Why do so many U.S. place names end in ee?

[Zaarin]

another (Penutian) is on pretty shaky ground

I was under the impression (chiefly from Mithun) that at least some portions of Penutian were probable if not yet adequately demonstrated.

On the note of bizarre linguistic theories, I was recently reading a non-linguistic book (Encyclopedia of American Indian Costume) that makes some really strange linguistic claims, most notably describing Kutenai as an Algonquian language and making reference to a "Wakashan-Algonquian" language family--a rather baffling linkage of languages.

[Salmoneus]

Unfortunately, "this really ought to be a language family because of stuff completely outside linguistics" is not convincing.

Why on earth not? If you know that something is a language family, that should be convincing, and clearly you can know that something is a language family for non-linguistic reasons [just put people in a big box for ten thousand years, and other than the possibility of spontaneous generation (which is generally discounted) you know that the resulting languages will be a language family - no linguistics needed]

You can of course hope that Greenberg was "right", but in general being right for the wrong reasons is not that impressive. Newton was "right" about light coming in "corpuscles", but he did not actually observe photons or come up with a good theory of photons..

And if we are interested in propositions purely in terms of assigning praise or blame to the person who first proposed them, that would be relevant. But from time to time, we may be interested in whether a proposition is actually true, at which point it doesn't matter whether the formulator of the theory believed he was being given the idea by a colloquy of tangerine pixies.

[Pole, the]

just put people in a big box for ten thousand years, and other than the possibility of spontaneous generation (which is generally discounted) you know that the resulting languages will be a language family - no linguistics needed

Not necessarily — just imagine the people that came before could speak several different, [closely] unrelated languages.

[zompist]

Unfortunately, "this really ought to be a language family because of stuff completely outside linguistics" is not convincing.

Why on earth not? If you know that something is a language family, that should be convincing, and clearly you can know that something is a language family for non-linguistic reasons [just put people in a big box for ten thousand years, and other than the possibility of spontaneous generation (which is generally discounted) you know that the resulting languages will be a language family - no linguistics needed]

Why on earth not? Because we tried it. Early attempts at classification mixed linguistic criteria with region, race, technological development, or Biblical taxonomy. This turned out not to be a generator of truth, once people went back and reclassified based on linguistics alone.

Your box analogy begs the question. You can't prove that Amerindian is a family by assuming that the ancestors of the Amerindians all spoke languages in one family.

There are just too many assumptions in your theory. A small population of hunter-gatherers need not speak the same language; indeed, they're notorious for having tiny languages. Genetic descent does not correlate with linguistic families. Family tree development (which is clearest in the language of former agricultural empires) is not the best model for hunter-gatherer languages. We really know nothing about what language looked like 15,000 (or more) years ago.

(On spontaneous generation of spoken language, I can't advocate that either, for this period. But we do have an example of the phenomena: the humans of Earth have spoken languages, so it happened at least once. We don't know when. We don't know what happened next. And we don't know when, if ever, it stopped being a possible process. There are interesting things like mother-in-law languages, twin languages, and sign language generation, that suggest that it's not simply impossible. In a world of agriculturalists there is always a dominant spoken language to swamp these efforts; in a hunter-gatherer situation in an unsettled continent, I'm not so sure.)

The diversity of the Americas is a scientific puzzle. Scientific puzzles are great; they're opportunities to learn something! Why are there as many as a hundred families there, when Eurasia makes do with a dozen or so?

And if we are interested in propositions purely in terms of assigning praise or blame to the person who first proposed them, that would be relevant. But from time to time, we may be interested in whether a proposition is actually true, at which point it doesn't matter whether the formulator of the theory believed he was being given the idea by a colloquy of tangerine pixies.

Fine, if we ever know by actual science, then you may go back and affix a gold star to Greenberg's grave. In the meantime, science doesn't work by assessing whether the pixies have spoken or not. Greenberg's work is criticized by linguists not because people think he's wrong, but because his methodology is suspect.

[Bristel]

As a kid I used to wonder why so many Western Washington place names ended in -mish, it wasn't until much later that I realized they were named by Lushootseed-speaking Salish tribes.

Snohomish <- ~'sdoh-doh-hobsh'
Duwamish <- [dxʷdɐwʔabʃ]

Plus at least a half dozen or more others that I can name.

[sirdanilot]

That means that Greenburg might have been wrong; it doesn't mean that Greenburg was insane.

