Errors in application The presence of frequent errors in Greenberg's data has been pointed out by linguists such as
Lyle Campbell and
Alexander Vovin, who see it as fatally undermining Greenberg's attempt to demonstrate the reliability of mass comparison. Campbell notes in his discussion of Greenberg's
Amerind proposal that "nearly every specialist finds extensive distortions and inaccuracies in Greenberg's data"; for example,
Willem Adelaar, a specialist in Andean languages, has stated that "the number of erroneous forms [in Greenberg's data] probably exceeds that of the correct forms". Some forms in Greenberg's data even appear to be attributed to the wrong language. Greenberg also neglects known
sound changes that languages have undergone; once these are taken into account, many of the resemblances he points out vanish. Greenberg's data also contains errors of a more systematic sort: for instance, he groups unrelated languages together based on outdated classifications or because they have similar names. Greenberg also arbitrarily deems certain portions of a word to be
affixes when affixes of the requisite
phonological shape are unknown to make words cohere better with his data. Conversely, Greenberg frequently employs affixed forms in his data, failing to recognise actual morphemic boundaries; when affixes are removed, the words often no longer bear any resemblance to his "Amerind" reconstructions. Greenberg has responded to this criticism by claiming that "the method of multilateral comparison is so powerful that it will give reliable results even with the poorest data. Incorrect material should merely have a randomizing effect”. This has hardly reassured critics of the method, who are far from convincing of the method's "power". admits that "in particular and infrequent instances the question of borrowing may be doubtful" when using mass comparison, but claims that basic vocabulary is unlikely to be borrowed compared to cultural vocabulary, stating that "where a mass of resemblances is due to borrowing, they will tend to appear in cultural vocabulary and to cluster in certain semantic areas which reflect the cultural nature of the contact." Mainstream linguists accept this premise, but claim that it does not suffice for distinguishing borrowings from
inherited vocabulary. Greenberg continues by claiming that "[R]ecurrent sound correspondences" do not suffice to detect borrowing, since "where loans are numerous, they often show such correspondences". However, Greenberg misrepresents the practices of mainstream
comparative linguistics here; few linguists advocate using sound correspondences to the exclusion of all other kinds of evidence. This additional evidence often helps separate borrowings from inherited vocabulary; for instance, Campbell mentions how "[c]ertain sorts of patterned grammatical evidence (that which resists explanation from borrowing, accident, or
typology and
universals) can be important testimony, independent of the issue of sound correspondences".
Position of Greenberg's detractors Since the development of
comparative linguistics in the 19th century, a linguist who claims that two languages are related, whether or not there exists historical evidence, is expected to back up that claim by presenting general rules that describe the differences between their lexicons, morphologies, and grammars. The procedure is described in detail in the
comparative method article. For instance, one could demonstrate that
Spanish is related to
Italian by showing that many words of the former can be mapped to corresponding words of the latter by a relatively small set of replacement rules—such as the correspondence of initial
es- and
s-, final
-os and
-i, etc. Many similar correspondences exist between the grammars of the two languages. Since those systematic correspondences are extremely unlikely to be random coincidences, the most likely explanation by far is that the two languages have evolved from a single ancestral tongue (
Latin, in this case). All pre-historical language groupings that are widely accepted today—such as the
Indo-European,
Uralic,
Algonquian, and
Bantu families—have been established this way.
Response of Greenberg's defenders The actual development of the comparative method was a more gradual process than Greenberg's detractors suppose. It has three decisive moments. The first was
Rasmus Rask's observation in 1818 of a possible regular sound change in Germanic consonants. The second was
Jacob Grimm's extension of this observation into a general principle (
Grimm's law) in 1822. The third was
Karl Verner's resolution of an irregularity in this sound change (
Verner's law) in 1875. Only in 1861 did
August Schleicher, for the first time, present systematic reconstructions of Indo-European proto-forms (Lehmann 1993:26). Schleicher, however, viewed these reconstructions as extremely tentative (1874:8). He never claimed that they proved the existence of the Indo-European family, which he accepted as a given from previous research—primarily that of
Franz Bopp, his great predecessor in Indo-European studies.
