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64-505: Joseph Greenberg (1963) classified the then-little-known Ubangian languages as Niger–Congo and placed them within the Adamawa languages as "Eastern Adamawa". They were soon removed to a separate branch of Niger–Congo, for example within Blench's Savanna languages . However, this has become increasingly uncertain, and Dimmendaal (2008) states that, based on the lack of convincing evidence for

128-600: A Niger–Congo classification ever being produced, Ubangian "probably constitutes an independent language family that cannot or can no longer be shown to be related to Niger–Congo (or any other family)." Blench (2012) includes Ubangian within Niger–Congo. Güldemann (2018) notes that although evidence for the inclusion of Ubangi within Niger-Congo is still weak, the same also applies to many other branches which are uncontested members of Niger-Congo. Boyd and Moñino (2010) removed

192-534: A Russophile, in his "Remarques sur l'évolution phonologique du russe comparée a celle des autres langues slaves" ("Remarks on the phonological evolution of the Russian language in comparison with other Slavic languages", 1929) and similarly in "Slavische Sprachfragen in der Sovjetunion" ("Slavic Language Questions in the Soviet Union", 1934, an attack on the policy of Ukrainization and its proponents) he presented

256-594: A book published in the United States in 1951, jointly authored by Roman Jakobson, C. Gunnar Fant and Morris Halle . In the same year, Jakobson's theory of 'distinctive features' made a profound impression on the thinking of young Noam Chomsky, in this way also influencing generative linguistics. He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1960. In his last decade, Jakobson maintained an office at

320-438: 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

384-419: 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

448-455: 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

512-591: A major post-war intellectual movement in Europe and the United States. Meanwhile, though the influence of structuralism declined during the 1970s, Jakobson's work has continued to receive attention in linguistic anthropology , especially through the ethnography of communication developed by Dell Hymes and the semiotics of culture developed by Jakobson's former student Michael Silverstein . Jakobson's concept of underlying linguistic universals, particularly his celebrated theory of distinctive features , decisively influenced

576-545: 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

640-515: 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

704-625: 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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768-643: 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

832-400: 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

896-424: 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

960-666: 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

1024-406: 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,

1088-539: 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

1152-542: The Gbaya and Zande languages. The half dozen remaining branches are coherent, but their interrelationships are not straightforward. Williamson & Blench (2000) propose the following arrangement: In addition, there is the Ngombe language , whose placement is uncertain due to a paucity of data. Note: The ambiguous name Ngbaka is used for various languages in the area. Generally, singular Ngbaka language refers to one of

1216-507: The Karolinska Hospital (with works on aphasia and language competence). When Swedish colleagues feared a possible German occupation, he managed to leave on a cargo ship, together with Ernst Cassirer (the former rector of Hamburg University) to New York City in 1941 to become part of the wider community of intellectual émigrés who fled there. In New York, he began teaching at The New School , still closely associated with

1280-793: The Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages and then at the Historical-Philological Faculty of Moscow University . As a student he was a leading figure of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and took part in Moscow 's active world of avant-garde art and poetry; he was especially interested in Russian Futurism , the Russian incarnation of Italian Futurism . Under the pseudonym 'Aliagrov', he published books of zaum poetry and befriended

1344-538: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where he was an honorary professor emeritus. In the early 1960s, Jakobson shifted his emphasis to a more comprehensive view of language and began writing about communication sciences as a whole. He converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in 1975. Jakobson died in Cambridge, Massachusetts , on 18 July 1982. His widow died in 1986. His first wife, who

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1408-466: The Organon-Model by Karl Bühler , Jakobson distinguishes six communication functions, each associated with a dimension or factor of the communication process [n.b. – Elements from Bühler's theory appear in the diagram below in yellow and pink, Jakobson's elaborations in blue]: One of the six functions is always the dominant function in a text and usually related to the type of text. In poetry,

1472-635: 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

1536-400: The visual arts , and cinema. Through his decisive influence on Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes , among others, Jakobson became a pivotal figure in the adaptation of structural analysis to disciplines beyond linguistics, including philosophy , anthropology and literary theory ; his development of the approach pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure , known as " structuralism ", became

