Merritt Ruhlen

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Merritt Ruhlen (pronounced ), born in 1944, is an American linguist known for his work on the classification of languages and what this reveals about the origin and evolution of modern humans. Some of his ideas are considered controversial.

Biography

Ruhlen received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1973 with a dissertation on the generative analysis of Romanian morphology, after earlier work at Rice University, the University of Paris, the University of Illinois and the University of Bucharest. He subsequently worked for several years as a research assistant on the Stanford Universals Project directed by Joseph Greenberg and Charles Ferguson. Since 1994 he has been a lecturer in Anthropological Sciences and Human Biology at Stanford and co-director, with Murray Gell-Mann and Sergei Starostin, of the Santa Fe Institute Program on the Evolution of Human Languages. He has also been a visiting professor at the City University of Hong Kong. Ruhlen knew and worked with Joseph Greenberg for three and a half decades and has become his mentor's most fervent and prolific disciple.

Work

Ruhlen is the author of several books dealing with the languages of the world and their classification:

A Guide to the Languages of the World

A Guide to the Languages of the World provides information on the phonological systems and classifications of 700 languages, prefaced by background information for linguists as well as non-linguists. A greatly expanded version of this work was published in 2005 on the Santa Fe Institute web site.

A Guide to the World’s Languages

In 1987 Ruhlen published A Guide to the World’s Languages. Volume I, Classification, which includes a complete classification of the world’s languages as well as a history and complete analysis of the genetic classification of languages. In addition to the factual information in this book Ruhlen provides a thorough examination, and defense, of the controversial taxonomic work of Joseph Greenberg.

On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy

In 1994 Ruhlen published two books with similar titles. On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy is aimed at a scholarly audience and claims that some of the assumptions current among historical linguists are incorrect. Among these, Ruhlen argues, is the notion that only the discovery of regular sound correspondences and the reconstruction of its protolanguage can be considered convincing evidence for the existence of a language family – these latter steps can, according to him, only be carried out after the existence of a language family has been discovered by classification.

The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue

Ruhlen’s other book published in 1994, The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue, explores many of the same topics, but with a more general, non-technical, audience in mind. This book includes exercises in which the readers are invited to classify languages themselves using the technique of mass comparison, better described as multilateral comparison.

Major Interests

Multidisciplinary Approach

Ruhlen has been in the forefront of attempts to coordinate the results of historical linguistics and other human sciences, such as genetics and archaeology. In this endeavor he has extensively worked with the geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza for three decades and with the archaeologist Colin Renfrew for two decades.

Taxonomic Methods

Some of the criticism of Ruhlen centers around his defense of Joseph Greenberg's technique of classification, called "mass lexical comparison", "mass comparison", or "multilateral comparison", which involves comparing the vocabulary of languages being investigated, examining them for similarities of sound and meaning, and formulating a hypothesis of classification. Ruhlen maintains that classification (by means of multilateral comparison) is the first step of the comparative method, and that the other operations of historical linguistics, such as reconstruction of a protolanguage and the formulation of sound correspondences, can only be carried out after a hypothesis of classification has already been established by the use of multilateral comparison.

While, for instance, Hock claims that only reconstruction proves genetic affinity, and Indo-European, Uralic, Dravidian, Austronesian, Bantu, and Uto-Aztecan have all been proved by successful reconstructions, Ruhlen disagrees with him, noting:

And yet all of these families were universally accepted as valid families before anyone even thought of trying to reconstruct the protolanguage.

As an example, Ruhlen mentions Delbrück, who considered Indo-European to have been proved by the time of Bopp at the beginning of the 19^th century, and the basis of this proof was the "juxtaposition of words and forms of similar meaning."

Perhaps the strongest evidence supporting Ruhlen can be found in the work of the geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, who has studied the genes in human populations throughout the world and constructed a phylogenetic tree, a structure similar in many respects to traditional trees of language families, showing where in the "tree" given genetic groups separated. The results are widely (though not universally) accepted as matching up remarkably well with Ruhlen's proposed structure of the languages and language families of the world. This has served to convince nonlinguists of the validity of Ruhlen's classifications, yet linguists agree that genetic relatedness cannot be used to adduce linguistic relatedness.

This tree has been criticized by some linguists and anthropologists on several grounds: that it makes selective use of languages and populations (omitting the very numerous Sino-Tibetan speakers of northern China, for example); that it assumes the truth of such linguistic groups as Austric and Amerind that are controversial; and that several of the population groups listed are defined not by their genes but by their languages, making the correlation irrelevant to a comparison of genetic and linguistic branching and tautological as well.

The Amerind Macrofamily

Ruhlen has supported and adduced more evidence for one of Greenberg’s most controversial hypotheses: the Amerind language family, which would unite nearly all languages of North and South America into a single macrophylum, excluding two widely accepted families: Na-Dené and Eskimo-Aleut.

