Joseph Greenberg

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Joseph Greenberg : biography

May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001

The languages of northern Eurasia

Main article: Eurasiatic languages

Later in his life, Greenberg proposed that nearly all of the language families of northern Eurasia belong to a single higher-order family, which he called Eurasiatic. The only exception was Yeniseian, which has been related to a wider Dené–Caucasian grouping, also including Sino-Tibetan. In 2008 Edward Vajda related Yeniseian to the Na-Dené languages of North America in a Dené–Yeniseian family., University of Alaska Fairbanks

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 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 broader than Greenberg’s grouping but it also left out Afroasiatic.

Recently, a consensus has been emerging among proponents of 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 a tripartite overall grouping: he considers Afroasiatic, Nostratic and Elamite to be roughly equidistant and more closely related to each other than to anything else., Russia 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 the precise placement of Dravidian and Kartvelian.

Greenberg continued to work on this project after he was diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer until he died in May 2001. His colleague and former student Merritt Ruhlen ensured the publication of the final volume of his Eurasiatic work (2002) after his death.