1600-420: 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

1664-483: 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

1728-618: The Czech émigré community during that period. At the École libre des hautes études , a sort of Francophone university-in-exile, he met and collaborated with Claude Lévi-Strauss , who would also become a key exponent of structuralism . He also made the acquaintance of many American linguists and anthropologists , such as Franz Boas , Benjamin Whorf , and Leonard Bloomfield . When the American authorities considered "repatriating" him to Europe, it

1792-565: The Futurists Vladimir Mayakovsky , Kazimir Malevich , Aleksei Kruchyonykh and others. It was the poetry of his contemporaries that partly inspired him to become a linguist. The linguistics of the time was overwhelmingly neogrammarian and insisted that the only scientific study of language was to study the history and development of words across time (the diachronic approach, in Saussure's terms ). Jakobson, on

1856-502: 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

1920-466: 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

1984-545: The Ukrainian language. Jakobson's three principal ideas in linguistics play a major role in the field to this day: linguistic typology , markedness , and linguistic universals . The three concepts are tightly intertwined: typology is the classification of languages in terms of shared grammatical features (as opposed to shared origin), markedness is (very roughly) a study of how certain forms of grammatical organization are more "optimized" than others, and linguistic universals

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2048-544: The academic and cultural life of pre-World War II Czechoslovakia and established close relationships with a number of Czech poets and literary figures. Jakobson received his Ph.D. from Charles University in 1930. He became a professor at Masaryk University in Brno in 1933. He also made an impression on Czech academics with his studies of Czech verse. Roman Jakobson proposed the Atlas Linguarum Europae in

2112-679: 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

2176-466: The dominant function is the poetic function: the focus is on the message itself. The true hallmark of poetry is according to Jakobson "the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection to the axis of combination". Very broadly speaking, it implies that poetry successfully combines and integrates form and function, that poetry turns the poetry of grammar into the grammar of poetry, so to speak. Jakobson's theory of communicative functions

2240-480: The early thinking of Noam Chomsky , who became the dominant figure in theoretical linguistics during the second half of the twentieth century. Jakobson was born in Moscow on 11 October [ O.S. 29 September] 1896 to well-to-do parents of Jewish descent, the industrialist Osip Jakobson and chemist Anna Volpert Jakobson, and he developed a fascination with language at a very young age. He studied at

2304-412: 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

2368-486: 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

2432-427: 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

2496-660: 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

2560-497: The late 1930s to the 1940s, during which he developed the notion that "binary distinctive features" were the foundational element in language, and that such distinctiveness is "mere otherness" or differentiation. In the third stage in Jakobson's work, from the 1950s to 1960s, he worked with the acoustician C. Gunnar Fant and Morris Halle (a student of Jakobson's) to consider the acoustic aspects of distinctive features. Influenced by

2624-490: The late 1930s, but World War II disrupted this plan and it laid dormant until being revived by Mario Alinei in 1965 . Jakobson escaped from Prague in early March 1939 via Berlin for Denmark , where he was associated with the Copenhagen linguistic circle , and such intellectuals as Louis Hjelmslev . He fled to Norway on 1 September 1939, and in 1940 walked across the border to Sweden, where he continued his work at

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2688-492: The main Gbaya languages , whereas plural Ngbaka languages refers to a branch of Ubangian. Güldemann (2018) recognises seven coherent "genealogical units" within Ubangian, but is agnostic about their positions within Niger–Congo. Sample basic vocabulary of Ubangian languages from Moñino (1988): Comparison of numerals in individual languages: Joseph Greenberg Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001)

2752-400: 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

2816-482: 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

2880-415: The other hand, had come into contact with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure , and developed an approach focused on the way in which language's structure served its basic function ( synchronic approach) – to communicate information between speakers. Jakobson was also well known for his critique of the emergence of sound in film. Jakobson received a master's degree from Moscow University in 1918. Although he