He thus objects to the notion that there are over 200 families among which there is no evidence of genetic affinity, and stresses the importance of the three-way i/u/a (i.e. masculine/feminine/neutral) ablaut in such forms as t'ina/t'una/t'ana ("son/daughter/child"), as well as of the typical general American pronominal pattern na/ma (i.e. "I/you"), first noted by Alfredo Trombetti in 1905. Some linguists have attributed this pronoun pattern to other than genetic causes. He refers to the earliest beginnings of the dispute, quoting from Edward Sapir's personal letter to A. L. Kroeber (1918):

Getting down to brass tacks, how in the Hell are you going to explain general American n- 'I' except genetically? It's disturbing, I know, but (more) non-committal conservatism is only dodging, after all, isn't it? Great simplifications are in store for us.

It should be stressed, however, that Greenberg and Ruhlen's views on the languages of the Americas have failed to find acceptance among the vast majority of linguists working with these languages.

Kusunda as an Indo-Pacific language

Ruhlen participated in research on the Kusunda language of Nepal. The results seem to indicate that Kusunda is a member of the tentative Indo-Pacific superfamily rather than a Tibeto-Burman language, as has often been erroneously maintained.

The main pieces of evidence, features typical of other Indo-Pacific languages, consist in:

(a) an independent first-person pronoun based on /t/;

(b) an independent second-person pronoun based on /n/ or /ŋ/;

(d) a vowel alternation in the first- and second-person independent pronouns in which /u/ occurs in subject forms and /i/ in possessive (or oblique) forms;

(e) a possessive suffix -/yi/

(f) the consonantal base also indicates the verbal subject

(g) demonstrative pronouns based on /t/ and /n/

(h) the most basic vocabulary

The following table is a sample that illustrates the similarities between the pronominal systems of several Indo-Pacific languages:

Pronoun	Kusunda	Andamanese languages		Core North Halmaheran family	Central Bird's Head family
Pronoun	Kusunda	Juwoi	Bo	Galela	Karon Dori
I	chi tsi tshi	tui	tu-lʌ	to	tuo
my	chí-yi	tii-ye	ti-e	d͡ʒi "me"
you	nu nu nu	ŋui	ŋu-lʌ	no	nuo
your	ní-yí	ŋii-ye		ni "thee"
he/she	gida git	kitɛ		kitɛ	gao

The few critics of this tentative proposal have rejected it on the following grounds:

the existence of an Indo-Pacific superfamily is disputed;
pronouns can be borrowed;
similarities may be due to chance;
theory of linguistic relationships cannot be based solely on the basis of the physical attributes of the speakers

Nevertheless, the proponents consider these arguments as unsubstantiated, since there is no evidence of contacts between the speakers of Kusunda and the other groups for borrowing to occur, and coincidental creation of the whole pronominal system is extremely unlikely. Moreover, the hypothesis is based exclusively on linguistic evidence, not on the physical attributes of the speakers, although they may serve as an indirect clue, as well. DNA analyses of the Kusunda speakers might shed some light on this issue in the future.

Yeniseian-Na-Dené

According to Ruhlen, linguistic evidence indicates that the Yeniseian languages, spoken in Siberia, are most closely related to the Na-Dené languages (here including Haida), spoken in North America. The hypothesis is supported by independent findings of other scholars, for example Heinrich K. Werner, or Edward J. Vajda (who nevertheless rejects Haida's membership in the Na-Dené language family).

This would mean that the Na-Dené represent a distinct migration from Asia to the New World, intermediate between the first migration of Amerinds around 13,000 years ago and the third migration of the Eskimo-Aleut around 5,000 years ago. Concurring with his earlier work,Ruhlen thinks the Yeniseian–Na-Dené population can plausibly be traced to West Asia, where the more distantly related Caucasian and Burushaski languages, other members of the tentative Dené-Caucasian superfamily, are found.

The Proto-Sapiens Hypothesis

On the question of the Proto-Sapiens language and global etymologies, most “mainstream” historical linguists reject Ruhlen's assumptions and methodology, holding that it is impossible to reconstruct a language spoken at least 30,000 years ago (possibly more than 100,000 years ago). Ruhlen has responded that he (and Bengtson) have never claimed to have reconstructed Proto-World, but have simply pointed out that reflexes of very ancient words can still be found in the world’s languages:

For each [global] etymology ... we present a phonetic and semantic gloss, followed by examples from different language families. ... We do not deal here with reconstruction, and these [semantic and phonetic] glosses are intended merely to characterize the most general meaning and phonological shape of each root. Future work on reconstruction will no doubt discover cases where the most widespread meaning or shape was not original.

Ruhlen also maintains that the “temporal ceiling” assumed by many mainstream linguists – the time depth beyond which the comparative method fails, considered by some to lie at roughly 6,000 to 8,000 years ago – does not exist, and that the now universally recognized existence of a language family as old as Afro-Asiatic, not to mention the even older Nostratic (Eurasiatic) whose existence remains controversial, shows that the comparative method can reach farther into the past than most linguists currently accept.

References

External links

Merritt Ruhlen's homepage, including an exhaustive list of his publications.

* Including the latest version of An Amerind Etymological Dictionary

The Evolution of Human Languages Project

* Members: Merritt Ruhlen

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