Besides, it's true the proposal lacks adequate linguistic evidence; but then, you can't prove it's false either. Having an opinion on something where there's inadequate evidence to come to a robust conclusion is not insane.

Plus, Greenburg was almost certainly right. With the possible exception of a few relict populations (eg on Tierra del Fuego), the entire population of the Americas (other than the Na-Dene and Inuit, of course) strongly appears to be descended from a population of only a couple of thousand very closely related people (living in a small but open plain, and migratory) living some 15,000 years ago. Given the tiny population size and the environment, it's likely that these people spoke one language, or at most a couple of closely related (genetically and/or through areal influence and loans) languages, and the fact of mass-migration would be likely to further reduce any language differences at that time. It seems extremely plausible, then, that at least the vast majority of Amerind languages do indeed belong to an Amerind language family (though it is of course possible that the occasional tribe might have wandered over the ice or sea at some point in the last 10,000 years, and retained their language - however, given the context this does not seem likely to have been a major source of population, and indeed they would have had to have been small groups so as not to influence the genetics much). Furthermore, genetic evidence suggests a fundamental split between northern and south/central (and possibly some northern coastal) populations, corresponding to Greenburg's primary split within Amerind.

I will apologize in advance that I am on my phone and will nut have computer access fur some days.

BUT AHAH AHH HAAHAHAHAHBAHAH YOU seriously think Greenberg s amerind idea is even to be remotely considered plausiblr?

Have you even seen the damn thing? have you read reviews (c.f. Campbell forgot the year )?! Do you have any idea how much is wrong with the method and the data used?


the entire order of what he did is.wrong. He wanted to make it plausible that almost all Cameroonian languages wererelated and to that end came up with his dsorry excuse for a language family. Proper comparative method shouldn't start with such preconception s.

He did not even properly apply mass lexical comparison ( a questionable method EVEN IF IT WERE PROPERLY APPLIED) It's phony.

[sirdanilot]

Cameroonian should.be Amerindian sorry

[Hydroeccentricity]

sirdanilot, please scroll up to Zompist's post to see how you could have responded respectfully to salmoneous's comments. I also think that there is no scientific reason to assume that Amerind must be true, but I don't think laughing incredulously at someone is the best way to express that idea.

[zompist]

Yeah, sirdan, laugh all you want in your head, but putting it in your post is just contentless flaming.

[CatDoom]

Plus, Greenburg was almost certainly right. With the possible exception of a few relict populations (eg on Tierra del Fuego), the entire population of the Americas (other than the Na-Dene and Inuit, of course) strongly appears to be descended from a population of only a couple of thousand very closely related people (living in a small but open plain, and migratory) living some 15,000 years ago.

Presumably you're arguing from the genetic data here, particularly the history of yDNA haplogroup Q, which is the predominant group found in the Americas. I'm not an expert on population genetics, but a look at some of the sources cited on Wikipedia suggests that there are multiple possible interpretations for the genetic evidence relevant to the peopling of the Americas, and findings that suggest a very small founding population do not necessarily preclude the possibility of subsequent admixture from Asia.

On top of that, the correlation between genetic and cultural groups is rarely straightforward, for any number of reasons. For one thing (based on this article I read on Language Log), it's very likely that both the male and female most recent common ancestors of all indigenous Americans whose genomes have been sampled lived more recently than the peopling of the Americas. Assuming I understand the implications, this means that there could be additional yDNA and mtDNA lineages that were widespread in the Americas at one time, but became extinct before they could appear in our samples. This doesn't require population replacement, only normal gene flow between groups, so there could be many biological and linguistic lineages that entered the Americas independently but are not distinguished by yDNA or mtDNA.

another (Penutian) is on pretty shaky ground

I was under the impression (chiefly from Mithun) that at least some portions of Penutian were probable if not yet adequately demonstrated.

That's true; Utian (Miwok-Costanoan) has been pretty solidly demonstrated by Catherine Callaghan, and Yok-Utian seems like a promising proposal. Plateau Penutian seems to be pretty well established as a valid genetic grouping as well. I think I've read that there are some decent correspondences between Plateau Penutian, Maiduan, and Yok-Utian as well, but I'm less sure about that. I'm also less familiar with the "Maritime Penutian" languages of the Northwest. As I understand it, however, there are some pretty significant difficulties when it comes to bringing the higher-order subgroups of the family together, and it may actually prove to be two or more families that share a number of features.