2944-458: The phonological development in Slavic languages as motivated only in Russian and Serbo-Croatian languages, while all other Slavic languages, including Ukrainian, are considered as devoid of independent development, subject only to Russian and Serbo-Croatian tendencies. In the same spirit, in his article about the Ukrainian imperative (1965), Jacobson tried to downplay the peculiarities of this form in

3008-565: The precise inclusion of Dravidian and Kartvelian. Greenberg continued to work on this project after he was diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer and until he died during May 2001. His colleague and former student Merritt Ruhlen ensured the publication of the final volume of his Eurasiatic work (2002) after his death. Roman Jakobson Roman Osipovich Jakobson ( Russian : Рома́н О́сипович Якобсо́н , IPA: [rɐˈman ˈosʲɪpəvʲɪt͡ɕ (j)ɪkɐpˈson] ; 11 October [ O.S. 29 September] 1896 – 18 July 1982)

3072-424: The preface to the second edition of The Sound Shape of Language argues that this book represents the fourth stage in "Jakobson's quest to uncover the function and structure of sound in language." The first stage was roughly the 1920s to 1930s where he collaborated with Trubetzkoy , in which they developed the concept of the phoneme, and elucidated the structure of phonological systems. The second stage, from roughly

3136-636: 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

3200-490: 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

3264-576: 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

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3328-469: The study of other aspects of language such as syntax , morphology and semantics . He made numerous contributions to Slavic linguistics , most notably two studies of Russian case and an analysis of the categories of the Russian verb . Drawing on insights from C. S. Peirce 's semiotics , as well as from communication theory and cybernetics , he proposed methods for the investigation of poetry, music,

3392-546: 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

3456-666: 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

3520-551: 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

3584-451: 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

3648-537: Was Franz Boas who actually saved his life. After the war, he became a consultant to the International Auxiliary Language Association , which would present Interlingua in 1951. In 1949 Jakobson moved to Harvard University , where he remained until his retirement in 1967. His universalizing structuralist theory of phonology , based on a markedness hierarchy of distinctive features , achieved its canonical exposition in

3712-447: Was a Russian and naturalised American linguist and literary theorist . A pioneer of structural linguistics , Jakobson was one of the most celebrated and influential linguists of the twentieth century. With Nikolai Trubetzkoy , he developed revolutionary new techniques for the analysis of linguistic sound systems, in effect founding the modern discipline of phonology . Jakobson went on to extend similar principles and techniques to

3776-575: 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

3840-470: Was born in 1908, died in 2000. According to Jakobson's own personal reminiscences, the most decisive stage in the development of his thinking was the period of revolutionary anticipation and upheaval in Russia between 1912 and 1920, when, as a young student, he fell under the spell of the celebrated Russian futurist wordsmith and linguistic thinker Velimir Khlebnikov . Offering a slightly different picture,

3904-772: 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

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3968-485: Was first published in "Closing Statements: Linguistics and Poetics" (in Thomas A. Sebeok , Style In Language , Cambridge Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1960, pp. 350–377). Despite its wide adoption, the six-functions model has been criticized for lacking specific interest in the "play function" of language that, according to an early review by Georges Mounin, is "not enough studied in general by linguistics researchers". As

4032-585: Was initially an enthusiastic supporter of the Bolshevik revolution, Jakobson soon became disillusioned as his early hopes for an explosion of creativity in the arts fell victim to increasing state conservatism and hostility. He left Moscow for Prague in 1920, where he worked as a member of the Soviet diplomatic mission while continuing with his doctoral studies. Living in Czechoslovakia meant that Jakobson

4096-598: Was physically close to the linguist who would be his most important collaborator during the 1920s and 1930s, Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy, who fled Russia at the time of the Revolution and took up a chair at Vienna in 1922. In 1926 the Prague school of linguistic theory was established by the professor of English at Charles University, Vilém Mathesius , with Jakobson as a founding member and a prime intellectual force (other members included Nikolai Trubetzkoy , René Wellek and Jan Mukařovský ). Jakobson immersed himself in both

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