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61-663: Kanite is a Papuan language spoken in Eastern Highlands Province , Papua New Guinea . This article about Trans–New Guinea languages is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Papuan languages New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse region in the world. Besides the Austronesian languages, there arguably are some 800 languages divided into perhaps sixty small language families, with unclear relationships to each other or to any other languages, plus many language isolates . The majority of

122-613: A single landmass for most of their human history, having been separated by the Torres Strait only 8000 years ago, and that a deep reconstruction would likely include languages from both. However, Dixon later abandoned his proto-Australian proposal, and Foley's ideas need to be re-evaluated in light of recent research. Wurm also suggested the Sepik–Ramu languages have similarities with the Australian languages, but believed this may be due to

183-438: A book, The Languages of Africa , in 1955). He revised the book and published it again during 1963, followed by a nearly identical edition of 1966 (reprinted without change during 1970). A few more changes of the classification were made by Greenberg in an article during 1981. Greenberg grouped the hundreds of African languages into four families, which he dubbed Afroasiatic , Nilo-Saharan , Niger–Congo , and Khoisan . During

244-535: A class taught by Franz Boas concerning American Indian languages . He graduated in 1936 with a bachelor's degree. With references from Boas and Ruth Benedict , he was accepted as a graduate student by Melville J. Herskovits at Northwestern University in Chicago and graduated in 1940 with a doctorate degree. During the course of his graduate studies, Greenberg did fieldwork among the Hausa people of Nigeria, where he learned

305-419: A combination of errors, accidental similarity, excessive semantic latitude in comparisons, borrowings, onomatopoeia, etc. However, Harvard geneticist David Reich notes that recent genetic studies have identified patterns that support Greenberg's Amerind classification: the "First American” category. "The cluster of populations that he predicted to be most closely related based on language were in fact verified by

366-821: A composite of Usher's and Ross' classifications, Palmer et al. do not address the more tentative families that Usher proposes, such as Northwest New Guinea . The coherence of the South Bird's Head , East Bird's Head , Pauwasi , Kwomtari , and Central Solomons families are uncertain, and hence are marked below as "tentative." Papuan independent language families (43 families) Papuan isolates and unclassified languages (37 total) Glottolog 4.0 (2019), based partly on Usher, recognizes 70 independent families and 55 isolates. The following families are identified by Timothy Usher and Edgar Suter in their NewGuineaWorld project: In addition, poorly attested Karami remains unclassified. Extinct Tambora and

427-406: A language, they are short and utilise a reduced set of the language's phonemic inventory . Both phenomena greatly increase the possibility of chance resemblances, especially when they are not confirmed by lexical similarities. Sorted by location north Irian : Sandaun Province : Sepik River : Bismarck Archipelago : Former isolates classified by Ross: Languages reassigned to

488-514: A number of instances". However, he considered this not evidence of a connection between (Great) Andamanese and Trans–New Guinea, but of a substratum from an earlier migration to New Guinea from the west. Greenberg also suggested a connection to the Tasmanian languages . However, the Tasmanian peoples were isolated for perhaps 10,000 years, their disappearance wiped out their languages before much

549-587: A single ancestral language... when a language is termed 'Papuan', this claims nothing more than that a language is not Austronesian. Most Papuan languages are spoken by hundreds to thousands of people; the most populous are found in the New Guinea Highlands , where a few exceed a hundred thousand. These include Western Dani (180,000 in 1993) and Ekari (100,000 reported 1985) in the western (Indonesian) highlands, and Enga (230,000 in 2000), Huli (150,000 reported 2011), and Melpa (130,000 reported 1991) in

610-509: A single genetic unit. This excludes the Austronesian languages , which have been established as associated with a more recent migration of people. Greenberg's subgrouping of these languages has not been accepted by the few specialists who have worked on the classification of these languages. However, the work of Stephen Wurm (1982) and Malcolm Ross (2005) has provided considerable evidence for his once-radical idea that these languages form