[sirdanilot]

On top of that, the correlation between genetic and cultural groups is rarely straightforward, for any number of reasons. For one thing (based on this article I read on Language Log), it's very likely that both the male and female most recent common ancestors of all indigenous Americans whose genomes have been sampled lived more recently than the peopling of the Americas. Assuming I understand the implications, this means that there could be additional yDNA and mtDNA lineages that were widespread in the Americas at one time, but became extinct before they could appear in our samples. This doesn't require population replacement, only normal gene flow between groups, so there could be many biological and linguistic lineages that entered the Americas independently but are not distinguished by yDNA or mtDNA.

Yup

Genes =/= languages. You will find little resemblance of genes between a pure Amerindian in Colombia and a spanish immigrant yet they probablyboth speak spanish (as many amerindian languages have already been lost, even among relatively unmixed amerindians).

This fallacy of genes = languages is also used by the IndoEuropeanists who think they can prove claims about linguistics through genetic evidence. It is laughable at best.

[KathTheDragon]

On top of that, the correlation between genetic and cultural groups is rarely straightforward, for any number of reasons. For one thing (based on this article I read on Language Log), it's very likely that both the male and female most recent common ancestors of all indigenous Americans whose genomes have been sampled lived more recently than the peopling of the Americas. Assuming I understand the implications, this means that there could be additional yDNA and mtDNA lineages that were widespread in the Americas at one time, but became extinct before they could appear in our samples. This doesn't require population replacement, only normal gene flow between groups, so there could be many biological and linguistic lineages that entered the Americas independently but are not distinguished by yDNA or mtDNA.

Yup

Genes =/= languages. You will find little resemblance of genes between a pure Amerindian in Colombia and a spanish immigrant yet they probablyboth speak spanish (as many amerindian languages have already been lost, even among relatively unmixed amerindians).

This fallacy of genes = languages is also used by the IndoEuropeanists who think they can prove claims about linguistics through genetic evidence. It is laughable at best.

The closest you can come is the core group of "original" speakers, if they still exist as a group you can identify, who inherited both languages and genes from their ancestors. But in most cases, language and genes will come from two very different groups. A better example are the Old Europeans, who almost certainly were not wiped out by the Indo-Europeans. What's far more likely is that the Indo-Europeans managed to spread their language(s) to all (or almost all) the Old Europeans.

[sirdanilot]

On top of that, the correlation between genetic and cultural groups is rarely straightforward, for any number of reasons. For one thing (based on this article I read on Language Log), it's very likely that both the male and female most recent common ancestors of all indigenous Americans whose genomes have been sampled lived more recently than the peopling of the Americas. Assuming I understand the implications, this means that there could be additional yDNA and mtDNA lineages that were widespread in the Americas at one time, but became extinct before they could appear in our samples. This doesn't require population replacement, only normal gene flow between groups, so there could be many biological and linguistic lineages that entered the Americas independently but are not distinguished by yDNA or mtDNA.

Yup

Genes =/= languages. You will find little resemblance of genes between a pure Amerindian in Colombia and a spanish immigrant yet they probablyboth speak spanish (as many amerindian languages have already been lost, even among relatively unmixed amerindians).

This fallacy of genes = languages is also used by the IndoEuropeanists who think they can prove claims about linguistics through genetic evidence. It is laughable at best.

The closest you can come is the core group of "original" speakers, if they still exist as a group you can identify, who inherited both languages and genes from their ancestors. But in most cases, language and genes will come from two very different groups. A better example are the Old Europeans, who almost certainly were not wiped out by the Indo-Europeans. What's far more likely is that the Indo-Europeans managed to spread their language(s) to all (or almost all) the Old Europeans.

Wow I actually agree with you Kathy

Indeed a group of 'pure, original speakers' is hardly if ever identifiable. The linguistic ideal of a speaker who is as 'pure' as possible (genetically and knowing as little of other languages as possible) is extremely outdated and luckily people are more and more moving away from it, as for many continents such a speaker does not exist d for most languages (go find a monolingual in Indonesia of a local language that is already beginning to die out good luck). Genetics are just hardly if at all linked to languages. People switch to new languages incredibly easy, within 2 generations often.

Sadly many linguists and also people on this forum (mostly Indo Europeanists, but also many people of other linguistic disciplins sadly) seem to be blissfully ignorant of the hardly/non-existance of a link between genetics and the languages spoken. It's cute and funny and endearing in a way but also very dangerous, because their silly ideas make their way towards the popular-scientific and popular press and proceed to spread their quackery nonsense into the general population. It's an evil poison that should be eradicated and stopped.