JOSEPH H.

GREENBERG
Department of Anthropology, Stanford Univesity
Stanford, California 94305
Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time.
by Johanna Nichols. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1989. 358 pp. $39.95 cloth.
1
This is a book with a highly complex set of arguments and,
to this reader at least, a frequently obscure style which hinders
comprehension. Moreover, it is provided with no less than 96
tables mostly either with numerical entries regarding the
absolute or relative frequency of certain typological properties
as distributed over various areas of the globe or of the
statistical significance of differences among such distributions.
In addition there are twelve maps containing world-wide plots of
the occurrence of the specific typological features on which
Nichols has based her arguments. She deserves credit for being
willing to attack such large scale historical problems in

linguistics at a time when both historical and broad scale
attempts are not the prevailing fashion.
2
Obviously, in a brief review it will not be possible to
consider all her arguments in detail. However the heart of the
argument is that the comparative method on which historical
inferences have been centrally based can by its nature only give
results for relatively recent time depths. She wishes to use
instead population typology which "gives us the heuristic method
that standard comparative-historical method lacks for great time-
depths."[p.J] Another leitmotiv alongside of population typology
is that diversity as such is a worthy subject of study. Regarding
this she notes that linguistics needs a theory of diversity. "If
we are to have a theory of diversity, we must have ways of
describing diversity, information on its distribution throughout
the world, and ways of explaining variations in degree and types
of diversity. We then apply the comparative method to sheer
diversity and draw inferences about the relative chronology and
the mechanism of the spread of human languages over the earth."
[pg. 231] Her third major emphasis is on geography. For example,
there are certain zones which might be called spread zones and
others which have certain characteristics regarding the
distribution of linguistic diversity. They are polar in many
respects. An example of a spread zone is the western Eurasian
steppe, of a residual zone the Caucasus. Rather more
significantly, she divides the language of the world into ten
principal areas e.g. Africa (but omitting North Africa among
others for reasons to be noted), Northern Eurasia, New Guinea,
Mesoamerica. For her major conclusions however she groups these
ten areas into just three macroareas: the Old World, the Pacific
and the New World. She believes that it is important to keep her
areas discrete, hence the omission of North Africa (between sub-
Saharan Africa and the Near East) and of Eskimo-Aleut to keep
North America and Northern Eurasia separate. Her two other
instances of discreteness are described here in her own words,
"Northern Eurasia is kept discrete from South and Southeast Asia
by not taking any languages for the North Eurasian area from its
Southern periphery." [p.26) This I find vague and hard to
interpret. Finally, "Mesoamerica is kept discrete from North and
south America by arbitrary use of political boundaries."
Elsewhere, she mentions the omission of Indonesia no doubt to
separate South and Southeast Asia from Oceania (Melanesia,
Micronesia, Polynesia). Thus languages from the Philippines,
Java,etc. do not figure in her sample.
Evidently diversity, linguistic population typology and
geography are connected in the following way. In each of her
areas or macroareas, the population which consists of languages
classified by certain typological criteria, are measured for
diversity within areas and between areas in regard to the
relative frequencies of the typological properties which have
been selected. From this we will deduce the ways in which
languages have spread over the world at times too remote to be
amenable to the comparative method.
3
Clearly, we cannot look at all the languages of the world,
even with the exclusion of the areas mentioned earlier, so we
must sample. Her total sample is 176 languages. She tries to get
one language from each lineage, by which is meant either a
genetic isolate or a family, ideally a subdivision of a stock.
For example, Indo-European is a stock, but Germanic is a family.
She is aiming here at a time depth of 2500-4000 years [p.24].
Her views here about the chronologie depths at which valid
linguistic stocks can be detected, namely very shallow, is
essential. Without that, there is no need for her attempt. The
resultant extreme splitting in classification has a profound
effect on her sampling, the results of which we shall see later.