671-614: A single genetic unit. Wurm stated that the lexical similarities between Great Andamanese and the West Papuan and Timor–Alor families "are quite striking and amount to virtual formal identity [...] in a number of instances." He believes this to be due to a linguistic substratum . Most linguists concerned with the native languages of the Americas classify them into 150 to 180 independent language families. Some believe that two language families, Eskimo–Aleut and Na-Dené , were distinct, perhaps

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732-545: A substratum effect, but nevertheless believed that the Australian languages represent a linguistic group that existed in New Guinea before the arrival of the Papuan languages (which he believed arrived in at least two different groups). The West Papuan , Lower Mamberamo , and most Torricelli languages are all left-headed , as well as the languages of New Britain and New Ireland . These languages all have SVO word order , with

793-400: A time, his classification was considered bold and speculative, especially the proposal of a Nilo-Saharan language family. Now, apart from Khoisan, it is generally accepted by African specialists and has been used as a basis for further work by other scholars. Greenberg's work on African languages has been criticised by Lyle Campbell and Donald Ringe, who do not believe that his classification

854-424: A tripartite overall grouping: he considers Afroasiatic, Nostratic and Elamite to be roughly equidistant and more closely related to each other than to any other language family. Sergei Starostin's school has now included Afroasiatic in a broadly defined Nostratic. They reserve the term Eurasiatic to designate the narrower subgrouping, which comprises the rest of the macrofamily. Recent proposals thus differ mainly on

915-640: Is a subfamily of Nilo-Saharan. During 1971 Greenberg proposed the Indo-Pacific macrofamily , which groups together the Papuan languages (a large number of language families of New Guinea and nearby islands) with the native languages of the Andaman Islands and Tasmania but excludes the Australian Aboriginal languages . Its principal feature was to reduce the manifold language families of New Guinea to

976-406: Is an attempt to demonstrate such means. Greenberg argued for the virtues of breadth over depth. He advocated restricting the amount of material to be compared (to basic vocabulary, morphology, and known paths of sound change) and increasing the number of languages to be compared to all the languages in a given area. This would make it possible to compare numerous languages reliably. At the same time,

1037-528: Is justified by his data and request a re-examination of his macro-phyla by "reliable methods" (Ringe 1993:104). Harold Fleming and Lionel Bender , who were sympathetic to Greenberg's classification, acknowledged that at least some of his macrofamilies (particularly the Nilo-Saharan and the Khoisan macrofamilies) are not accepted completely by most linguists and may need to be divided (Campbell 1997). Their objection

1098-676: The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1973) and the American Philosophical Society (1975). In 1996 he received the highest award for a scholar in Linguistics, the Gold Medal of Philology. Greenberg is considered the founder of modern linguistic typology , a field that he has revitalized with his publications in the 1960s and 1970s. Greenberg's reputation rests partly on his contributions to synchronic linguistics and

1159-826: The Austronesian family : Unclassified due to lack of data: Unaccounted for: Søren Wichmann (2013) accepts the following 109 groups as coherent Papuan families, based on computational analyses performed by the Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) combined with Harald Hammarström 's (2012) classification. Some of the groups could turn out to be related to each other, but Wichmann (2013) lists them as separate groups pending further research. 9 families have been broken up into separate groups in Wichmann's (2013) classification, which are: An automated computational analysis ( ASJP 4) by Müller, Velupillai, Wichmann et al. (2013) found lexical similarities among

1220-513: The East Papuan languages have not been addressed, except to identify Yele as an Austronesian language. Joseph Greenberg proposed an Indo-Pacific phylum containing the (Northern) Andamanese languages , all Papuan languages, and the Tasmanian languages , but not the Australian Aboriginal languages . Very few linguists accept his grouping. It is distinct from the Trans–New Guinea phylum of

1281-554: The Hausa language . The subject of his doctoral dissertation was the influence of Islam on a Hausa group that, unlike most others, had not converted to it. During 1940, he began postdoctoral studies at Yale University . These were interrupted by service in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II , for which he worked as a codebreaker in North Africa and participated with the landing at Casablanca . He then served in Italy until

