Re: review of Greenberg Re: Nostratic

From: Kleinecke (kleinecke_at_astound.net)
Date: 09/19/04 

Date: 19 Sep 2004 13:31:14 -0700

"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message news:<414D7C1E.352B@worldnet.att.net>...
 
> If you haven't read through Tucker & Bryan, and before them Meinhof, you
> have no idea what the state of African linguistics was in the first half
> of the twentieth century.

I remember reading Greenberg's original African paper when it first
came out. I wasn't very impressed with the constructive part of it.
But I was impressed with the destructive part. That is, his dismissal
of Meinhof and his school.

I had already, at that point, been through Tucker and Bryan and I had
never thought of them as linguistic contributers. They sounded to me
like colonial administrators inventorying their possessions.

Meinhof, although he went off the deep end on racial matters, was a
genuine, if old-fashioned, linguists. So far as I know, his
comparative Bantu has never been questioned, only extended. My guess
is that Meinhof never intended to present a complete picture of
African language - only those parts that had attracted his attention.
By 1950, of course, he was quite of date.

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