Merritt Ruhlen

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Merritt Ruhlen : biography

1944 –

Ruhlen stresses the importance of the three-way i / u / a (i.e. masculine / feminine / neutral) ablaut in such forms as t’ina / t’una / t’ana ("son / daughter / child") as well as of the general American pronominal pattern na / ma (i.e. "I / you"), first noted by Alfredo Trombetti in 1905. Some linguists have attributed this pronoun pattern to other than genetic causes.Nichols 1992 He refers to the earliest beginnings of the dispute,Ruhlen 1994b quoting from a personal letter of Edward Sapir to A.L. Kroeber (1918):Sapir, cited in Sapir 1984 "Getting down to brass tacks, how in the Hell are you going to explain general American n- ‘I’ except genetically? It’s disturbing, I know, but (more) non-committal conservatism is only dodging, after all, isn’t it? Great simplifications are in store for us."

Greenberg and Ruhlen’s views on the languages of the Americas have failed to find acceptance among the vast majority of linguists working with these languages.

Kusunda as an Indo-Pacific language

Whitehouse, Ruhlen, and others have concludedWhitehouse et al. 2004 that the Kusunda language of Nepal belongs to the tentative Indo-Pacific superfamilyGreenberg 1971 rather than belonging to the Tibeto-Burman group or being a language isolate.Watters 2006 They adduce:

  • within the personal pronouns,
    • an independent first-person pronoun based on /t/;
    • an independent second-person pronoun based on /n/ or /ŋ/;
    • an independent third-person pronoun based on /g/ or /k/;
    • a vowel alternation in the first- and second-person independent pronouns in which /u/ occurs in subject forms and /i/ in possessive (or oblique) forms;
  • a possessive suffix -/yi/;
  • the consonantal base also indicates the verbal subject;
  • demonstrative pronouns based on /t/ and /n/;
  • the core vocabulary.

The following table shows similarities between the pronominal systems of several languages claimed to belong to the Indo-Pacific family.

Pronoun Kusunda Andamanese languages Core North Halmaheran family Central Bird’s Head family
Juwoi Bo Galela Karon Dori
I chiHodgson 1857tsiReinhard 1976tshiReinhard and Toba 1970 tui tu-lʌ to tuo
my chí-yi tii-ye ti-e d͡ʒi "me"
you nununu ŋui ŋu-lʌ no nuo
your ní-yí ŋii-ye ni "thee"
he/she gidagit kitɛ kitɛ gao

The following objections have been made to this tentative proposal:Poser 2004

  • the existence of an Indo-Pacific superfamily is disputed;
  • pronouns can be borrowed;
  • similarities may be due to chance;
  • linguistic relationships cannot adduced solely on the basis of the physical attributes of the speakers, and the current proposal concurs with an old one allegedly so based;
  • misrepresentation of the data (e.g., kitɛ in Juwoi is actually a demonstrative meaning "this", never used as a personal pronoun.)

Yeniseian–Na-Dene

According to Ruhlen, linguistic evidence indicates that the Yeniseian languages, spoken in central Siberia, are most closely related to the Na-Dene languages of western North America (among which, concurring with Sapir, he includes Haida).Ruhlen 1998a The hypothesis is supported by the separate researches of Heinrich K. WernerWerner 2004 and Edward J. Vajda (Vajda rejects Haida’s membership in the Na-Dene language family).Vajda 2010 This would mean that Na-Dene represents a distinct migration of peoples from Asia to the New World, intermediate between the migration of speakers of the putative Proto-Amerind, estimated at around 13,000 years ago, and the migration of Eskimo–Aleut speakers around 5,000 years ago. At other times, Ruhlen has maintained the existence of a language family called Dene–Caucasian.Ruhlen 1998b, 231–246