced his work. In 1962, Greenberg relocated to the anthropology department at Stanford University in California, where he continued working for the rest of his life. In 1965 Greenberg served as president of the African Studies Association . That same year, he

784-400: A time, his classification was considered bold and speculative, especially the proposal of a Nilo-Saharan language family. Now, apart from Khoisan, it is generally accepted by African specialists and has been used as a basis for further work by other scholars. Greenberg's work on African languages has been criticised by Lyle Campbell and Donald Ringe, who do not believe that his classification

840-424: A tripartite overall grouping: he considers Afroasiatic, Nostratic and Elamite to be roughly equidistant and more closely related to each other than to any other language family. Sergei Starostin's school has now included Afroasiatic in a broadly defined Nostratic. They reserve the term Eurasiatic to designate the narrower subgrouping, which comprises the rest of the macrofamily. Recent proposals thus differ mainly on

896-666: Is a subfamily of Nilo-Saharan. During 1971 Greenberg proposed the Indo-Pacific macrofamily , which groups together the Papuan languages (a large number of language families of New Guinea and nearby islands) with the native languages of the Andaman Islands and Tasmania but excludes the Australian Aboriginal languages . Its principal feature was to reduce the manifold language families of New Guinea to

952-535: Is able to contain multiple post-bases or morphemes. The Eskaleut languages are exclusively suffixing (with the exception of one prefix in Inuktitut that appears in demonstratives). Suffixes are able to combine and ultimately create an unlimited number of words. Some of the morphemes that are able to attach contain features such as carrying nominal subjects and objects, adverbial information, direct objects, and spatial noun phrases. Polysynthetic languages are said to be

1008-855: Is also present. A rare feature of many dialects of Yup'ik and Aleut is contrasting voiceless nasals . The following vowels and consonants were taken from Michael Fortescue et al., 2010. Eskimoan / ə / corresponds to Aleut / i / . Inuit allows only a single initial consonant and no more than two successive consonants between vowels. Yupik lacks the consonant assimilation process so common to Inuit. Consonants in parentheses are non-Proto-Eskimoan phonemes. The following vowels and consonants were taken from Knut Bergsland , (1997). The Aleut language has six vowels in total: three short vowels /i/ , /u/ , /a/ , and three long vowels /iː/ , /uː/ , /aː/ . Orthographically, they would be spelled ii , uu , and aa . There are no diphthongs in Aleut vowels. The length of

1064-406: Is an attempt to demonstrate such means. Greenberg argued for the virtues of breadth over depth. He advocated restricting the amount of material to be compared (to basic vocabulary, morphology, and known paths of sound change) and increasing the number of languages to be compared to all the languages in a given area. This would make it possible to compare numerous languages reliably. At the same time,

1120-539: Is justified by his data and request a re-examination of his macro-phyla by "reliable methods" (Ringe 1993:104). Harold Fleming and Lionel Bender , who were sympathetic to Greenberg's classification, acknowledged that at least some of his macrofamilies (particularly the Nilo-Saharan and the Khoisan macrofamilies) are not accepted completely by most linguists and may need to be divided (Campbell 1997). Their objection

1176-412: Is quite unremarkable, compared to the interesting phenomena exhibited by most varieties of Eskimo. Proto-Eskimo had four vowels */i a u ə/, but few or none of the long vowels or diphthongs found in the modern languages." This article about historical linguistics is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Joseph Greenberg Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001)

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1232-635: The U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II , for which he worked as a codebreaker in North Africa and participated with the landing at Casablanca . He then served in Italy until the end of the war. Before leaving for Europe during 1943, Greenberg married Selma Berkowitz, whom he had met during his first year at Columbia University. After the war, Greenberg taught at the University of Minnesota before returning to Columbia University in 1948 as

1288-586: The native languages of the Americas . This is a geographical category, not a genealogical one. The Eskaleut languages are not demonstrably related to the other language families of North America and are believed to represent a separate, and the last, prehistoric migration of people from Asia . Alexander Vovin (2015) notes that northern Tungusic languages , which are spoken in eastern Siberia and northeastern China, have Eskaleut loanwords that are not found in Southern Tungusic, implying that Eskaleut

1344-420: The 1960s and 1970s. Greenberg's reputation rests partly on his contributions to synchronic linguistics and the quest to identify linguistic universals . During the late 1950s, Greenberg began to examine languages covering a wide geographic and genetic distribution. He located a number of interesting potential universals as well as many strong cross-linguistic tendencies. In particular, Greenberg conceptualized

