This book has many virtues, or at least its first few chapters do. There is probably no other book which presents such a clear and detailed history of the attempts at classifying languages into families, both the successful attempts and the unsuccessful ones (though Ruhlen seldom acknowledges any unsuccessful ones). The reader will find a great deal of useful information here on this enterprise, information which is hard to find elsewhere.

However, as is well known, Ruhlen has a number of large and dangerous bees in his bonnet, and those bees gradually take over the book. By chapter 7, real linguistics has been left behind, and we read only about Ruhlen's bees.

The huge shortcoming is Ruhlen's willingness to accept, in a wholly uncritical manner, just about every speculative mega-grouping of languages which has ever been proposed. This weakness appears in the earlier chapters, as Ruhlen unhesitatingly accepts a series of increasingly dubious "families', like Uralic-Yukaghir, North Caucasian, Khoisan, Austric, and Indo-Pacific. It comes to a head in chapter 6, where Ruhlen wholeheartedly endorses the vast but shriekingly speculative "Amerind" family proposed by Joseph Greenberg. Chapter 6 is by far the poorest of the first six chapters, and the reader will find much better information on the classification of American languages in Lyle Campbell's American Indian Languages (Oxford, 1997).

Then, from chapter 7 onward, Ruhlen's bees take over entirely, and the book falls apart. Ruhlen's familiar lack of understanding of linguistic methodology comes to the fore, and he descends into increasingly ridiculous claims about method and about results. True, he notes the hostility of professional linguists to the speculations he defends, but he fails to tell the reader anything much about the powerful reasons for that hostility, and he attempts to present the objections as resulting from little more than bad temper and supposed incompetence.

Ruhlen's profound lack of understanding of the formidable difficulties involved in relating any languages at all reaches a nadir on page 383, where he draws a preposterous parallel with biological classification, suggesting that identifying a language family is a task on a par with recognizing a class of butterflies. He should have pursued this analogy: he might have found out just how difficult and controversial biological classification really is.

As always, Ruhlen wants the reader to believe that languages can be successfully classified by the mere collection of miscellaneous resemblances -- which they cannot, as every professional linguist knows all too well. Waving away the laws of probability, he assures us breezily, on pages 255-256, that chance resemblances among languages are unlikely, and that they can be dismissed from consideration. But anybody who who has looked carefully at a few languages knows that chance resemblances are enormously frequent and statistically unavoidable: we have only a few speech sounds with which to construct thousands and thousands of words in every language, and chance resemblances are always with us. Consider English 'much' and Spanish 'mucho' ('much'), which are unrelated, or Italian 'due' ('two') and Malay 'dua' ('two'), which are unrelated, or Basque 'elkar' ('each other') and Dutch 'elkaar' ('each other'), which are unrelated.

Impervious to criticism, Ruhlen ventures to classify all the world's languages into just a few "families": 17 on page 258, and then only 12 on page 390. Readers should be aware that these "families" are, in most cases, no more than Ruhlen's pipe-dreams. Real linguists recognize well over 300 established families, and reducing that number by even one is an almost Herculean enterprise, requiring vast amounts of painstaking work. But Ruhlen doesn't believe in hard work; he believes only in collecting miscellaneous lookalikes from the pages of bilingual dictionaries. For Ruhlen, comparative linguistics is a trivial task, requiring no training, no experience, and no knowledge of the languages being classified, and he advocates ignorance over knowledge.

There are a few irritations even in the sensible sections, such as Ruhlen's (acknowledged) eccentric use of 'Indo-Hittite' for what the rest of the world calls 'Indo-European' -- a use which may bewilder innocent readers.

In sum, this book is a largely reliable source of information on the history of attempts at classification. But Ruhlen's grandiose conclusions, and indeed everything after chapter 6, is best ignored: it's fantasy, no more.

Larry

This is a useful work if approached with caution and taken with a grain of salt. There are two camps of comparative linguists: the clumpers and the splitters. Ruhlen is an extreme example of a clumper, placing languages into families based on tenuous evidence. He is also an excellent writer and an enthusiastic cheerleader. This has led some amateurs into accepting what is a marginal position among professional linguists. This does not mean that he is wrong, but that he should not necessarily be taken at face value.

Regardless of this, his tables are immensely helpful, so long as the reader is aware of which parts are established and which are more speculative.

