Of Two Minds About Minding Language in Culture

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Silverstein
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Indian Languages ◽  
Universal Truth

Analyzing Franz Boas's critically new insights under the lens of philology, this chapter redefines Boasian linguistics as a globalizing mode of mutual enlightenment through the exchange of grammatical concepts between selves across borders of sound and sense—a process he calls “comparative calibrationism,” the asymptotic pursuit of the always-inaccessible yet ever-closer universal truth. It focuses on the Handbook of American Indian Languages, where Boas dismantled every plank in the language-focused platform on which inferences of evolutionary primitivism stand. Boas also went after the very applicability to American languages of the comparative method of historical linguistics, from which inferences of so-called linguistic families descended from single proto-languages emerged in the nineteenth century.

Lyle Campbell, American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America. (Oxford studies in anthropological linguistics, 4.) Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xiv, 512. Hb $75.00.

2000 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 150-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Golla
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Native America ◽  
Indian Languages ◽  
Anthropological Linguistics ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Linguistic Classification ◽  
Lexical Data

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.

American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America

Language ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 596
Author(s):  
Doris Bartholomew ◽  
Lyle Campbell
Keyword(s):  
American Indian ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Native America ◽  
Indian Languages
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document