1400-483: The Americas has generated lively debate, but has been criticized strongly; it is rejected by most specialists of indigenous languages of the Americas and also by most historical linguists. Specialists of the individual language families have found extensive inaccuracies and errors in Greenberg's data, such as including data from non-existent languages, erroneous transcriptions of the forms compared, misinterpretations of

1456-497: The Eskimoan family, alongside the Yupik and Inuit languages. The Alaska Native Language Center believes that the common ancestral language of the Eskimoan languages and of Aleut divided into the Eskimoan and Aleut branches at least 4,000 years ago. The Eskimoan language family split into the Yupik and Inuit branches around 1,000 years ago. More recent classifications find a third branch, Old Sirenik . The Eskaleut languages are among

1512-603: The Eurasiatic hypothesis is generally disregarded by linguists, one critique by Stefan Georg and Alexander Vovin stated that they were not willing to disregard the theory immediately although ultimately agreed that Greenberg's conclusion was dubious. Greenberg explicitly states that his developments were based on the previous macro-comparative work done by Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Bomhard and Kerns. By providing evidence of lexical comparison, Greenberg hoped that it would strengthen his hypothesis. Despite all these efforts,

1568-464: The Eurasiatic language theory was overruled on the basis that mass comparison is not accurate enough an approach. In comparative linguistics , the comparative method bases its validity on highly regular changes, not occasional semantic and phonological similarities, which is what the Eurasiatic hypothesis provides. In the 1960s Morris Swadesh suggested a connection with the Wakashan languages . This

1624-502: The Nostratic hypothesis. Greenberg basically agreed with the Nostratic concept, though he stressed a deep internal division between its northern 'tier' (his Eurasiatic) and a southern 'tier' (principally Afroasiatic and Dravidian). The American Nostraticist Allan Bomhard considers Eurasiatic a branch of Nostratic, alongside other branches: Afroasiatic, Elamo-Dravidian , and Kartvelian . Similarly, Georgiy Starostin (2002) arrives at

1680-466: The Nostraticists had excluded from comparison because they are single languages rather than language families) and in excluding Afroasiatic . At about this time, Russian Nostraticists, notably Sergei Starostin , constructed a revised version of Nostratic. It was slightly larger than Greenberg's grouping but it also excluded Afroasiatic. Recently, a consensus has been emerging among proponents of

1736-554: The Siberian languages more than the North American ones. Eskaleut languages possess voiceless plosives at four positions ( bilabial , coronal , velar and uvular ) in all languages except Aleut, which has lost the bilabial stops (though it has retained the nasal ). There are usually contrasting voiced and voiceless fricatives at the same positions, and in the Eskimoan subfamily a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative

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1792-733: The course of his work, Greenberg invented the term "Afroasiatic" to replace the earlier term "Hamito-Semitic", after showing that the Hamitic group, accepted widely since the 19th century, is not a valid language family. Another major feature of his work was to establish the classification of the Bantu languages , which occupy much of Central and Southern Africa, as a part of the Niger–Congo family, rather than as an independent family as many Bantuists had maintained. Greenberg's classification rested largely in evaluating competing earlier classifications. For

1848-550: The end of a word there can be one of a small number of clitics with meanings such as "but" or indicating a polar question . Phonologically, the Eskaleut languages resemble other language families of northern North America ( Na-Dene and Tsimshianic ) and far-eastern Siberia ( Chukotko-Kamchatkan ). There are usually only three vowels— /a/ , /i/ , /u/ —though some Yup'ik dialects also have / ə / . All Eskaleut languages lack both ejectives and aspirates , in which they resemble

1904-581: The first such proposals, the Eskimo–Uralic hypothesis, was suggested by the pioneering Danish linguist Rasmus Rask in 1818, upon noticing similarities between Greenlandic and Finnish . Perhaps the most fully developed proposal to date is Michael Fortescue 's Uralo–Siberian hypothesis, published in 1998 which links Eskaleut languages to Yukaghir and the Uralic languages . More recently Joseph Greenberg (2000–2002) suggested grouping Eskaleut with all of