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1342-649: The Prague school of structuralism , which influenced his work. In 1962, Greenberg relocated to the anthropology department at Stanford University in California, where he continued working for the rest of his life. In 1965 Greenberg served as president of the African Studies Association . That same year, he was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences . He was later elected to

1403-475: The Takia language has. The Reef Islands – Santa Cruz languages of Wurm's East Papuan phylum were a potential 24th family, but subsequent work has shown them to be highly divergent Austronesian languages as well. Note that while this classification may be more reliable than past attempts, it is based on a single parameter, pronouns, and therefore must remain tentative. Although pronouns are conservative elements in

1464-660: The genetic classification of languages. Joseph Greenberg was born on May 28, 1915, to Jewish parents in Brooklyn, New York . His first great interest was music. At the age of 14, he gave a piano concert in Steinway Hall . He continued to play the piano frequently throughout his life. After graduating from James Madison High School , he decided to pursue a scholarly career rather than a musical one. He enrolled at Columbia College in New York in 1932. During his senior year, he attended

1525-478: The Americas has generated lively debate, but has been criticized strongly; it is rejected by most specialists of indigenous languages of the Americas and also by most historical linguists. Specialists of the individual language families have found extensive inaccuracies and errors in Greenberg's data, such as including data from non-existent languages, erroneous transcriptions of the forms compared, misinterpretations of

1586-460: The Australian languages, a later migration bringing the West Papuan, Torricelli and the East Papuan languages and a third wave bringing the most recent pre-Austronesian migration, the Trans–New Guinea family. Two of Wurm's isolates have since been linked as the and since Wurm's time another isolate and two languages belonging to a new family have been discovered, Foley summarized the state of

1647-497: The Nostratic hypothesis. Greenberg basically agreed with the Nostratic concept, though he stressed a deep internal division between its northern 'tier' (his Eurasiatic) and a southern 'tier' (principally Afroasiatic and Dravidian). The American Nostraticist Allan Bomhard considers Eurasiatic a branch of Nostratic, alongside other branches: Afroasiatic, Elamo-Dravidian , and Kartvelian . Similarly, Georgiy Starostin (2002) arrives at

1708-459: The Nostraticists had excluded from comparison because they are single languages rather than language families) and in excluding Afroasiatic . At about this time, Russian Nostraticists, notably Sergei Starostin , constructed a revised version of Nostratic. It was slightly larger than Greenberg's grouping but it also excluded Afroasiatic. Recently, a consensus has been emerging among proponents of

1769-1115: The Papuan languages are spoken on the island of New Guinea, with a number spoken in the Bismarck Archipelago , Bougainville Island and the Solomon Islands to the east, and in Halmahera , Timor and the Alor archipelago to the west. The westernmost language, Tambora in Sumbawa , is extinct. One Papuan language, Meriam , is spoken within the national borders of Australia , in the eastern Torres Strait . Several languages of Flores , Sumba , and other islands of eastern Indonesia are classified as Austronesian but have large numbers of non-Austronesian words in their basic vocabulary and non-Austronesian grammatical features. It has been suggested that these may have originally been non-Austronesian languages that have borrowed nearly all of their vocabulary from neighboring Austronesian languages, but no connection with

1830-598: The Papuan languages of Timor has been found. In general, the Central–Eastern Malayo-Polynesian languages are marked by a significant historical Papuan influence, lexically, grammatically, and phonologically, and this is responsible for much of the diversity of the Austronesian language family. The "Papuan languages" are a strictly geographical grouping, and does not imply a genetic relationship . The concept of Papuan (non-Austronesian) speaking Melanesians as distinct from Austronesian -speaking Melanesians

1891-567: The Papuan region is the Trans–New Guinea phylum , consisting of the majority of Papuan languages and running mainly along the highlands of New Guinea. The various high-level families may represent distinct migrations into New Guinea, presumably from the west. Since perhaps only a quarter of Papuan languages have been studied in detail, linguists' understanding of the relationships between them will continue to be revised. Statistical analyses designed to pick up signals too faint to be detected by

