Amerind Languages - Reception

Reception

The consensus among historical linguists specializing in Native American languages is that the Amerind hypothesis is unsupported by valid evidence. Particularly because the basis for the proposal is mass comparison, but also because of many other methodological flaws made by Greenberg in the elaboration of the hypothesis. Critics regard this technique as fundamentally flawed, unable to distinguish chance resemblances from those due to a historical relationship among the languages and providing no means of distinguishing resemblances due to common descent from those due to language contact. Many historical and/or Americanist linguists do not believe that it is possible to find relationships or make linguistic reconstructions as far back in time as the Amerind hypothesis would require.

In addition, critics have pointed out errors in the citation of data, including erroneous forms, erroneous glosses, unjustified morphological segmentation, attribution to the wrong language, and citation of entirely spurious forms.

A further criticism is that, contrary to normal scholarly practice, no source references are given for the data, which in most cases come from languages for which there is no standard, authoritative source. In addition, Greenberg does not normalize the spelling of the data, so it is impossible without knowing the source of each form to know what the notation actually represents.

While sympathetic to the idea of an Amerind language family, Morris Swadesh was critical of many of Greenberg's subdivisions and believed it was due to an insufficient number of comparisons by Greenberg.

Certain groups of linguists working with mass lexical comparison and long-range genetic relationships have continued to defend Greenberg's hypothesis. The most vociferous of these is Merritt Ruhlen who has published extensively in favor of the hypothesis, also including new elements. He thus also objects to the notion that there are over 200 families among which there is no evidence of genetic affinity. He suggests that there is evidence for a three-way i / u / a (i.e. masculine / feminine / neutral) ablaut in such forms as t'ina / t'una / t'ana ("son / daughter / child").

More recently it has been suggested that the Almosan languages represent a separate group to the other Amerind languages and a relationship with the Nivkh language and the substratum of the Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages in a Beringian language group has been suggested. Another suggestion would link the Almosan languages with Dene–Caucasian. However, migrations occurred both ways across the Bering Strait and it is less clear which direction these languages migrated if related.

Some recent research would suggest that many of the languages of the Americas are related, but not all of them. Languages that seem to be unrelated to the Amerind languages (and perhaps therefore predate them) include the Gulf languages, the Keresan languages, the Siouan languages and the Otomanguean languages. However, Kaufman has proposed a relationship between Otomanguean and Hokan and all these languages were considered related to Hokan by Swadesh and Sapir.

It has also been suggested that the Fuegian languages of Southern South America represent remnants of earlier languages . Nevertheless the Chon languages have been suggested to be Macro-Panoan languages and if this turns out to be justified this would leave just the Kawesqar language, the Yaghan language and the extinct Chono language with no proven connections either to languages outside the region or even to each other.