Rating: 
Summary: A wonderfully interactive look into our origins.
Review: If you are as curious as I am about the dispersal of our species, this is a must read. This book sucessfully tackles the multi-faceted question of where our languages originated, giving the reader a new perspective of the depth of the question "where did we come from?" I loved how the author draws you in to the subject matter by asking you to try your hand at classifying languages. It was very informative and has revived my interest in learning anoter language or two. If you are interested in the origins of Homo Sapiens, this book will give you a perspective that complements theories that you may have encountered in books by Antropologist and Genetic Biologist. I deffinitely recomend it.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting theory + desciption of historical linguistics
Review: Overall quite good and I agree with most of the positive comments from earlier writers (except Newbrook). The only faults I find: a pronunciation key and maps of language migration would help.Reviewer Newbrook, who seems quite intelligent, somehow misses two of the major points of the book: 1: Historical linguistics in the 20th century was largely misguided.
2: Genetic (biological) evidence does mostly confirm Greenberg's thesis. A specific case of #1: to find super-families, one shouldn't proceed by comparing words from current languages, but by comparing their known or imputed root words in the base languages of each family. I.e., it's a stepwise process going back through time. From what I can find through Google (Linguist list), Donald Ringe seems to have taken statistical measures of words from current languages, which, if true, misses the point. Well, whether I'm right on that point or not, Ruhlen's theory is plausible, and backed by physical evidence. That it would be dismissed by the orthodox historical linguists is hardly surprising. That they have no explanation of their own for global patterns of linguistic evolution that fit the migration of humans during prehistoric times may just make them a little bit defensive. The book should be required reading for all linguistics students for those reasons, whether or not they choose to believe the theory or not. It's a good case study in the (messy) way science gets done.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting theory + desciption of historical linguistics
Review: Overall quite good and I agree with most of the positive comments from earlier writers (except Newbrook). The only faults I find: a pronunciation key and maps of language migration would help. Reviewer Newbrook, who seems quite intelligent, somehow misses two of the major points of the book: 1: Historical linguistics in the 20th century was largely misguided.
2: Genetic (biological) evidence does mostly confirm Greenberg's thesis. A specific case of #1: to find super-families, one shouldn't proceed by comparing words from current languages, but by comparing their known or imputed root words in the base languages of each family. I.e., it's a stepwise process going back through time. From what I can find through Google (Linguist list), Donald Ringe seems to have taken statistical measures of words from current languages, which, if true, misses the point. Well, whether I'm right on that point or not, Ruhlen's theory is plausible, and backed by physical evidence. That it would be dismissed by the orthodox historical linguists is hardly surprising. That they have no explanation of their own for global patterns of linguistic evolution that fit the migration of humans during prehistoric times may just make them a little bit defensive. The book should be required reading for all linguistics students for those reasons, whether or not they choose to believe the theory or not. It's a good case study in the (messy) way science gets done.
Rating: 
Summary: Rebuilding Babel
Review: Ruhlen is a Greenbergite and a Proto-Worldist. This fact alone is a guarantee of controversy in linguistic circles. If you are really interested in the origin of language, by all means read this interesting book, but try to balance it with a more traditional view. That said, this is the most comprehensive statement of the Proto-Worldist/Nostratic viewpoint that I've seen. One can criticize it on various grounds (note R. Trask's objections elsewhere on this page). While the occasional incorrect citation can be forgiven--after all, Ruhlen is trying to establish broad affinities here--I find more to criticize in the fact that Ruhlen's super-families are reconstructions at second or third hand. For instance, to get to his precious reconstructed Proto-World roots, he has to go through reconstructed Indo-European and reconstructed Eurasiatic. To take that many steps without hard facts to back them all the way is asking for trouble. Ruhlen is on much safer ground when he supports the theory that the Indo-Europeans originated in Anatolia (Chapter 8), and he is up to date regarding the findings of genetics and archaeology. This is definitely the work of a "lumper," full of interesting ideas, some supported weakly, others more strongly. Worth reading, even if it's not mainstream scholarship.
