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[[Image:YohAsakura.PNG|250px|thumb|Yoh Asakura]]
I cannot figure out if comments should be posted on the top of the page or the bottom. When one chooses "post comment", they wind up at the bottom, where several new omments have just appeared. I don't care either way, just wondering if there is some standard for this.
{{nihongo|'''Yoh Asakura'''|麻倉 葉|''Asakura Yō''}} is the main character in the [[anime]] and [[manga]] ''[[Shaman King]]''. In the original [[Japan]]ese anime, his name is sometimes romanized with a [[circumflex]], sometimes romanized as ''Yoh'', and sometimes romanized as ''You'', while in the English adaptations, his name is always romanized as ''Yoh''.
==Character==
[[User:Timothy_Usher|Timothy_Usher]]
Yoh was born on [[May]] [[12]], [[1945]] and has a bloodtype of A. He hails from [[Izumo, Shimane|Izumo]], [[Shimane Prefecture]], [[Japan]], is a [[slacker]] and wants to become Shaman King so that he could lead an easy life, as well as to fulfill his promise to his fiancée. His fiancée, [[Anna Kyoyama|Anna Kyōyama]], is pushing him into being the Shaman King. Yoh's grandparents paired them up in an arranged marriage in order to keep the family bloodline going (In the [[English language|English]] [[anime]], Anna saved Yoh's life and Yoh promised her that she would be Shaman Queen if he was Shaman King).
Yoh's best friend is the panicky [[Manta Oyamada]] (Mortimer "Morty"). As the story progresses, Yoh's adversaries are often won over by his good nature and become his allies in the Shaman Tournament. Yoh attends Shinra Private Academy along with [[Anna Kyoyama]] and Manta, and along with them is in Class C in the 7th grade.
Yoh is part of the Funbari Hotspring Team (Team Asakura in the English anime). It is stated in the first volume of the manga that Yoh's name means "Leaf" in Japanese. His favourite musician, "SOUL BOB", is a reference to [[Bob Marley]].
Timothy Usher asks what is the source for my comment "reported failure in joining North and South Caucasian". That was another unattributed statement which I read in some Wikipedia page on Caucasian linguistics (the line is now in [[languages of the Caucasus]]), and apparently refers to Greenberg's Eurasian work.
Jeanne has described his furyoku as,"soothing, calm and crystal clear." Jeanne then asks Yoh if he would consider becoming an X-Law.
The estimate of 10,000 years for the traditional method is my guess based on the apparent reluctance or inability of mainstream linguists to propose trees that extend that far in the past. I take it that Nostratic is not considered mainstream either, is that right? What is the oldest family that is considered "mainstream"?
His furyoku however can be quite menacing and oppressive under rage or great stress, identical to that of [[Hao Asakura|Hao's]] as seen by the reaction from Hao's followers and [[Lyserg Diethel|Lyserg]]. This furyoku manifests as flames in his eyes, just like Hao since technically, they are the same person.
==Amidamaru==
I gather that there is a major debate about when exactly were the Americas inhabited -- some say "no more than 12,000 years ago", others belive that some South American sites are older than that, perhaps 20,000. (A respected Brazilian archaeologist claims that there are several sites in Brazil which are older than 12,000 and show a very distinct population, more like the Pacific/Australian type than the Siberian/Mongolian one.) Anyway, the three waves recognized by Greenberg presumably came through Western Siberia. So we have three linguistic phyla in that small region that could not be connected by Greenberg's method. How much older could be their common root?
[[Image:Oversoul_Amidamaru_Evolved.jpg|thumb|Yoh invoking Amidamaru in his evolved Over Soul form, after venturing through the Cavern of Shamans]]
Yoh's spirit ally is [[Amidamaru]], a dead [[samurai]], and his [[sword]] is named Harusame, which means 'Spring Rain' (called "The Sword of Light" in the English dub). Yoh has different special attacks, based on certain positions. One of them is the most common: ''Amida-Ryuu Dai Gokoujin'' (Halo Blade in the English anime). This is when Yoh and Amidamaru do a very powerful slash that can be quite murderous. The other attack, ''Shinkuu Buttagiri'' (or ''Celestial Slash'' in the English dub), is where they emit an energy wave from their sword. At one point in the anime, Yoh and Amidamaru execute an attack, ''Shinkuu Buttagiri'', in which Yoh strikes using the over-soul shield. This attack is presumably a lot weaker than his other [[muscle memory]] techniques.