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1952-510: The classifications below. Joseph Greenberg proposed that the Andamanese languages (or at least the Great Andamanese languages ) off the coast of Burma are related to the Papuan or West Papuan languages. Stephen Wurm stated that the lexical similarities between Great Andamanese and the West Papuan and Timor–Alor families "are quite striking and amount to virtual formal identity [...] in

2013-440: The comparative method, though of disputed validity, suggest five major Papuan stocks (roughly Trans–New Guinea , West , North , East , and South Papuan languages); long-range comparison has also suggested connections between selected languages, but again the methodology is not orthodox in historical linguistics. The Great Andamanese languages may be related to some western Papuan languages, but are not themselves covered by

2074-724: The course of his work, Greenberg invented the term "Afroasiatic" to replace the earlier term "Hamito-Semitic", after showing that the Hamitic group, accepted widely since the 19th century, is not a valid language family. Another major feature of his work was to establish the classification of the Bantu languages , which occupy much of Central and Southern Africa, as a part of the Niger–Congo family, rather than as an independent family as many Bantuists had maintained. Greenberg's classification rested largely in evaluating competing earlier classifications. For

2135-623: The eastern (PNG) highlands. To the west of New Guinea, the largest languages are Makasae in East Timor (100,000 in 2010) and Galela in Halmahera (80,000 reported 1990). To the east, Terei (27,000 reported 2003) and Naasioi (20,000 reported 2007) are spoken on Bougainville. Although there has been relatively little study of these languages compared with the Austronesian family, there have been three preliminary attempts at large-scale genealogical classification, by Joseph Greenberg , Stephen Wurm , and Malcolm Ross . The largest family posited for

2196-464: The end of the war. Before leaving for Europe during 1943, Greenberg married Selma Berkowitz, whom he had met during his first year at Columbia University. After the war, Greenberg taught at the University of Minnesota before returning to Columbia University in 1948 as a teacher of anthropology . While in New York, he became acquainted with Roman Jakobson and André Martinet . They introduced him to

2257-452: The exception of the language isolate Kuot , which has VSO word order . All other Papuan languages are right-headed . Tonal Papuan languages include the Sko , Lepki , Kaure , Kembra , Lakes Plain , and Keuw languages. Joseph Greenberg Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was an American linguist , known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and

2318-402: The families that appear when comparing pronouns may be due to pronoun borrowing rather than to genealogical relatedness. However, Ross argues that Papuan languages have closed-class pronoun systems, which are resistant to borrowing, and in any case that the massive number of languages with similar pronouns in a family like Trans–New Guinea preclude borrowing as an explanation. Also, he shows that

2379-466: The following language groups. Note that some of these automatically generated groupings are due to chance resemblances. Bill Palmer et al. (2018) propose 43 independent families and 37 language isolates in the Papuasphere, comprising a total of 862 languages. A total of 80 independent groups are recognized. While Pawley & Hammarström 's internal classification of Trans-New Guinea largely resembles

2440-412: The genetic patterns in populations for which data are available.” Nevertheless, this category of "First American" people also interbred with and contributed a significant amount of genes to the ancestors of both Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dené populations, with 60% and 90% "First American" DNA respectively constituting the genetic makeup of the two groups. Later in his life, Greenberg proposed that nearly all of

2501-486: The goal of determining broad patterns of relationship, the idea was not to get every word right but to detect patterns. From the beginning with his theory of mass comparison, Greenberg addressed why chance resemblance and borrowing were not obstacles to its being useful. Despite that, critics consider those phenomena caused difficulties for his theory. Greenberg first termed his method "mass comparison" in an article of 1954 (reprinted in Greenberg 1955). As of 1987, he replaced

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2562-404: The influence of contact and bilingualism . Similarly, several groups that do have substantial basic vocabulary in common with Trans–New Guinea languages are excluded from the phylum because they do not resemble it grammatically. Wurm believed the Papuan languages arrived in several waves of migration with some of the earlier languages (perhaps including the Sepik–Ramu languages ) being related to