Rating:
Summary: Un dubbio
Review: Ruhlen usa tre radici akwa, tik, pal per ipotizzare un'unica madre lingua. Ogni radice è dl tipo VCV o CVC: ma le vocali, data l'equivalenza potenziale fra i ed e, fra o ed u si riducono a 3, le consonanti, al netto delle rotazioni, delle palatalizzazioni, delle assibilazioni, delle rotacizzazioni e delle lenizioni, dell'intercambiabilità fra le nasali e fra l e r, si riducono a p (=b, ph, f), k (ecc.), t, m (n), l(r). Totale 5. Con 3 vocali e 5 consonanti si formano poche centinaia di radici. Le probabilità di coincidenza diventano così assai elevate. C'è una storiella che si racconta dalle mie parti (Piemonte): Un vecchio contadino che conosce solo il dialetto piemontese (neppure l'italiano) va a Londra, poi torna al suo villaggio e racconta (sempre in dialetto) agli amici che gli domandano se ha avuto problemi di lingua: "L'inglese è proprio come il piemontese, però i londinesi sono degli stravaganti. Capovolgono il senso delle parole. Usano dei pullman a due piani e li chiamano bassi (bus suona in piemontese bas = basso), le lettere le spediscono con la spazzatura (in piemontese lettera si dice litra/litrë), le strade larghe le chiamano strette (in piemontese stretto si dice streit/strit)". Insomma con tre parole il contadino della storiella stabiliva l'identità fra il suo dialetto e l'inglese, sia pure rovesciato. Allora, prof. Ruhlen, tre radici non sono troppo poche per una conclusione tanto impegnativa?
Livio Berardo, Bra (Italia)
Rating: 
Summary: Ruhlen's position is not untenable but IS dubious
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Say what?
Review: Sort of alright. It will tell you where language developed
and how. I use it to help with early history that I love to study.
It is okay. Jimmy
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic Entry into the Intellectual World of Linguists
Review: Suddenly realizing that I wanted to find out more about linguistics, I didn't have a clue as to where to scratch the surface. I glad I stumbled upon this book. Ruhlen demystifies the inaccessibility of linguistics and shows that they do the same kind of intuitive, rational-based thinking involved in the other sciences. This was helpful to someone like me, who assumed that linguistics catered to an marginal crowd of thinkers who toyed around with arcane and esoteric terminology and symbols. This book proves that thinking about language does not require a PhD in linguistics. Indeed I immensely credit Ruhlen with dismantling the mystique of linguistics. This book presents interesting ideas about the origin of language, includes accessible scientific concepts (to most eduacted laymen) like evolution and also attacks the cultural assumptions made in liguistics that curb the intellectual potential of research on language. Namely I'm talking about how he points out the irrational and discriminatory thinking that goes in in linguistics with respect to European languages and African languages. In summary, for a beginner with a curiosity about the origin of languages Ruhlen's book is a great choice for it candor, accessibility, and intuitive sense.
Rating:
Summary: The first structured job that links all language families
Review: The book Origin of Language is the first job that I have ever seen that tries with scientific method and simple explanation to structure all language families in the world together. Their language genealogic tree and their comparisons with biological and genetic trees of human specie give us a broad idea of how human beings spreaded around the world. Ruhlen and Greenberg are pioneers about the origin of language as Darwin was about the origin of species. I think that to improve the linguistic research, Ruhlen could introduce a mathematic analysis to measure the divergence among languages and from those to reconstruct his genealogical tree of human beings, as is done with genetic research.
Rating:
Summary: Taxonomy is the first step.....
Review: The jacket of Mettitt Ruhlen?s book THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE suggests that he is one of the world?s foremost linguists, however, the contents of his book suggest he is a leader of one faction of linguists, and by his own words, not in the majority.
Apparently, linguists form two camps (terminology from Colin Renfrew) ?lumpers? (those who subscribe to the Nostratic (Russian)-Petersen-Greenberg-Ruhlen perspective that all languages probably evolved from a common source which they can identify, hence the search for the ?origin?of language), and the ?splitters? (those who believe one simply cannot tell if there was a mother tongue because if it existed, the original language is so far back in time as to be unknowable.
Ruhlen makes a fairly compelling case for his argument. He takes the reader through a series of exercises designed to illustrate how with 10-12 words per language one can identify and classify (taxonomy) commonalities that reflect family groupings, and that using the root words for each classification one can then compare and aggregate families into supra-families or groupings. Most interesting to me are the links between languages of the Eskimo-Aleuts and other Indo-European groups.
I was with Ruhlen until he began to discuss Sforza-Cavalli?s work with genetics, which he suggests supports his theory (it does partially). However, in his most recent book (2001) Sforza-Cavalli suggests the Indo-European homeland was probably in the steppes of Russia (Ukraine), not Anatolia, thus agreeing with the traditionalists (Child-Gimbutas), not Renfrew with whom Ruhlen associates himself in this book. Sforza-Cavalli?s synthesis suggests timing is the core issue regarding the movement of the nomadic Kurgan culture into Europe and the expansion of the peoples of agricultural Anatolia into Europe.
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