Rating: Summary: Your common sense equals a PHD Review: The Origin of Language offers the common reader like me the chance of getting in contact with one of the most cumbersome subjects of all scientific knowledge and investigation, that is, the origin or origins of the languages spoken today and all the extinct ones. And the author, a well known scholar, does it in the simplest of ways, taking you by the hand and letting you into the intrincacies of the field in a very unassumed way, disregarding all the prevalent taboos placed by some of indo-europeanists of the last 200 years, which prefer the warmth of the assented doctrines than to brave new challenging hypothesis. The sensation, in the end, is one of accomplishing a major task only by using your common sense in the major task of classifying languages and group of family languages. Despite not being an specialist on the subject, I do not agree on many of his views , specially the endorsement he does to Mr.Colin Renfrew's theory of the origin in Anatolia ( modern Turkey) of the Indo-european people, but enjoyed pretty much the unpretentious style Mr.Merritt adopted. His view of one common origin to all languages seems reasonable but still lacking more evidences.
Rating: Summary: Fascinating! Pulls you into comparative linguistics. Review: This book makes me wish I was an undergraduate now so I could study linguistics in more detail. Starting with the well-established Indo-European family of languages and moving around the globe and back in time to trace other language groupings, Ruhlen encourages you to decide for yourself at each step what the relationships among the various languages and families are. He also relates these linguistic findings to recent genetic and archaeological discoveries to provide an "emerging synthesis" of the prehistory of modern humans.
Rating: Summary: Doesn't live up to its potential. Review: This book would have been much more enjoyable if it included a 1 or 2 page appendix describing the phonetic system used. I tried to read it on a plane, but without a self-contained way to sound out his examples, it was not as much fun as it could have been. In addition, much space seems to be devoted to the adolescent sniping that seems to be extremely prevalent in the academic linguistics community. It serves as a vivid reminder why I never got along all that well in the academic world. Nonetheless, there is some interesting material presented.
Rating: Summary: A book to infuriate the professionals Review: This book, not be confused with the same author's "On the origin of languages", which is a far more technical work on a similar theme directed towards professionals, is intended for the general reader, and is easy to read. Far too easy, some may think, as it is a book that enrages many (nearly all, in fact) professional linguists, who consider his methods to be worthless and his conclusions nonsense.
Merritt Ruhlen not only believes that all human languages have a common origin, a reasonable enough hypothesis as long as one takes it no further, but he also goes much further, arguing that the common origin can be demonstrated and that it is obvious enough to be recognized in similarities that exist in modern languages. He presents various examples, but one is enough to illustrate the basic point: he reports that the words for water, in five of twelve language families that are normally considered to have no discernable relationship with one another, are (omitting diacritics and some other complications) "ka", "akwa", "okhwa", "akwa" and, again, "akwa". By restricting himself to words like "water", "two", "finger" etc., that have been part of human experience since the earliest times, and are not very likely to be borrowed from other languages, Ruhlen tries to avoid the danger that the similarities result from borrowing. It would hardly do to use words like "telephone" that are similar in many languages simply because the thing itself is something that has been transferred from one culture to another in recent times.
Ruhlen's argument is that the similarity of these words across language families is not a coincidence; his opponents' argument is that he has selected his data to the point that he has just gone through long lists of possibilities in dictionaries until he finds examples that suit his purpose. In the Indo-European family, for example, English "water" doesn't look very promising for including in the above list, but Italian "acqua" looks just fine. The argument then resolves into the question of whether there is a big enough range of possibilities in language families that are unfamiliar to the ordinary reader to allow this sort of selection to seem successful even though there is no genuine relationship to be found. This is a question that the ordinary reader cannot answer, and so what I should like to see would be a book by one of Ruhlen's opponents who sets out the opposite case in an accessible manner. I know of no such book: the late and much regretted Larry Trask (whose own review appears elsewhere in this collection) could have written one, but that is no longer possible.
Rating: Summary: Ruhlen's fantasies Review: This is not a book about comparative linguistics. Instead, it is a book devoted to Ruhlen's personal fantasies. Comparative linguistics, like all linguistics, and indeed like all serious scholarly work, is done by applying rigorous and scrupulous methods to carefully obtained data. The right way of doing comparative linguistics was worked out only at the end of the 18th century, and it has been developed and refined ever since. Before that time, people had no idea how to compare languages, and they worked wholly in the dark. Their favored "method" was nothing more than the assembly of miscellaneous resemblances among miscellaneous languages, in the hope that this might shed light on language origins. But it didn't, and it doesn't: miscellaneous resemblances are meaningless and worthless, as has been amply demonstrated countless times. See any decent textbook of historical linguistics. But this Dark Age procedure is exactly what Ruhlen wants his readers to accept, believe in, and follow. Ruhlen shows no understanding of the numerous and serious obstacles to the comparison of languages, and no understanding of the formidable pitfalls that must be avoided if useful work is to be done. In place of rigor, Ruhlen offers us only lists of miscellaneous resemblances, which, like the forlorn scholars of the past, he wants us to take seriously, and to use as the sole basis for spectacular conclusions. Worse, Ruhlen wants his eager readers to believe that they too can do serious work in linguistics: "Don't believe the blinkered professionals when they tell you that good work requires years of training and experience, or that it requires a comprehensive knowledge of the languages you want to compare. Just trust me when I tell you that any idiot with a bilingual dictionary can do real linguistics, better even than the professionals." There is more, much more. The very first duty of a scholar is to get the data right, but Ruhlen can't even do that. For example, of the 13 Basque items presented on page 65 (as "language B"), four are wrong, and