2623-656: The language families of northern Eurasia belong to a single higher-order family, which he termed Eurasiatic . The only exception was Yeniseian , which has been related to a wider Dené–Caucasian grouping, also including Sino-Tibetan . During 2008 Edward Vajda related Yeniseian to the Na-Dené languages of North America as a Dené–Yeniseian family. The Eurasiatic grouping resembles the older Nostratic groupings of Holger Pedersen and Vladislav Illich-Svitych by including Indo-European , Uralic , and Altaic . It differs by including Nivkh , Japonic , Korean , and Ainu (which

2684-754: The literature. Besides Trans–New Guinea and families possibly belonging in TNG ( see ), he accepted the proposals for, Malcolm Ross re-evaluated Wurm's proposal on purely lexical grounds. That is, he looked at shared vocabulary, and especially shared idiosyncrasies analogous to English I and me vs. German ich and mich . The poor state of documentation of Papuan languages restricts this approach largely to pronouns . Nonetheless, Ross believes that he has been able to validate much of Wurm's classification, albeit with revisions to correct for Wurm's partially typological approach. (See Trans–New Guinea languages .) Ethnologue (2009) largely follows Ross. It has been suggested that

2745-421: The lowest levels of his classification, most of which he inherited from prior taxonomies. Foley (1986) divides Papuan languages into over sixty small language families, plus a number of isolates. However, more recently Foley has accepted the broad outline if not the details of Wurm's classification, as he and Ross have substantiated a large portion of Wurm's Trans–New Guinea phylum. According to Ross (see below),

2806-451: The main problem with Wurm's classification is that he did not take contact-induced change into account. For example, several of the main branches of his Trans–New Guinea phylum have no vocabulary in common with other Trans–New Guinea languages, and were classified as Trans–New Guinea because they are similar grammatically . However, there are also many Austronesian languages that are grammatically similar to Trans–New Guinea languages due to

2867-400: The meanings of words used for comparison, and entirely spurious forms. Historical linguists also reject the validity of the method of multilateral (or mass) comparison upon which the classification is based. They argue that he has not provided a convincing case that the similarities presented as evidence are due to inheritance from an earlier common ancestor rather than being explained by

2928-654: The more egalitarian New Guinea societies.) Ross has proposed 23 Papuan language families and 9–13 isolates. However, because of his more stringent criteria, he was not able to find enough data to classify all Papuan languages, especially many isolates that have no close relatives to aid in their classification. Ross also found that the Lower Mamberamo languages (or at least the Warembori language—he had insufficient data on Pauwi) are Austronesian languages that have been heavily transformed by contact with Papuan languages, much as

2989-482: The order of meaningful elements". Greenberg rejected the opinion, prevalent among linguists since the mid-20th century, that comparative reconstruction was the only method to discover relationships between languages. He argued that genetic classification is methodologically prior to comparative reconstruction, or the first stage of it: one cannot engage in the comparative reconstruction of languages until one knows which languages to compare (1957:44). He also criticized

3050-636: The prevalent opinion that comprehensive comparisons of two languages at a time (which commonly take years to perform) could establish language families of any size. He argued that, even for 8 languages, there are already 4,140 ways to classify them into distinct families, while for 25 languages there are 4,638,590,332,229,999,353 ways (1957:44). For comparison, the Niger–Congo family is said to have some 1,500 languages. He thought language families of any size needed to be established by some scholastic means other than bilateral comparison. The theory of mass comparison

3111-490: The process would provide a check on accidental resemblances through the sheer number of languages under review. The mathematical probability that resemblances are accidental decreases strongly with the number of languages concerned (1957:39). Greenberg used the premise that mass "borrowing" of basic vocabulary is unknown. He argued that borrowing, when it occurs, is concentrated in cultural vocabulary and clusters "in certain semantic areas", making it easy to detect (1957:39). With

