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Mesoamerican Historical Linguistics and Distant Genetic Relationship: Getting It Straight See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229789004 Mesoamerican Historical Linguistics and Distant Genetic Relationship: Getting It Straight Article in American Anthropologist · October 2009 DOI: 10.1525/aa.1983.85.2.02a00080 CITATIONS READS 10 51 2 authors, including: Lyle Campbell University of Hawai'i System 136 PUBLICATIONS 2,540 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE All content following this page was uploaded by Lyle Campbell on 10 April 2016. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. Mesoamerican Historical Linguistics and Distant Genetic Relationship: Getting It Straight Author(s): Lyle Campbell and Terrence Kaufman Source: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 85, No. 2 (Jun., 1983), pp. 362-372 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/676320 Accessed: 24/02/2010 18:08 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Blackwell Publishing and American Anthropological Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Anthropologist. http://www.jstor.org [85,1983] ANTHROPOLOGIST AMERICAN believe 362 It is hard to critically such proposals. of the conceptual weak- Sapir,Edward thatare WB unaware York: World Book. spinning, since in more 1921Language. New nesstheirof hypothesis are expressed to the Scollon,Ronald thanonearticle, thanks of of Variability in Chipe- versions some 1979236 Years of readersof prepublication InternationalJournal strenously to the methodology wyanConsonants. whomobjected articles Linguistics 45: 332- 342. drawn in those American Scollon usedandconclusions and Suzanne B. K. personal communication). Scollon,Ronald, San Fran- (anonymous, among com- 1979Linguistic Convergence. 1.Chance. Chance similarities Press. much more serious prob- cisco:Academic paredlanguages is a of W. by WB's (1981) repetition Stocking,George Ameri- lemthanimplied matching Plan for the Study of claim that with strict 1974The Boas and Bender's(1969) per 250 In Traditions chance lexical match canIndian Languages. criteriaonly one strict D. Hymes, ed. pp. 454-484. and with less Paradigms. itemsshould be expected, is a Indiana University Press. or two per 100. This Bloomington: criteriaonly one the H. H. given the history of Thoresen,Timothy strangemaneuver, Piper and Calling the relatives of Mayan 1975Paying the Be- searchfor distant genetic of the History of the languages. Wonderly Tune. Journal andother Mesoamerican 11:255-275. to the Macro-Mayan havioralSciences (1953:108), in response be- L. 100 accidental similarities Trager,George Inter- proposal,found a list of Loan-Words in Taos. and Zoque (based on 1944Spanish Linguistics tweenEnglish and Miller Journal of American Zoque items); Callaghan national about2,000 with English 10:144-158. (1962)parodied Macro-Mixtecan Campbell (1973) refuted Zuckerman,Harriet in similarities;and un- and Social Processes by showing that several 1974 Cognitive Bender'sclaims Bender's American Sociological share far more than ScientiElcDiscovery. relatedlanguages more meetings, Montreal. one to expect. To give Association claimswould allow (in the this discussion, we compare substanceto and Mixe- Finnish with the Mayan appendix) forms presented in Zoquean(WB's Zoquean) Historical 1979 (henceforth BW Mesoamerican Brownand Witkowski Mayan- and Distant evidence of their proposed Linguistics 1979)as of these ac- hypothesis. Perhaps some Genetic Relationship: Zoquean fetching than matchings are more It Straight cidental examples demon- Getting but as a whole these others, are indeed an im- stratethat chance similarities in LYLE CAMPBELL distant genetic proposals portantproblem for of Autonoma de Mexico the BW (1979) proposal Untsersidad Nacional generaland for chance in particular, and that Mayan-Zoquean find. TERRENCE KAUFMAN are not difficult to soundcorrespondences in Fin- UnzversZtyof Pitts burgh plausible matchings Wefind reasonably proposed by of the 62 cognate sets mis- nishfor most 2 SO chance number of fundamental far more than the There are a (AA BW 1979, we Witkowski and Brown's Bender (1969) . Moreover, understandingsin predicted by only the henceforth WB 1981) to only