Position Among The World's Language Families
Eskimo–Aleut does not have any genetic relationship to any of the world's other language families that is generally accepted by linguists at the present time. There is general agreement that it is not closely related to the other language families of North America. The more credible proposals on the external relations of Eskimo–Aleut all concern one or more of the language families of northern Eurasia, such as Chukchi–Kamchatkan just across the Bering Strait. One of the first such proposals was made by the pioneering Danish linguist Rasmus Rask in 1818, upon noticing similarities between Greenlandic Eskimo and Finnish. Perhaps the most fully developed such proposal to date is Michael Fortescue's Uralo-Siberian hypothesis, published in 1998. More recently Joseph Greenberg (2000–2002) suggested grouping Eskimo–Aleut with all of the language families of northern Eurasia, with the exception of Yeniseian, in a proposed language family called Eurasiatic. Such proposals are not generally accepted.
In the 1960s Swadesh suggested a connection with the Wakashan languages. This was picked up and expanded by Holst (2005).
Read more about this topic: Eskimo-Aleut Languages
Famous quotes containing the words position, world, language and/or families:
“Feminism, like Boston, is a state of mind. It is the state of mind of women who realize that their whole position in the social order is antiquated, as a woman cooking over an open fire with heavy iron pots would know that her entire housekeeping was out of date.”
—Rheta Childe Dorr (1866–1948)
“Day by day we hear the cry of AFRICA FOR THE AFRICANS. This cry has become a positive, determined one. It is a cry that is raised simultaneously the world over because of the universal oppression that affects the Negro.”
—Marcus Garvey (1887–1940)
“Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“You hear a lot of dialogue on the death of the American family. Families aren’t dying. They’re merging into big conglomerates.”
—Erma Bombeck (b. 1927)