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3172-737: The quest to identify linguistic universals . During the late 1950s, Greenberg began to examine languages covering a wide geographic and genetic distribution. He located a number of interesting potential universals as well as many strong cross-linguistic tendencies. In particular, Greenberg conceptualized the idea of "implicational universal" , which has the form, "if a language has structure X, then it must also have structure Y." For example, X might be "mid front rounded vowels" and Y "high front rounded vowels" (for terminology see phonetics ). Many scholars adopted this kind of research following Greenberg's example and it remains important in synchronic linguistics. Like Noam Chomsky , Greenberg sought to discover

3233-571: The results of later migrations into the New World. Early on, Greenberg (1957:41, 1960) became convinced that many of the language groups considered unrelated could be classified into larger groupings. In his 1987 book Language in the Americas , while agreeing that the Eskimo–Aleut and Na-Dené groupings as distinct, he proposed that all the other Native American languages belong to a single language macro-family, which he termed Amerind . Language in

3294-546: The term "mass comparison" with "multilateral comparison", to emphasize its contrast with the bilateral comparisons recommended by linguistics textbooks. He believed that multilateral comparison was not in any way opposed to the comparative method, but is, on the contrary, its necessary first step (Greenberg, 1957:44). According to him, comparative reconstruction should have the status of an explanatory theory for facts already established by language classification (Greenberg, 1957:45). Most historical linguists (Campbell 2001:45) reject

3355-581: The term Papuan. The most widely used classification of Papuan languages is that of Stephen Wurm , listed below with the approximate number of languages in each family in parentheses. This was the scheme used by Ethnologue prior to Ross's classification (below). It is based on very preliminary work, much of it typological , and Wurm himself has stated that he does not expect it to hold up well to scrutiny. Other linguists, including William A. Foley , have suggested that many of Wurm's phyla are based on areal features and structural similarities, and accept only

3416-559: The two cases of alleged pronoun borrowing in New Guinea are simple coincidence, explainable as regular developments from the protolanguages of the families in question: as earlier forms of the languages are reconstructed, their pronouns become less similar, not more. (Ross argues that open-class pronoun systems, where borrowings are common, are found in hierarchical cultures such as those of Southeast Asia and Japan , where pronouns indicate details of relationship and social status rather than simply being grammatical pro-forms as they are in

3477-651: The universal structures on which human language is based. Unlike Chomsky, Greenberg's method was functionalist , rather than formalist . An argument to reconcile the Greenbergian and Chomskyan methods can be found in Linguistic Universals (2006), edited by Ricardo Mairal and Juana Gil. Many who are strongly opposed to Greenberg's methods of language classification (see below) acknowledge the importance of his typological work. In 1963 he published an article : "Some universals of grammar with particular reference to

3538-542: The use of mass comparison as a method for establishing genealogical relationships between languages. Among the most outspoken critics of mass comparison have been Lyle Campbell , Donald Ringe , William Poser , and the late R. Larry Trask . Greenberg is known widely for his development of a classification system for the languages of Africa , which he published as a series of articles in the Southwestern Journal of Anthropology from 1949 to 1954 (reprinted together as

3599-451: Was methodological : if mass comparison is not a valid method, it cannot be expected to have brought order successfully out of the confusion of African languages. By contrast, some linguists have sought to combine Greenberg's four African families into larger units. In particular, Edgar Gregersen (1972) proposed joining Niger–Congo and Nilo-Saharan into a larger family, which he termed Kongo-Saharan . Roger Blench (1995) suggests Niger–Congo

3660-461: Was first suggested and named by Sidney Herbert Ray in 1892. In accordance with William A. Foley (1986): The term 'Papuan languages' must not be taken in the same sense as 'Austronesian languages'. While all Austronesian languages are genetically related in one family, in the sense that they all descend from a common ancestral language called Proto-Austronesian spoken some 6,000 years ago... [Papuan languages] do not all trace their origins back to

3721-485: Was recorded of them, and few linguists expect that they will ever be linked to another language family . William A. Foley (1986) noted lexical similarities between R. M. W. Dixon 's 1980 reconstruction of proto- Australian and the languages of the East New Guinea Highlands . He believed that it was naïve to expect to find a single Papuan or Australian language family when New Guinea and Australia had been

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