Re: review of Greenberg Re: Nostratic

From: Peter T. Daniels (grammatim_at_worldnet.att.net)
Date: 09/19/04 

Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 21:45:28 GMT

Kleinecke wrote:
>
> "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.

You subscribed to Southwest Journal of Anthropology in 1948? Wow.

> 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.

T&B's 1st part, IIRC, was published in 1951. They published a great deal
of linguistics, in linguistics journals, for colonial administrators.

(See my chapter in the McCawley Mem. Vol., forthcoming from MIT Press,
for observations on the languages coverage in the Eleventh Britannica as
related to the British Empire and La France d'Outre-Mer.)

> 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.

But still the authority.

I should look at Pater Schmidt's Africa chapters. And do you know about
Albert Drexel? I considered him in the Bright Festschrift. 

-- 
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@att.net