For more than a decade, Americanists have been
working in the shadow of Greenberg's Language
in the Americas (1987) and the hemisphere-wide classification
of American Indian languages proposed there. Greenberg's
work, based for the most part on naïve comparisons
of lexical data with which he was largely unfamiliar, was
met with considerable skepticism by scholars familiar with
the problems of American linguistic classification. But
Greenberg, a senior linguist who is widely recognized as
the father of modern linguistic typology, aggressively
defended his methods and results, and he made allies among
geneticists and archeologists who found that his tripartite
classification (Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene, and “Amerind”)
dovetailed with some of their own ideas. Moreover, his
book was published by a leading university press. Mainly
for these reasons – certainly not for its critical
acceptance – Language in the Americas has
become a standard reference work. It is in most academic
libraries in North America, and in many it is given a place
of honor on the reference shelf – together with Merritt
Ruhlen's Guide to the world's languages,
I: Classification (published by the same press,
1987), which, at least for the Americas, does little more
than uncritically recapitulate Greenberg.
Colonial Nahuas - Annals of Native America: How the Nahuas of Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive. By Camilla Townsend. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. 318. $35.00 cloth.