Free Review Of Language In The Americas, By Joseph Greenberg Report Example

In this report, I will review three articles pertaining to the classification of American Indian languages. The first one is Campbell review of Language in the Americas, by Joseph Greenberg. The second one is Response to Campbell Review by Greenberg, and the last one is Rankin review of Language in the Americas, by Joseph Greenberg. A very concise summary of these three articles is provided, and a comparison of the ways that Campbell and Rankin criticized Greenberg's classification is given, too.
Lyle Campbell states that the classification of the American Indian languages by Greenberg must be rejected. He claims that Greenberg's book is unproductive because it provides misleading and faulty information related to the classification of American Indian Languages. Campbell claims that there are many errors in the data on which his classification is based. He criticized the background claims and the methodology that Greenberg used in his classification of American Indian languages.
Joseph Greenberg’s article explains the assertion that the majority of the indigenous languages of America fall under one single category except for two languages, namely Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut. He gives an in-depth response to Campbell regarding different perspectives presented by him in the terms of American Indian Languages classification.
Rankin provides his comprehensive explanation regarding the classification and genetic relationship of Language in the Americas. He claims that Greenberg's classification of American Indian languages was a mixture of genealogical (cladistics) and typological (phonetic). Rankin states that Greenberg in his classification method of multilateral comparison depended only on superficial similarities between words in many languages, and he did not distinguish similarities due to common ancestry. Linguistic similarities can be due to many factors such as the chance, borrowing from neighboring languages and onomatopoeia.
I completely agree that Greenberg's classification of Language in the Americas is not fully accurate and has a lot of flaws as Campbell and Rankin pointed out especially in the method that he used. I also agree with them that the basic knowledge of languages is the requirement, crucial, and greatly effects on the classification accuracy, but Greenberg did not consider that in his classification of American Indian languages. That is just one reason I claimed that Greenberg's classification is not fully accurate. According to the most historical linguists, sound correspondences are very necessary and plays a significant role in the comparative method to determine the genetic relations among languages if it applies correctly. However, Greenberg sometimes neglected regular sound correspondences between languages in his classification or applied it incorrectly such as between borrowed words.
The major criticism regarding the articles which were written by Campbell and Rankin is pertinent to the fact that these articles talk about the drawbacks of methodology that Greenberg used in his classification without shedding the light on the ways to resolve these drawbacks. Therefore, I consider their criticism against Greenberg's classification slightly unconstructive. More notably, the readership of Campbell review article receives no real idea of the full arguments and details of Greenberg's book. However, reading Rankin's article gives you a better understanding about the way that Greenberg classified American Indian Languages. Even though Rankin's article was not very easy for me to follow because of the complex scientific terms that he used to describe the types of classifications, I still got his point, understood it well and preferred it to Campbell's article.