Karl Brugmann, who succeeded Schleicher as the leading authority on Indo-European, and the other
Neogrammarians of the late 19th century, distilled the work of these scholars into the famous (if often disputed) principle that "every sound change, insofar as it occurs automatically, takes place according to laws that admit of no exception" (Brugmann 1878). The Neogrammarians did not, however, regard regular sound correspondences or comparative reconstructions as relevant to the proof of genetic relationship between languages. In fact, they made almost no statements on how languages are to be classified (Greenberg 2005:158). The only Neogrammarian to deal with this question was
Berthold Delbrück, Brugmann's collaborator on the
Grundriß der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen (Greenberg 2005:158-159, 288). According to Delbrück (1904:121-122, quoted in Greenberg 2005:159), Bopp had claimed to prove the existence of Indo-European in the following way: :The proof was produced by juxtaposing words and forms of similar meanings. When one considers that in these languages the formation of the inflectional forms of the verb, noun and pronoun agrees in essentials and likewise that an extraordinary number of inflected words agree in their lexical parts, the assumption of chance agreement must appear absurd. Furthermore, Delbrück took the position later enunciated by Greenberg on the priority of etymologies to sound laws (1884:47, quoted in Greenberg 2005:288): "obvious etymologies are the material from which sound laws are drawn." The opinion that sound correspondences or, in another version of the opinion, reconstruction of a proto-language are necessary to show relationship between languages thus dates from the 20th, not the 19th century, and was never a position of the Neogrammarians. Indo-European was recognized by scholars such as
William Jones (1786) and Franz Bopp (1816) long before the development of the comparative method. Furthermore, Indo-European was not the first language family to be recognized by students of language.
Semitic had been recognized by European scholars in the 17th century,
Finno-Ugric in the 18th.
Dravidian was recognized in the mid-19th century by
Robert Caldwell (1856), well before the publication of Schleicher's comparative reconstructions. Finally, the supposition that all of the language families generally accepted by linguists today have been established by the comparative method is untrue. Some families were accepted for decades before comparative reconstructions of them were put forward, for example
Afro-Asiatic and
Sino-Tibetan. Many languages are generally accepted as belonging to a language family even though no comparative reconstruction exists, often because the languages are only attested in fragmentary form, such as the
Anatolian language
Lydian (Greenberg 2005:161). Conversely, detailed comparative reconstructions exist for some language families which nonetheless remain controversial, such as
Altaic. Detractors of Altaic point out that the data collected to show by comparativism the existence of the family is scarce, wrong and non sufficient. Keep in mind that regular phonological correspondences need thousands of lexicon lists to be prepared and compared before being established, and these lists are lacking for many of the proposed families identified through mass comparison. Furthermore, other specific problems affect "comparative" lists of both proposals, like the late attestation for Altaic languages, or the comparison of not certain proto-forms.
A continuation of earlier methods? Greenberg claimed that he was at bottom merely continuing the simple but effective method of language classification that had resulted in the discovery of numerous language families prior to the elaboration of the
comparative method (1955:1-2, 2005:75) and that had continued to do so thereafter, as in the classification of
Hittite as Indo-European in 1917 (Greenberg 2005:160-161). This method consists in essentially two things: resemblances in basic vocabulary and resemblances in inflectional morphemes. If mass comparison differs from it in any obvious way, it would seem to be in the theoretization of an approach that had previously been applied in a relatively ad hoc manner and in the following additions: • The explicit preference for basic vocabulary over cultural vocabulary. • The explicit emphasis on comparison of multiple languages rather than bilateral comparisons. • The very large number of languages simultaneously compared (up to several hundred). • The introduction of typologically based paths of sound change. The positions of Greenberg and his critics therefore appear to provide a starkly contrasted alternative: • According to Greenberg, the identification of sound correspondences and the reconstruction of protolanguages arise from genetic classification. • According to Greenberg's critics, genetic classification arises from the identification of sound correspondences or (others state) the reconstruction of protolanguages.
Time limits of the comparative method Besides systematic changes, languages are also subject to random mutations (such as borrowings from other languages, irregular inflections, compounding, and abbreviation) that affect one word at a time, or small subsets of words. For example, Spanish
perro (dog), which does not come from Latin, cannot be rule-mapped to its Italian equivalent
cane (the Spanish word
can is the Latin-derived equivalent but is much less used in everyday conversations, being reserved for more formal purposes). As those sporadic changes accumulate, they will increasingly obscure the systematic ones—just as enough dirt and scratches on a photograph will eventually make the face unrecognisable. == See also ==