4
Let us consider a few examples. She evidently considers
Northwest and Nakh-Dagestan in the Caucasus as not related. Their
distinction from Khartvelian in the Southern Caucasus is not at
issue. However, the relationship of Northwest and Nakh-Dagestan
seems evident and Catford [1977:254], probably the world's
leading expert on Caucasian, simply states that there are two
major groups of Caucasian languages, Northern and Southern. Here
as elsewhere, whatever view gives the larger number of stocks is
accepted without referring to dissenting opinions. Another
example is Altaic which we learn "is now abandoned." The
reference here is to the summary report of the Altaic panel by
Unger (1990). This is a mere four page effort which does not cite
any linguistic facts. There is also a significant note appended
to this report that shows it is not fully representative.
"Changes in the makeup of the committee which were necessitated
by defection of the original members made the final group
somewhat less sympathetic to Altaic than the original."
5
It is to her credit that she is troubled by what is no
doubt, the strongest evidence for Altaic namely, that " . the
disturbing fact remains that the pronominal roots are just too
similar, in both basic consonantism and patterns of suppletion to
be the product of chance." [p.6] She believes however that the
lexical resemblances are too few and that they (all?) proved not
to be valid, an evident exaggeration.
We are faced then with a paradox. Either the Altaic
languages are related, but if so, very closely, since the
pronominal resemblences are comparable according to her to those
within a single branch of Indo-European such as Germanic, or they
are not, because of the absence of lexical evidence. Actually,
resemblances of the kind found in Altaic pronouns occur between
different branches of Indo-European e.g. 'I,''me,''thou' =
Russian jg, menja, tu = Italian io, mi, tu etc.
However according to her the population-typological offers
other explanations "for the striking similarities in genetically
unrelated languages." These resemblances are most obvious in
personal pronouns but are found elsewhere. Her solution is that
pronouns are sound symbolic. How this derives from the
population-typological approach is hard to see. In regard to m
'first 'second person' which she acknowledges occurs
in a dozen or so Eurasian stocks (to which one should add Eskimo-
Aleut) [p.313, f.n. 3]. Wundt already offered a sound symbolic
explanation according to which m stands for the nearer and ~ for
the farther.
6
To her the sound symbolic properties of personal pronouns
are comparable to those of "mama" and "papa" words but even
stronger. She states it as follows (p.261-262). "Specifically,
personal pronoun systems the world over are symbolically
identified by a high frequency of nasals in their roots, a strong
tendency for nasality and labiality to co-occur in the same
person form, and a tendency to counterpoise this form to one
containing a dental. In the Old World, the labial and nasal favor
the first person; in the New World, they favor the second person.
The Pacific is intermediate, with a distribution of dentals like
that of the Old World and nasals like that of the New World."
What we have here is an involved way of saying that the Old
World has m in the first person and ~ in the second person and in
the New World n in the first person and m in the second person.
The Pacific I cannot interpret. But the m ~ pattern only occurs
in Europe and Northern Asia in the Old World, all in members of
what I call the Eurasiatic family. Elsewhere, the patterns are
quite different e.g. gfi in Nilo-Saharan. In the New World Nadene
again is quite different and Eskimo-Aleut actually goes with the
Old World.
But why should there be this shifting between labial/dental in
the Old World and dental/labial in the New World (subject to the
strong genetic and areal limitations I have already noted)? The
answer is that because their meanings are 'shifters' (Jacobson's
term) or deictics (now the more usual term) and in this way are
unlike the mama-papa terms. But this is at best a bad metaphor.
To equate Eurasiatic ID 'first person' with Amerind ID 'second
person' requires that first to second person or vice versa be a
well attested meaning change. I do not know of any examples.
7
We are told that pronouns are subject to phonetic wear,
etc., but the important process of replication is omitted. That
is an independent pronoun can be affixed to verbs to indicate
subject or object and to nouns to indicate possession and
continue in its original form thus multiplying the chances for
survival. The real proof that this is all special pleading to get
rid of inconvenient evidence is the coherent distribution of
these forms along with other resemblances defining deeper
groupings than Nichols will allow.