1960-412: The genetic patterns in populations for which data are available.” Nevertheless, this category of "First American" people also interbred with and contributed a significant amount of genes to the ancestors of both Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dené populations, with 60% and 90% "First American" DNA respectively constituting the genetic makeup of the two groups. Later in his life, Greenberg proposed that nearly all of

2016-486: The goal of determining broad patterns of relationship, the idea was not to get every word right but to detect patterns. From the beginning with his theory of mass comparison, Greenberg addressed why chance resemblance and borrowing were not obstacles to its being useful. Despite that, critics consider those phenomena caused difficulties for his theory. Greenberg first termed his method "mass comparison" in an article of 1954 (reprinted in Greenberg 1955). As of 1987, he replaced

2072-427: The idea of "implicational universal" , which has the form, "if a language has structure X, then it must also have structure Y." For example, X might be "mid front rounded vowels" and Y "high front rounded vowels" (for terminology see phonetics ). Many scholars adopted this kind of research following Greenberg's example and it remains important in synchronic linguistics. Like Noam Chomsky , Greenberg sought to discover

2128-660: The language families of northern Eurasia belong to a single higher-order family, which he termed Eurasiatic . The only exception was Yeniseian , which has been related to a wider Dené–Caucasian grouping, also including Sino-Tibetan . During 2008 Edward Vajda related Yeniseian to the Na-Dené languages of North America as a Dené–Yeniseian family. The Eurasiatic grouping resembles the older Nostratic groupings of Holger Pedersen and Vladislav Illich-Svitych by including Indo-European , Uralic , and Altaic . It differs by including Nivkh , Japonic , Korean , and Ainu (which

2184-466: The language families of northern Eurasia (Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Korean, Japanese, Ainu, Nivkh/Gilayak, and Chukchi–Kamchatkan), with the exception of Yeniseian , in a proposed language family called Eurasiatic . Such proposals are not generally accepted. Criticisms have been made stating that Greenberg's hypothesis is ahistorical , meaning that it lacks and sacrifices known historical elements of language in favour of external similarities. Although

2240-400: The meanings of words used for comparison, and entirely spurious forms. Historical linguists also reject the validity of the method of multilateral (or mass) comparison upon which the classification is based. They argue that he has not provided a convincing case that the similarities presented as evidence are due to inheritance from an earlier common ancestor rather than being explained by

2296-482: The order of meaningful elements". Greenberg rejected the opinion, prevalent among linguists since the mid-20th century, that comparative reconstruction was the only method to discover relationships between languages. He argued that genetic classification is methodologically prior to comparative reconstruction, or the first stage of it: one cannot engage in the comparative reconstruction of languages until one knows which languages to compare (1957:44). He also criticized

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2352-466: The phoneme in italics is found only in Eastern Aleut, and the bold phonemes are a part of the standard Aleut inventory. Aleut lacks labial stops and allows clusters of up to three consonants as well as consonant clusters in word initial position. Noteworthy phonological features: voiceless nasals and lack of a /p/ . Eskaleut is polysynthetic , which features a process in which a single word

2408-636: The prevalent opinion that comprehensive comparisons of two languages at a time (which commonly take years to perform) could establish language families of any size. He argued that, even for 8 languages, there are already 4,140 ways to classify them into distinct families, while for 25 languages there are 4,638,590,332,229,999,353 ways (1957:44). For comparison, the Niger–Congo family is said to have some 1,500 languages. He thought language families of any size needed to be established by some scholastic means other than bilateral comparison. The theory of mass comparison

2464-490: The process would provide a check on accidental resemblances through the sheer number of languages under review. The mathematical probability that resemblances are accidental decreases strongly with the number of languages concerned (1957:39). Greenberg used the premise that mass "borrowing" of basic vocabulary is unknown. He argued that borrowing, when it occurs, is concentrated in cultural vocabulary and clusters "in certain semantic areas", making it easy to detect (1957:39). With

2520-576: The results of later migrations into the New World. Early on, Greenberg (1957:41, 1960) became convinced that many of the language groups considered unrelated could be classified into larger groupings. In his 1987 book Language in the Americas , while agreeing that the Eskimo–Aleut and Na-Dené groupings as distinct, he proposed that all the other Native American languages belong to a single language macro-family, which he termed Amerind . Language in

