12 Facts About Merritt Ruhlen

Merritt Ruhlen was an American linguist who worked on the classification of languages and what this reveals about the origin and evolution of modern humans.

Merritt Ruhlen was the principal advocate and defender of Joseph Greenberg's approach to language classification.

Merritt Ruhlen received his PhD in 1973 from Stanford University with a dissertation on the generative analysis of Romanian morphology.

Subsequently, Merritt Ruhlen worked for several years as a research assistant on the Stanford Universals Project, directed by Joseph Greenberg and Charles Ferguson.

From 2005, Merritt Ruhlen was on the advisory board of the Genographic Project and held appointment as a visiting professor at the City University of Hong Kong.

Merritt Ruhlen knew and worked with Joseph Greenberg for three-and-a-half decades and became the principal advocate and defender of Greenberg's methods of language classification.

Merritt Ruhlen is the author of several books dealing with the languages of the world and their classifications.

Merritt Ruhlen has been in the forefront of attempts to coordinate the results of historical linguistics and other human sciences, such as genetics and archaeology.

Merritt Ruhlen maintains that such classification is the first step in the comparative method and that the other operations of historical linguistics, in particular the formulation of sound correspondences and the reconstruction of a protolanguage, can only be carried out after a hypothesis of classification has been established.

Merritt Ruhlen believes his classification of the world's languages is supported by population genetics research by the geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, who has identified the distribution of certain human genes in populations throughout the world.

Merritt Ruhlen has used this evidence to construct phylogenetic trees showing the evolutionary history of these populations.

Merritt Ruhlen has responded that he have never claimed to have reconstructed Proto-Sapiens, but have simply pointed out that reflexes of very ancient words can still be found in the world's languages: For each [global] etymology.