Caveat lector.

This opus magnum (first of three volumes that will ultimately constitute a guide to the world's languages) addresses the genetic classification of languages. I'm not a trained linguistic but have a passionate interest in historical linguistics and I found this book easy to digest and illuminating. For a state-of-the-art reference work on classification, there is no equivalent! In each language family, the author traces the history of classification within that group and concludes with the very latest research. Each chapter has its own exhaustive bibliography and there is a bibliographic update. The book is illustrated with 21 helpful maps indicating the geographical spread of language families whilst countless tables and figures support the text. There are personal name, language group and language indexes plus a detailed Complete Classification comprising 77 pages. The last chapter, Postscript 1991, is the most fascinating of all since here the author discusses long-range comparisons, Nostratic/Eurasiatic, Amerind, Dene-Caucasian, human genetics as per the work of Cavalli-Sforza (Fig. 9.2: Comparison of the genetic tree and linguistic phyla). I highly recommended this work to all who are interested in linguistics, anthropology and the history of the human race.

Ruhlen's approach to historical linguistics is an extreme manifestation of the use of mass comparison across language families to arrive at family trees which could not be demonstrated using the more clearly reliable traditional comparative methods - because the posited time-depths are too great. Using those methods, we can reconstruct forms and families only a little earlier than the earliest written records. Greenberg and the Nostraticists, reviving some of the 'glottochronological' notions of the 1950s, represent a more moderate version of Ruhlen's view. Some of their proposals have been generally accepted (eg, Greenberg's on Africa). But Ringe and others have argued persuasively (with statistics) that in general their methods are unreliable, because - given enough time - chance similarities are very likely and are indistinguishable from genuine cognates when traditional methods are unavailable. This would apply even more strongly to Ruhlen. He acknowledges that his position is very controversial; but readers should be aware that his book has not succeeded in persuading more than a few linguists that he is right in thinking that we can date or identify 'Proto-World' (the universal ancestor language), still less reconstruct any of it. It is not even regarded as certain (though it is perhaps probable) that there WAS just one Proto-World. Ruhlen's position is not wholly untenable, but beware of regarding it as the best currently available; the consensus is that it is dubious.

Even if Ruhlen should have a case, this would NOT support those who posit links between apparently unrelated languages on the basis of a few unsystematic instances of similar words for similar concepts, eg, very roughly similar words for 'god', 'father' etc around the world, wrongly seen as showing that all languages derive from Sanskrit, Latvian or Hungarian, or that two isolated languages such as Zuni and Japanese are in fact linked (all these examples are from actual proposals).

BTW: most linguistics programs will happily accept a student who knows as many as three languages. Even monoglots can study the subject with profit, learning about more languages as they go.

Comparative linguists can be grouped into two mutually antagonistic camps: the "splitters" who maintain distinction between language families unless rigorous criterion are met and "lumpers" who readily accept the grouping of disparate languages into a single language family on the basis of having somewhat minimal commonality. Ruhlen's controversial work is an engaging account of how "lumpers" have developed a model which distills all extant languages into twelve language families that are direct descendants of a postulated mother tongue.

Roughly two-thirds of the book involves the classification of languages into families and into families of families. The author does this by presenting tables containing selected words in various languages and asking the reader to classify the languages based on similarity. Ruhlen continues on this sort of path until arriving at the final direct descendants of the mother tongue. Throughout this journey Ruhlen guides the reader to the inner workings of language classification. The final third of the book is an attempt at justification of his classification method citing both genetics and archeology as sources of corroborative evidence while also citing sources of disagreement with other linguists.

Ruhlen's work is an insightful introduction to historical linguistics for the lay reader. Unfortunately, the book at times seemed to have less to do with historical linguistics and more with serving as a platform by which to blast opposing schools of thought who believe Ruhlen's judgement as to what constitutes a cognate is more subjective than is desirable. These frequent attacks were a significant detraction from what was otherwise an enjoyable read. Accepting the logic behind Ruhlen's language taxonomy at times required a significant leap of faith and he was unconvincing in dealing with the time depth issues pertaining to linguistic reconstruction. However ethnographic surveys of blood proteins and other genetic data indicate that the movement of peoples from an ancestral homeland in Africa can be reconstructed and this reconstruction corresponds to Ruhlen's linguistic family tree. This remarkable degree of correspondence is compelling evidence that Ruhlen is on the right track.

