Book Description
Native American languages are spoken from Siberia to Greenland, and from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego; they include the southernmost language of the world (Yaghan) and some of the northernmost (Eskimoan). Campbell's project is to take stock of what is currently known about the history of Native American languages and in the process examine the state of American Indian historical linguistics, and the success and failure of its various methodologies. There is remarkably little consensus in the field, largely due to the 1987 publication of Language in the Americas by Joseph Greenberg. He claimed to trace a historical relation between all American Indian languages of North and South America, implying that most of the Western Hemisphere was settled by a single wave of immigration from Asia. This has caused intense controversy and Campbell, as a leading scholar in the field, intends this volume to be, in part, a response to Greenberg. Finally, Campbell demonstrates that the historical study of Native American languages has always relied on up-to-date methodology and theoretical assumptions and did not, as is often believed, lag behind the European historical linguistic tradition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Scholarly. Difficult. Conservative.
About every branch of science has two types of people: the "splitters" and the "lumpers."The splitters are those who separate everything (plants, animals, etc.) into many different groups and doubt they are connected or related. The lumpers find reasons to believe that everything is related.So it is with languages.A linguist named Greenberg grouped all American Indians languages on both continents into three groups: Amerind, Na-Dine (i.e. Apaches), and Eskimo-Aleut.That's a lumper at work.

By contrast, Campbell, the author of this book is a splitter, finding reasons why North American Indian languages are not related.He asserts there are dozens -- maybe over a hundred -- American Indian language families which are either unrelated or a relationship cannot be proven. Who's right?I don't know, but it makes for heated debate -- and the correct answer is important the who, where, when, and how of the first people to inhabit the Americas.

The virtue of Campbell's book is that he briefly discusses virtually every American Indian language and language family, including those that are proposed but unproven. This sounds pretty dull and technical and beyond the comprehension of the average reader.So it is -- if I qualify as an average reader --but through the fog of technical linguistic discussion comes some wonderfully interesting speculations.For example, how is that two small tribes in northern California speak languages that are related to the Algonquin spoken by dozens of tribes thousands of miles away in Canada, the Great Lakes, and the eastern United States. Did the Algonguins originate in California and migrate eastward?Or the reverse?And, how is that the Uto-Aztecan language family can encompass Indians from El Salvador to Nevada and include both the urbanized Aztecs and the simple hunting gathering groups of the desert?

Campbell imparts an enormous amount of information about American Indian languages and their relationships with each other.He discusses the history of American linguistics and the techniques linguists have used in attempting to establish relationships among languages, and he examines the many theories of linguistic relationships, refuting Greenberg and the other lumpers in detail.One of the better features of this 500 page book are maps of tribal locations and linguistic families.Want to know the name and something about the language of the tribe that inhabited the region of Brazilia?Look up the Xakriaba. "American Indian Languages" is not easy reading but as a thorough reference book I doubt that it is matched in its field.

Smallchief (Kansa tribe, Dheghia language group, Siouan language family)

The authoritative reference book on this topic
This is now the standard reference on this topic, the best place to go for an understanding of what mainstream historical linguists know about the genetic relationships of the native languages of the Americas as well as for an evaluation of proposals of remoter relationships. It is a comprehensive survey by one of the very few scholars with such a breadth of knowledge. In addition to the main content, the survey of the languages and language families of the Americas, it contains discussions of the methodology of historical linguistics and a review of proposals ranging from the extreme fringe to proposals considered plausible but for one reason or another not clearly established. Campbell rates the subjective likelihood of the proposals discussed on a scale from -100 to 100, where 0 means that he is agnostic as to whether the proposal is valid, -100 means that he is certain that it is invalid, and 100 means that he is certain that it is valid. Contrary to another reviewer's comments, there is nothing idiosyncratic in his understanding of probabilities - he is simply presenting his evaluation in a clear and easily understood fashion that happens not to be the usual probability scale.

