Joseph H. Greenberg

Work in language classification

Greenberg is widely known for his development of a new classification system for African languages, which he published in 1963. The classification was for a time considered very bold and speculative, but is now generally accepted among African historical specialists. The most controversial of his African classifications is the Nilo-Saharan languages. In the course of this work, Greenberg coined the term Afroasiatic, to replace the former "Hamito-Semitic".

Greenberg went on later to do similarly speculative work, with the crucial difference that this later work failed to achieve agreement among his fellow scholars, and indeed has been forcefully denounced by many of them. One such proposal has been Greenberg's method of mass lexical comparison, considered by most historical linguists to be invalid, being far too vulnerable to accidental resemblances among words. Most historical linguists continue to take the view that the orthodox comparative method, developed in the 19th century, remains the only legitimate way to prove linguistic relatedness of extinct varieties.

Greenberg's later work on language classification is also met a hostile reception from most of the informed scholarly community. In this work, he classified all of the languages of the Americas into three families: Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene, and Amerind. He also later proposed to group many language families of Europe and Asia into a group called Eurasiatic. The basis of widespread scholarly skepticism is that the work relies almost entirely on the method of mass comparison.

Work in language typology

Greenberg's reputation also rests on his work in synchronic linguistics which is widely considered seminal. In the late 1950's, Greenberg began to examine corpora of languages, intended to cover a wide geographic and genetic distribution, in hopes of discovering linguistic universals. He located a number of interesting potential universals, as well as many strong cross-linguistic tendencies. Greenberg also promulgated the notion of "implicational universal", which takes 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). This kind of research was picked up by many other scholars following Greenberg's example and has continued to be an important kind of data-gathering in synchronic linguistics.

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