Merritt Ruhlen

An odd and limited approach to historical linguistics, focussing almost exclusively on methods of comparing different languages to trace the relationships among them. I am not a professional, but this seems a very dated approach, in an era when serious work is being done on the emergence of language itself.

Very very interesting, marred slightly by being a polemic. The first few chapters, describing how language families are constructed, what the families are, and how the superfamilies are created, are quite fascinating. The later chapters, where the author vents his (probably well-justified) anger at the bulk of the linguistics establishment, are a whole lot less interesting to an outside observer.

The points I want to try to remember:

* Four African families, with the history appearing to be show more something like
- The Khoi-San group in most places then
- A group in Nigeria develop agriculture and spread west then south giving rise to the Bantu group
- But there's also a Nilotic group --- what's the deal there? Those are an offshoot of the Bantu guys or what?
- In North Africa an Afro-Asiatic group that's Semitic plus others and is presumably the guys who left Africa, established agriculture in the Middle East, then returned to Africa.

* Pre-agricultural languages in Europe (a common family? Basque a survivor, likewise Etruscan?) Agriculture moves in (as population expansion, not transmission of the idea) from Anatolia. Still arguments as to how this links up with Indo-European.
- Colin Renfrew says these farmers are proto-Indo-Europeans; others say the proto-Indo-Europeans came from north of the Black Sea.
- Ruhlen suggests that the first round of proto-Indo-Europeans were the Anatolians who spread up and round Europe, some of whom reached the area above the Black Sea, became aggressive and, in a second wave, swept over what was left of Europe and down into Iran and northern India.

* Three Native American language families representing three waves of immigration.
- The first, Amerind, populated the entire (at that stage empty) continent.
- The second, Na-Dene, populated the west coast, with an offshoot into the US desert area (Arizona, New Mexico, that sort of area)
- The third covers the cold Inuit northernmost strip of North America.

* When humanity originally left Africa (c 50,000 yrs ago) the most rapid path was along the southern coast of Asia, (perhaps by boat), which allowed for humanity to arrive at New Guinea and Australia surprisingly rapidly.

* The wave of people that populated Polynesia started from Taiwan, and while it mostly spread east, it was these same people that populated Madagascar(!)
- Things I still don't know about this include when it happened, how this relates to the populations of Phillipines, Malaysia and Indonesia, Melanesia vs Micronesia vs Polynesia, and whether Madasgascar was empty when they reached it. show less

An interesting book with interesting ideas, not all of them are agreeable. Nevertheless, a good book for anyone into languages and linguistics.