2576-546: The term "mass comparison" with "multilateral comparison", to emphasize its contrast with the bilateral comparisons recommended by linguistics textbooks. He believed that multilateral comparison was not in any way opposed to the comparative method, but is, on the contrary, its necessary first step (Greenberg, 1957:44). According to him, comparative reconstruction should have the status of an explanatory theory for facts already established by language classification (Greenberg, 1957:45). Most historical linguists (Campbell 2001:45) reject

2632-666: The universal structures on which human language is based. Unlike Chomsky, Greenberg's method was functionalist , rather than formalist . An argument to reconcile the Greenbergian and Chomskyan methods can be found in Linguistic Universals (2006), edited by Ricardo Mairal and Juana Gil. Many who are strongly opposed to Greenberg's methods of language classification (see below) acknowledge the importance of his typological work. In 1963 he published an article : "Some universals of grammar with particular reference to

2688-551: The use of mass comparison as a method for establishing genealogical relationships between languages. Among the most outspoken critics of mass comparison have been Lyle Campbell , Donald Ringe , William Poser , and the late R. Larry Trask . Greenberg is known widely for his development of a classification system for the languages of Africa , which he published as a series of articles in the Southwestern Journal of Anthropology from 1949 to 1954 (reprinted together as

2744-722: The vowel is dependent upon three characteristics: stress, surrounding consonants, and in particularly Eastern Aleut, surrounding vowels. Short vowels are in initial position if a following consonant is velar or labial. For example: the demonstratives uka , ika , and aka . Long vowels are lower than their short counterpart vowels, but are less retracted if they make contact with a uvular consonant. For example: uuquchiing 'blue fox,' qiiqix̂ 'storm-petrel', and qaaqaan 'eat it!' The Aleut consonants featured below include single Roman letters, digraphs , and one trigraph . Phonemes in parentheses are found only in Russian and English loanwords,

2800-477: The world's other language families, this being generally accepted by linguists at the present time. There is general agreement that it is not closely related to the other language families of North America. The more credible proposals on the external relations of Eskaleut all concern one or more of the language families of northern Eurasia , such as Chukotko-Kamchatkan just across the Bering Strait . One of

2856-451: Was methodological : if mass comparison is not a valid method, it cannot be expected to have brought order successfully out of the confusion of African languages. By contrast, some linguists have sought to combine Greenberg's four African families into larger units. In particular, Edgar Gregersen (1972) proposed joining Niger–Congo and Nilo-Saharan into a larger family, which he termed Kongo-Saharan . Roger Blench (1995) suggests Niger–Congo

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2912-575: Was an American linguist , known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages. Joseph Greenberg was born on May 28, 1915, to Jewish parents in Brooklyn, New York . His first great interest was music. At the age of 14, he gave a piano concert in Steinway Hall . He continued to play the piano frequently throughout his life. After graduating from James Madison High School , he decided to pursue

2968-772: Was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences . He was later elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1973) and the American Philosophical Society (1975). In 1996 he received the highest award for a scholar in Linguistics, the Gold Medal of Philology. Greenberg is considered the founder of modern linguistic typology , a field that he has revitalized with his publications in

3024-420: Was expanded by Jan Henrik Holst (2005). Every word must have only one root ( free morpheme ) always at the beginning. Eskaleut languages have a relatively small number of roots: in the case of Central Alaskan Yup'ik, around two thousand. Following the root are a number of postbases , which are bound morphemes that add to the basic meaning of the root. If the meaning of the postbase is to be expressed alone,

3080-854: Was once much more widely spoken in eastern Siberia. Vovin (2015) estimates that the Eskaleut loanwords in Northern Tungusic had been borrowed no more than 2,000 years ago, which was when Tungusic was spreading northwards from its homeland in the middle reaches of the Amur River . Vovin (2015) concludes that the homeland ( Urheimat ) of Proto-Eskaleut was in Siberia rather than in Alaska. Aleut Sirenik † Alutiiq Central Alaskan Yupʼik Naukan Central Siberian Yupik Iñupiaq Inuvialuktun Inuktitut Greenlandic Eskaleut does not have any genetic relationship to any of

3136-753: Was spoken by the ancestors of the Yupik and Inuit peoples. It is linguistically related to the Aleut language , and both descend from the Proto-Eskaleut language . Comparative studies of Eskimo and Aleut languages suggest that the Proto-Eskimoan and Proto-Aleut languages diverged between 4000 and 2000 BCE. According to the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, "Eskimo languages show variation primarily in their phonology and lexicon, rather than in syntax. Aleut phonology

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