Any book such as this will seem dry to those looking for interesting facts about American Indian languages. It is a reference book, aimed primarily at scholars and at students and others who want to look up what is known about the genetic affiliation of particular languages. Contrary to another reviewer's comments, one should not expected it to be full of data. A review of the details of the evidence with the scope of this book would require thousands of pages. Those looking for a survey of the languages themselves are more likely to be satisfied with Marianne Mithun's Languages of Native North America, or, if they are more interested in social and cultural aspects of languages, with Shirley Silver and Wick Miller's book American Indian Languages: Cultural and Social Contexts.

The book devotes considerable attention to the work of Joseph Greenberg because Greenberg's book Language in the Americas has received a great deal of attention from non-linguists, many of whom do not understand that Greenberg's methodology is a throwback to pre-scientific historical linguistics. It happens that at present the popular, uninformed view is one that lumps together languages without justification, so any critique appears to be negative.

In sum, this book is not only the most authoritative reference on the classification of the languages of the Americas, but it contains useful discussions of how such classifications are created and evaluated and evaluations of proposed relationships that will be useful both to those who need to decide what to believe and to students and others choosing research projects.

Yes, exactly because of that
The reasosn listed by the other post are exactly de reasons why you should buy this book.
It offers a different vision from that of Greenberg's (fortunately), refutes many things, give a different classification.
Actually, the work of greenberg is falling down, because of the lack of proves.

Where's the Data?
Thoroughly miserable, this book never delivers on its title.Its focus is purely negative: an ad hoc piecemeal attack on the author's apparent nemesis, Joseph Greenberg.

Rather than offering his own positive arguments in support of any genetic relationships between all but the most obvious American language families, Campbell spends the great majority of his time attacking certain portions of the evidence that other classifiers offer.He never addresses the overall context of any circumstance, and he remains silent in the face of any evidence he can't refute.The actual posited cognates in question are almost never cited, and native forms in general are quite rare.

Regardless of whether one proposes six, two-dozen, or the over 50 independent and further un-relatable North American stocks that Campbell clings to, any book that purports to study the "Historical Linguistics of Native America" should at least be chock-full of native words or texts, with grammatical sketches and detailed phonetic transcriptions.

Yet the most we get for the majority of languages or families is a list of phonemes without the context of even one single native word.In a few families case endings or pronouns are given. There is not one sketch, text, or real wordlist.The maps given are available elsewhere.The entirety of the native forms cited could fit on two pages.

This book's fatal flaw is its exclusively negative focus.Pages upon pages list references in English to secondary and tertiary sources, but the subject languages themselves are studiously ignored.Never making any positive argument of his own, he never feels obliged to provide the one thing a thinking reader wants, the evidence.

Campbell further embarrasses himself with his uniquely idiosyncratic system of probability analysis.He cites various theories of distant relationships proposed by other scholars.He then (admittedly subjectively) grades the likeliness of these theories, not on a scale of 0% to 100% as is universally accepted, but rather on a scale of positive to negative (!) 100%, with a 0% probability on his scale indicating an actual probability of 50%.

For example, he finds the Tlingit-Eyak-Athabaskan hypothesis to have a +75% probability, by which he means that it is actually 87.5% likely.But to the Na Dene hypothesis (the above family linked to Haida) he gives a 0% probability, by which means an actual 50% likelihood.Any link between Zuni and Penutian (however constituted) he gives a -80% probability.Yes, that's a "negative eighty percent," by which he means an actual possibility of 10%.

