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Mosan III: A problem of remote common proximity
Academic Work
The Pacific Coast of North America is well-known as the home of one of the most geographically extensive Sprachbunds in the world, stretching from the north of California to southern Alaska. Within this area is found a remarkably diverse yet in many respects homogenous set of languages belonging to a wide range of families and phyla; the job of sorting and classifying these languages into genetic groupings has been, and continues to be, a difficult and contentious problem. One of the principal difficulties in the reconstruction of Northwest Coast (NWC) language families is the tremendous time-depth that must be posited to make any kind of case for genetic relationships between languages of the various families, time-depths which rival or even exceed those proposed for the more familiar examples of Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic. In the absence of written historical records, however, the task of reconstruction on the Northwest Coast has been much more problematical than the reconstruction of Indo-European, which was aided by diverse and extensive attestation of lexical material and grammatical patterns from the intermediate ancestors of the modern PIE daughter languages. Without such aids, establishing deep genetic affiliations on the NWC by means of the traditional historical comparative method is a slow and arduous task, and, rather than relying on historical reconstruction, a number of investigators have attempted to create genetic groupings based on typological similarities between languages of the different families - which, after all, were the original sources of the intuition that such relationships might exist. One of the most famous of these attempts is Edward Sapir's Na-Dene hypothesis - linking Haida, Tlingit, Eyak, and Athapaskan, largely on the basis morphological similarities - and this hypothesis, in turn, sparked one of the most famous debates in Amerindian historical linguistics between Sapir and Franz Boas, who argued that such typological similarities could as well be attributed to diffusion as to common descent.
AW.00105
1997
Language and Linguistics
UBC Working Papers in Linguistics
International Conference on Salish Languages Papers, 32,
International Conference on Salish Languages Papers, 32,
Working Papers
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