Ever noticed that the word for water in a lot of seemingly unrelated languages is like "aqua"? If you're interested in historical linguistics then this book is for you. The author takes the comparative method to the extreme, comparing and linking protolanguages into families. It's quite fun if you're a fan of linguistics and logic, but casual readers may get bogged down in the technical minutiae. This work is definitely outside the mainstream of historical linguistics (Ruhlen was a student of Joseph Greenberg, who did pioneering but controversial work in the field at Stanford). However, the logic is flawless and the author is the first to admit the limitations of his methods. And the results are remarkable, pushing the envelope of the method and helping to fill in some of the holes in our knowledge of prehistoric migrations. Fans of Cavalli-Sforza will find these implications particularly revealing.

To read this book is to be a witness to the middle of a brawl that started long ago and will long continue -- the battle beween the Lumpers and the Splitters. Of course, the Great Lumper is the brilliant Joseph Greenberg, and the author of this book, Merritt Ruhlen, is one of his key disciples.

The essays in the book are of varying levels of interest. Half the essays are detailed defenses of Greenberg's Amerind hypothesis. Here, Ruhlen is preaching only to the choir, for Greenberg's detractors, incredibly, take great pride in not having read his work.

Greenberg's methodology is inductive, attempting to discover global truths by comparing word lists from many languages at once. The conventional methodology is deductive, charting the phonetic differences between related languages and running them backwards to reconstruct a parent language.

Languages change so fast that the conventional methodology does not work beyond about a 6000-year horizon. Many linguists therefore refuse to consider earlier stages of language. Greenberg's methods offer a hope of penetrating this veil -- yet like most inductive methods, they are subjective and error-prone.

Future generations no doubt will figure this all out. Until then, those of us who are not active participants in the battle would be well advised to stand clear of the stuff that is being thrown.

Ruhlen is a good writer, with interesting ideas, and this book should be better than it is. Even so, it may be worth a read.

In these 13 studies, the author presents compelling evidence for one common origin for all the world's languages. The book is certain to accelerate research towards the ultimate reconstruction of the proto-language and to cast more light on mankind's unknown past, although much needs to be done. In this regard the work of Alan Bomhard (Nostratic) and Joseph Greenberg (Eurasiatic)is also of great value. Because this work challenges the current orthodoxy it has elicited much venomous criticism from those linguists who claim that genetic relationship cannot be demonstrated after a certain lapse of time. But this is disproved by the 27 global etymologies so thoroughly documented here in the form of a phonetic/semantic gloss followed by current examples from many different language families. It is statistically impossible for this to be the result of chance. When looking at the Nostratic/Eurasiatic or Dene-Sino-Caucasic reconstructions, the correspondences become more and more obvious. In other words, the further back in time one reconstructs, the clearer the similarities become. Recent advances in biological taxonomy (Cavalli-Sforza) serve to confirm this author's classifications of macro-families, and by implication, monogenesis of all languages. This is a well-written book demonstrating impeccable scholarship and is an exciting read. Readers interested in Ruhlen's work may also want to investigate the title "Sprung From Some Common Source," edited by Sydney M. Lamb, available here on amazon.com

This book is so poisonously criticized by another reviewer that one questions the motives. When Joseph Greenberg published his research on African languages in the early 60s, in which he identified only four macro-families, it was treated with the same type of scorn as displayed here. Yet his classification is now generally accepted. As for Amerind, there are some very solid supra-liguistic arguments in favour of classifying the American languages into 3 macro-families: (1) Christy Turner's dental studies show 3 distinct shapes of teeth in the native peoples of the Americas, corresponding with Greenberg's classification. (2) Genetic studies of native Americans also indicate the same 3 groups (Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza). (3) Most archaeologists believe that humans entered the Amricas about 12 000 years ago. If this is so, the "splitter" linguists must explain how so many (up to 200 according to them) language families arose in such a short time. Science will speak for itself and does not need self-appointed champions to foolishly charge against anybody who dares to propose a new theory or express a different opinion. Ruhlen's scholarship is impeccable, he's a great writer and there is an extensive bibliography for every chapter. This well-written book presents compelling evidence for a common origin for all the world's language families. It will in time achieve a place of honour in the fields of historical linguistics, history and archaeology.