two more are not even native Basque words, but are words borrowed from Latin or Spanish. And there are also some profound problems concerning the origins and earlier forms of several of the others, problems which Ruhlen ignores because he doesn't even know about them: he's just extracted his forms incomprehendingly from a bilingual dictionary. But Ruhlen doesn't care about such humdrum tasks as getting the facts right: he merely wants to persuade readers of the spectacular success of his primitive and wrongheaded approach. So what if the data are wrong: it's the Big Picture that's important, right? Professional linguists, who are all too aware of the enormous difficulty of establishing links between any languages at all, have no time for this sort of nonsense. This shabby book is made even shabbier by Ruhlen's practice of making nasty remarks about those linguists who have quite properly criticized his work -- which means just about every linguist who has ever commented on it at all. He even goes so far as to say nasty things about long-dead linguists of the past, like Meillet (on page 79), apparently on the ground that they too would have condemned his work if they had lived to see it. You will learn nothing about doing comparative linguistics by reading this dreadful book. You will learn only how to join the massed ranks of the linguistic cranks. And we already have more than enough of those. There are thousands and thousands of cranks churning out useless and pathetic "comparisons" like Ruhlen's every year. Ruhlen is more prominent than most, but he is no better. R. L. Trask Professor of Linguistics (mail addresses withheld at Amazon's request)
Rating: Summary: An excellent guide but failed to reach the destination Review: This is one of the best guide book for anyone who wonders "where are we from?" However, the author leaves us unanswered as to "The Origin of Language" like all other linguists who tried to explain us in vain. Nevertheless, his argument against Roman Jakobson's hypothesis on "mama" and "papa" is very convincing. And, moreover, his special attention to other kin terms like "kaka" gives us a meaningful suggestion how to cope with the obstacles on our road in search of the origin of our mother tongue. Nobody can deny his theory that the global languages share the same origin because another kin term "abba" which means "father" in English and Syriac, means also "father" in Korean as well as in Chinese, Hungarian (pronounced <apa>), and "abbe" in French. In short, we owe him thousands of thanks for his wonderful work which lead us very close to our ultimate goal.
Rating: Summary: Excellent guide but failed to reach the destination Review: This is one of the best guide books for anyone who wonders "where are we from?". However, the author leaves us unanswered as to "The origin of language" just like all other linguists. Nevertheless, his argument against Roman Jakobson's hypothesis on "mama" and "papa" is very convincing. His special attention to other kin terms like "kaka" gives us meaningful suggestion how to cope with the obstacles on our road in search of the origin of languages.
Rating: Summary: Disappointment. Review: This man wrote this book to whine over other scholars that disagree with him, to make the reader an accomplice of his thinking. I think that he needs a Psychiatrist! The two or three interesting ideas could be written on a newspaper short article and even that would leave you thinking that such information is good for nothing but to fantasize over a mother tongue that common sense will see at the best dubious. The book is also boring. Howcome people like this can be regarded as a specialist?
Rating: Summary: Common Tongue Review: This survey of the state of language reconstruction is well worth reading. I'm not yet through it, but those interested in the history of this branch of study will enjoy it. The question of origin is settled by all who study the family tree -- they merely assume that all languages sprang from a common source, and that the source can be reconstructed. Given the ebb and flow of the consensus, it is clear that this field of study will remain a bit goofy, at least until unknown or still to be discovered writing systems are identified and deciphered. Also of interest is "The Lost Civilization of the Stone Age" by Richard Rudgley and Mary Settegast's "Plato Prehistorian".
Rating: Summary: response to larry west Review: West claims that historical linguistics in the 20th Century was largely misguided. This is, of course, a matter of opinion. But his claim would be rejected by the vast majority of contemporary historical linguists, who see their work as building on 20th Century achievements. Even Greenberg's supporters mostly regard Ruhlen's position as badly overstated. And in the mainstream proper Ruhlen is simply not taken seriously; see Trask's review below. My own review was widely perceived as too generous. Can West explain why he regards historical linguistics in the 20th Century as largely misguided? West also claims that genetic evidence mostly confirms Greenberg's thesis. This is an oversimplification/overstatement in that - although the most recent findings do suggest closer links between genetic and linguistic histories than is necessarily to be expected (see McMahon & McMahon in the current issue of TPS) - one cannot assume that linguistic relationships will correspond with genetic relationships between groups of speakers. And even if Greenberg's ideas came to be accepted (and if anything current linguistic thought is heading the opposite way), that would not necessarily afford much comfort to Ruhlenites, whose position, as noted, is more extreme. Ringe and other such researchers do work with the oldest known forms; but in order to examine greater time-depths and wider coverage through mass comparison one must often also work with more recent data. For many language families, this is actually necessary, because older forms are not available or not representative and any reconstructed forms are uncertain. Mass comparison is, of course, used chiefly in just such cases, where there is simply not enough early data to perform proper comparative analyses involving systematic correspondences; where this latter IS possible, one can be much more confident of identifying cognates. This is why it is also used in seeking deep-time relationships between language families - IF the reconstructed proto-forms are regarded as sufficiently well established. West's criticism of Ringe is thus off-target. Actually, during the 20th Century the methods which West criticises were much more typical of the amateur fringe than of real historical linguists, although very few amateurs paid enough attention to the statistical issues. Ringe's work is itself innovative in some respects. We are not embarrassed by the fact that we cannot explain ALL the observed patterns of linguistic evolution. We will continue to study these matters, working with our collleagues in human genetics and other disciplines (Ringe has done just this; see Sykes' 1998 book). But we are not called upon to explain alleged relationships for which there is no good evidence.
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