Confused? Then don't buy this book.Marianne Mithun's "The Languages of North America" is an excellent general source for north of the Rio Grande, with a conservative classification, a well-specimened typological overview of the documented variation and at least a phonology, sketch, and brief text of each language family.Maps of North America are as good as Campbell's. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

If you like words - WOW!
Ciardi was a mind-bogglingly brilliant man.This comes across in this book.When I want to learn about any subject, I start with the words and their etymologies.I use this book as one of my references.Example:Albania - why is it called that?I find that 'alb' means 'white', so it tells me that the country has snow covered mountains.Then, no wonder the white of the egg is called 'albumen', the alps are called such, and the word 'album' means 'white tablet', or an albino is an albino. I guess an albatross must be white.Looking into word histories tells you about all sorts of things.Ciardi must have been working indefatigably on this subject, like Pliny and some of those other guys who did so much work for all of us. ... Read more

Book Description
From New England and Virginia to New Spain and the current Southwest,North America's founding householders-English and Spanish alike-took the limitedEuropean practice of coerced labor and, over the course of two hundred years, transformed itinto a depersonalized and brutal chattel slavery unlike anything that had existed in Europe.What system of language and logic, what visions of religious and civil society, allowed menwho saw themselves both as Christians and cultured humanists to dehumanize and enslavepeople whose cultures and accomplishments were evident to nearly all? In this book we observethe progressive development of a mindset that allowed the settlers to see both NativeAmericans and Africans as "others" who did not merit human status. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from The Other Side, published by The Other Side on March 1, 1998. The length of the article is 1326 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

From the supplier: Native Americans struggle against offensive language used by the dominant culture. The word "squaw," in Native American languages, refers to a woman's sexual parts and is an offensive term to Native American women. The Arizona legislature considered renaming a landmark called "Squaw's Peak" but failed to rename it. Native Americans struggle to find the right words to defend themselves against cultural insensitivity.

Citation Details
Title: What do you say? (responding to language offensive to Native Americans)
Author: June Lorenzo
Publication: The Other Side (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 1, 1998
Publisher: The Other Side
Volume: v34Issue: n2Page: p48(2)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from The Futurist, published by World Future Society on March 1, 1990. The length of the article is 546 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: American Indian culture at risk. (Cherokee anthropologist Robert Thomas reports language and culture loss among Native Americans)
Publication: The Futurist (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 1, 1990
Publisher: World Future Society
Volume: v24Issue: n2Page: p53(2)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Product Description
Contains Census 2000 sample data based on both the 100-percent and sample questions for respondents who reported as American Indian or Alaska Native and specified only one American Indian or Alaska Native tribe that met a specified threshold. Sample subjects include American Indian and Alaska Native languages; family and household size; educational attainment; disability status; journey to work; income in 1999; poverty in 1999; units in structure; house heating fuel; vehicles available; value of home; telephone service available; selected monthly owner costs; and renter costs. Comparable to the 1990 CP-3-7 report, Characteristics of American Indians by Tribe and Language. Volume 1 (Part 1) contains tables 1-49; Volume 2 (Part 2) contains tables 50-80. This report is a companion to the Census 2000 American Indian and Alaska Native Summary File (AIANSF). ... Read more

Book Description
The study of Native American languages has traditionally paid little attention to linguistic convergence, just as linguists focusing on language contact have often neglected Native American cases.Drawing both on fieldwork and on archival research Emanuel Drechsel presents a grammatical, sociolinguistic, and ethnohistorical study of Mobilian Jargon, a Muskogean-based American Indian pidgin of the Mississippi valley.Mobilian Jargon functioned as an interlingual medium of communication among linguistically diverse southeastern Native American groups, and in contact between these groups and non-Indians, from at least 1700 until the mid-twentieth century.It also served as a a sociolinguistic buffer, providing native peoples with some protection against outside intrusions.The linguistic and extralinguistic evidence points to a pre-Columbian origin, and a role as a lingua franca among mound-building paramount chiefdoms of the lower Mississippi valley.Because of its focus on a non-European based case, Drechsel's study questions the universality of some concepts developed in pidgin and creole linguistics.It also carries significant implications for the ethnology of Native American peoples, and for the history of North America, suggesting that Native American peoples have had a greater historical role than has been acknowledged hitherto. ... Read more