Finnish and to 83:905-911, 981, AA limitedourselves saying and Kaufman, 1979. It goes without responseto our (Campbell 62forms of BW be discussion of their impressive picture could 82:850-857, 1980) that a much more mere 62 AA 80:942-944, 1978, we gone beyond the and Brown, put together had from (Witkowski proposed Mesoamerican or had we cited forms henceforthWB 1978) to formsof BW 1979 (or even their methods of trying of all the Finno-Ugric languagephylum and We the vocabularies BW genetic relationship. it will be noticed that demonstrate distant Uralic) languages; of all issues here. as targets the vocabularies hope to clarify these are 1979 permitted lan- objection to WB's efforts and all the Mixe-Zoquean Our most serious for try- the Mayan insufficiently strict criteria that by using relationships, guages. say that Mayan demonstrate distant genetic WB (1981 :907) themselves ing to novices and non- agreements are will lead astray linguistic and Mixe-Zoquean vocabulary they equipped to evaluate linguists who are not RESEARCH REPORTS 363 probably no greater than lONo;with matchings most Germanic languages changed *a to e no better than those presented by BW 1979, under influence of the y(a), which was later lost. chance coupled with other factors (loans, A comparison of Finnish patya, "mattress," onomatopoeia, sound syrnbolism, universals, with English bed reveals no identical correspon- etc.) is indeed sufficient to raise serious doubts. dences, not even in meaning. This example il- 2. DzJfusion.WB (1981:906) say several mis- lustrates how sounds can be different, though leading things about loan words. They believe the similarity in sounds is still readily recog- that ancient loan words suffer the same attrition nized. Greater, less recognizable differences are from the vocabulary as native lexical items and illustrated in a comparison of modern Finnish thus the problem of older loans is less severe hakea "to get, obtain, fetch, look for" with than it might first appear. Loans do undergo English seek (/sik/) and German suchen change and loss just as native etyma, but that (/zu:xan/). The Finnish loan is from pre-Proto- does not make them less a problem; if anything Germanic *sa:keya(cf. Proto-Indian-European it makes them more of a problem. It hardly *sa:g-), which by Proto-Germanic times had seems necessary to cite examples of persistent become *so:kya(*a: to *o:), and other changes old loans; we presented many (Campbell and produced the current forrns (e.g., English Kaufman 1976) involving precisely the lan- umlaut, German voicing of s, the German guages in question here, Mayan and Mixe- change of k to x, and vowel shifts in both, etc.). Zoquean. With Finnish again as our devil's ad- The form was borrowed into pre-Proto-Finnic vocate, we mention others. Proto-Finno-Ugric as *sake-, "to fetch, seek," which became hake- borrowed many items from its Indo-European via the late Proto-Finnic change of *s to *h neighbors, which still exist in Finnish vocab- (Koivulehto 1980). One could hardly call the ulary, for example, grain, honey, bee, orphan, Finnish h/ German z or the Finnish a/ English pig, horn, hundred, hammer, sheep, and l/ German u correspondences mere "surface" many others (Itkonen 1966). Anyone unduly similarities (WB 1981:906), yet such differences impressed by these should consider the still- are not uncommon in borrowed forms. surviving Germanic and Baltic loans in Finnish, Finally, although WB (1981:907) claim that from 1000 to 500 B.C. (the presumed period of they eliminated any forms which on distribu- our Mixe-Zoquean loans in Mesoamerica tional or other grounds seemed likely candidates [Campbell and Kaufman 1976]), for example, for loans, several were missed. We (Campbell daughter, sister, mother, bride, tooth, thigh, and Kaufman 1980) did not list these in our (body) hair, neck, navel, slow, throw, to get response because we assumed their 62 forms to (obtain), ill, big, forehead (Anttila 1972:155- be sufficiently invalidated on other grounds. 164; Koivulehto 1980). Nevertheless, to take one obvious example, WB (1981:906) also say that lexical diffusion BW's (1979) number (43) coati is such a loan; is highly compatible with very similar sound cor- Yucatec cifk
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