Universals of Language: Report of a Conference Held at Dobbs Ferry, New York, April 13-15, 1961

Joseph H. Greenberg, May 28, 1915 - May 7, 2001 Joseph H. Greenberg was born on May 28, 1915 in Brooklyn, New York to a Polish immigrant father who owned a pharmacy, but lost it in the Depression. His mother was German, the language that a young Joseph grew up with. Greenberg may have had a career as a professional pianist if he had stayed with show more it. But while attending Columbia University, Greenberg decided to become a social anthropologists, doing field work on the religion of the Hausa-speaking people of West Africa. He received his Ph. D. from Northwestern University in 1940. After college, Greenberg entered the Army Signal Intelligence Service, decoding Italian signals. It was through this that he realized he wanted to devote his life to the study of linguistics. He returned to Columbia University where he remained from 1948 to 1962, becoming chairman of the anthropology department. From Columbia, Greenberg went on to Stanford, from which he retired from in 1985, but continued to work through til a few months before his death. Greenberg is best known for his attempts to trace relationships among the world's 5,000 languages. Greenberg's major works include his classification of the 1,500 languages of Africa into four groups which was published in 1955. He then assigned the languages of North and South America into three groups in a work entitled "Language in the Americas", published in 1987. Before he died, Greenberg was working on the languages of Asia, a project he was never able to finish. Joseph Greenberg died on May 7, 2001 in Stanford, California from cancer. He was 85. show less