But what does it matter, one may ask, if she is sampling at
depths of 2500-3000 years consistently? The problem is that she,
for all of her evident statistical sophistication, seems unaware
of Galton's problem, that of the independence of cases, because
she proceeds purely typologically. For example, she calculates
the percentage of languages in her sample with the distinction
between inclusive and exclusive first person plural pronouns in
each of the three macroareas but never asks whether the phonetic
forms are similar and explainable by genetic inheritance so that
they are in effect a single case. This is a matter to which I
will return later after considering the overall conclusions which
---------------------
8
she develops.
These depend mainly on a "global cline" among the macroareas
which she finds for a number of typological characteristics. To
stay with the inclusivejexclusive distinction, 22% of her sample
in the Old World, 48% in the New World and 57% of the languages
in the Pacific have this distinction. From this and a few other
similar distributions she draws the conclusion that "an early
typological bifurcation took place in Southeast Asia or the
Western Pacific and the New World underwent multiple colonization
by a circum-Pacific population with an Old World admixture that
increased over time." [p.207] This is about the closest we come
to any actual historical hypothesis, one without geographical
detail or chronology.
But let us look more closely at just one of her typological
features, the inclusive/exclusive distinction mentioned earlier.
In the Pacific, as we have seen, the percentage of systems with
this feature is 57% of the languages, actually 28 out of 49
languages. When we look at them however in terms of genetic
affiliations we see that 5 of these are Austronesian, and that
there is an additional Austronesian language Acehnese in
Southeast Asia in the Old World macroarea, i.e. not in the
Pacific. All of these have the inclusivejexclusive distinction
and all go back to the same proto-Austronesian forms. Another
Pacific group, the Australian languages, have 16 out of 18 with
the distinction, and these can at least for the non-Pama-Nyungan
languages be reconstructed for the proto-language. It is
9
particularly striking that hypotheses regarding global clines and
temporally remote circum-Pacific movements should be drawn from
Austronesian forms reconstructible for probably less that 2,000
years ago all counted as independent cases and even occurring in
two different macroareas.
Other problems abound. One is that using another of her key-
concepts, genetic density i.e. number of genetically distinct
stocks per unit area she notes: "the Old World shows low genetic
density even under circumstances which should favor high genetic
density." It is a long established principle that earlier settled
areas show greater diversity. Suppose, however, that we don't
have 150 odd stocks in the Americas but only three? The
difficulty disappears. Again she finds problems reconciling
Beringia as the entry point for the settling of the New World, a
notion she accepts alongside her theory of circum-Pacific
colonization. [p. 228] Related to this is her problem with the
physical evidence as when she notes [pp.224-225]: "the
typological affinities of the linguistic population of the New
World are with Melanesia (although the physiological affinities
of its human population are clearly with Siberia)."
The basic fallacy of the book is the notion that we can use
statistics concerning the relative frequencies of typological
features in different areas to reconstruct remote prehistory. It
is rather the distribution of such typological features (which
themselves normally allow very limited possibilites, e.g. the
presence versus absence of the inclusivejexcusive distinction)
10
which itself requires historical explanation. It can be inherited
within small or large families, be the result of areal contact or
be a quite recent independent innovation. Thus, from the
historical point of view, typological distributions are
explananda,not explanatory principles.
Although as should be evident, I consider this book to be
fundamentally flawed, one cannot but admire the author's
willingness to work on a vast scale. She clearly has an extensive
knowledge of the world's languages and she has noted some
important typological implicational universals in the course of
the work.
References Cited
CATFORD, J.C. 1977 "Mountains of Tongues: The languages of the
Caucasus. Annual Review of Anthropology 6:283-314.
UNGER, J. MARSHALL 1990 "Summary Report of the Altaic Panel,' in
Linguistic Change and Reconstruction Methodology. Edited by
Philip Baldi, pp. 479-82. Berlin:Mouton de Gruyter.