28 Facts About Joseph Greenberg

Joseph Harold Greenberg was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages.

Joseph Greenberg was born on May 28,1915, to Jewish parents in Brooklyn, New York.

Joseph Greenberg continued to play the piano frequently throughout his life.

Joseph Greenberg enrolled at Columbia College in New York in 1932.

Joseph Greenberg then served in Italy until the end of the war.

In 1962, Joseph Greenberg relocated to the anthropology department at Stanford University in California, where he continued working for the rest of his life.

In 1965 Joseph Greenberg served as president of the African Studies Association.

Joseph Greenberg was later elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Joseph Greenberg is considered the founder of modern linguistic typology, a field that he has revitalized with his publications in the 1960s and 1970s.

Joseph Greenberg's reputation rests partly on his contributions to synchronic linguistics and the quest to identify linguistic universals.

Joseph Greenberg located a number of interesting potential universals as well as many strong cross-linguistic tendencies.

Joseph Greenberg rejected the opinion, prevalent among linguists since the mid-20th century, that comparative reconstruction was the only method to discover relationships between languages.

Joseph Greenberg 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.

Joseph Greenberg criticized the prevalent opinion that comprehensive comparisons of two languages at a time could establish language families of any size.

Joseph Greenberg 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.

Joseph Greenberg thought language families of any size needed to be established by some scholastic means other than bilateral comparison.

Joseph Greenberg advocated restricting the amount of material to be compared and increasing the number of languages to be compared to all the languages in a given area.

Joseph Greenberg used the premise that mass "borrowing" of basic vocabulary is unknown.

Joseph Greenberg argued that borrowing, when it occurs, is concentrated in cultural vocabulary and clusters "in certain semantic areas", making it easy to detect.

Joseph Greenberg first termed his method "mass comparison" in an article of 1954.

Joseph Greenberg believed that multilateral comparison was not in any way opposed to the comparative method, but is, on the contrary, its necessary first step.

Joseph 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.

Joseph Greenberg revised the book and published it again during 1963, followed by a nearly identical edition of 1966.

Joseph Greenberg's subgrouping of these languages has not been accepted by the few specialists who have worked on the classification of these languages.

Early on, Joseph Greenberg became convinced that many of the language groups considered unrelated could be classified into larger groupings.

Later in his life, Joseph Greenberg proposed that nearly all of the language families of northern Eurasia belong to a single higher-order family, which he termed Eurasiatic.

Joseph Greenberg basically agreed with the Nostratic concept, though he stressed a deep internal division between its northern 'tier' and a southern 'tier'.

Joseph Greenberg continued to work on this project after he was diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer and until he died during May 2001.