Week 1: The Genesis of the Theory

Where does one start with Nilo-Saharan? The natural answer is Greenberg. It was Joseph Greenberg who first proposed the concept of the family in 1963 and it is his initial postulations which the bulk of modern Nilo-Saharan studies rest atop. However, it is impossible not to recognize that Greenberg was a controversial figure in linguistics. He actively supported the idea of large, sweeping language families like Indo-Pacific and Eurasiatic, neither of which were ever seriously attested for by other linguists. Greenberg justified these decisions through his process of “mass comparison.” Mass comparison, also known as multilateral comparison, is a method of determining the relatedness of languages which importantly does not attempt to posit a proto-language which the modern languages could’ve theoretically evolved and diverged from. Rather, mass comparison starts with a pool of many languages’ vocabularies and attempts to draw comparison through the presence of similar-sounding words. There are multiple problems which can arise through this methodology, for example, similarities in vocabularies are often attributable to the proximity of one language to another, and do not inherently imply that they ultimately derived from the same language. German is an Indo-European language while Hungarian is a Uralic language, yet their words for math, ‘Mathematik’ and ‘matematika,’ sound similar because both are derived from the Ancient Greek ‘mathēmatikē.’ It is also possible for similarities in words to occur purely out of chance, such as the Portuguese ‘obrigado’ and Japanese ‘arigato,’ both meaning ‘thank you.’

One might naturally wonder why Greenberg’s Nilo-Saharan is still used by linguists today if Greenberg’s method were so unscrupulous. The answer to that question lies in the fact that while Greenberg’s overall body of literature is tinged with large assumptions, his work on African linguistics is actually quite respected. His book The Languages of Africa managed to completely alter the field in ways still respected by modern linguists. Greenberg successfully identified the Bantu languages as a part of the larger Atlantic-Congo family–as opposed to being an independent family–and also successfully refuted the eugenics-based theory of the ‘Hamitic’ languages, mapping them within the larger Afro-Asiatic family. His work on Africa was not completely accepted however, as the Khoisan family is generally accepted in the modern day as three distinct families with significant intermingling, still used today by linguists but as a helpful category and not a true family. This leaves Nilo-Saharan in a complicated position, as it is accepted by some linguists and rejected by others. There are some notable phonetic similarities in pronouns across the proposed family, and the prevalence of the otherwise rare singulative-collective-plurative number system–a trait in which a language has three different words for a singular noun, a plural noun, and the concept of said noun–lead some modern linguists to continue pursuing the theory. At the same time, other linguists believe that Greenberg was cherry-picking his words, as he didn’t even use the Swadesh list–a standardized list of 207 concepts for which there is a word in almost every spoken language–to assemble his comparative vocabularies.

Overall, a consensus is yet to be met on the status of the theory, though I hope that my research can bring us the slightest bit closer to that goal.