==Family==
It is revealed in Shaman King that part of the reason why it is critically important for Yoh to become Shaman King is that he has to defeat [[Hao Asakura]] (Zeke in the English anime), who wants to destroy humanity.
When Hao and Yoh first meet, what is notable is that Yoh is a dead ringer for Hao, except for his shorter hair length. Even as it is revealed that Hao was actually Yoh's ancestor, who reincarnated himself, it doesn't seem to explain how the two look so alike. Eventually, it is revealed that the two are actually twins. However, it is revealed that Yoh is in fact also Hao's reincarnation, the rest of Hao's power.
[[User:Jorge Stolfi|Jorge Stolfi]] 17:37, 5 May 2004 (UTC)
Hao had been defeated by the members of the Asakura family one thousand years ago, but he managed to reincarnate himself 500 years later as a member of the Patch Village Tribe (Dobi Village in English anime). In his first reincarnation, he was defeated by [[Yohken Asakura]] (an ancestor of Yoh's) and the spirit [[Matamune]]. Not one to give up so easily, Hao reincarnates himself back into the Asakura family 500 years later, this time as one half of a pair of twins, by accident. The fact was that they weren't just twins. Hao and Yoh were actually once one and the same person, Hao had the larger portion of his soul with all his memories, while Yoh had the smaller portion, as the original Hao's soul somehow split when he got reborn. In other words, Yoh was Hao in his previous life, and they used to be one. Later, the reason why Hao wants Yoh to get stronger is revealed. Hao had said, "Please take care of my other half of my body well. I'll eventually come back to claim it."
The Asakura family is notable for its spiritual prowess and only those with the strongest spiritual abilities marry into the family. Anna, because of her unusually strong [[itako]] powers, is one of the select few who may become a member of the family (through marriage). Yoh, in particular, possesses a rare potential seen in few members of the family.
----
Billposer wrote,
Yoh's father, [[Mikihisa Asakura]] (麻倉 幹久 ''Asakura Mikihisa''), is an ascetic monk and commands two spirits of nature, a kitsune (fox) and a tanuki (raccoon-dog). Keiko Asakura, his mother, is a [[miko]] whose most distinguished ability is hearing spirits telling of impending disaster. Yoh's grandfather, [[Yohmei Asakura]] (麻倉葉明 ''Asakura Yōmei''), is an [[onmyōji]] known for his divining abilities. His grandmother, [[Kino Asakura]], is a master [[itako]] who trains young girls in the art at [[Osorezan]].
"Many of them report errors in the majority of the items that they examined, and some even report that every form examined is erroneous."
==Shamanic Spells & Techniques==
Who is the scholar who reported that "every form examined is erroneous"? To what Greenberg list was he referring, and what source did he cite?
[[Image:OS_Collection.PNG|thumb|The Evolution of Yoh's Over Soul. From top to bottom: O.S. Amidamaru (1st Stage), O.S. Amidamaru (2nd Stage), O.S. Spirit of Sword, S.O.S ~ Byakkou]]
;'''小鬼ストライク Ko-Oni Strike'''
:This is one of the Asakura clan's onmyôji magic. With this magic, an onmyôji can summon shikigami -- familiar spirits -- from leaves or bits of paper to do their bidding. They are most useful, from anything from household chores to assassinations. Yoh never truly mastered Shikigami magic, but displayed the capacity to use it at age 10, under tutelage of his grandfather, Yohmei Asakura. At best, he could only invoke three Shikigami from the leaves. Overall, however, this is a minuscule technique compared to Yoh's more advanced shaman magic.
;'''御経 Okyō'''
:A sutra taught to him by Anna. It is a Buddhist exorcism chant of the Sankiraimon, or the [[Three Jewels|Three Refuges]] that would send any spirit with knowledge of [[Buddhism]] who hears it to the hereafter. However, as it is a written language media, the sutra mainly works on spirit whom identify with the culture of eastern shamanism, which Yoh eventually discovered during his entry exam against [[Silva (Shaman King)|Silva]]; almost sending Amidamaru to heaven.
;'''憑依合体 Hyōi Gattai'''
Jorge Stolfi wrote,
:'''Translation:''' ''VIZ'' "Spirit Integration", ''literally'' "Spirit Unity"
:This shamanic technique enables the shaman to integrate spirits into their body, forming a "unity" of both, their spirit and that of the ghost. The shaman would enter a special trance which enables them to synchronize their spirit with that of the ghost; allowing the ghost to possess their body and enabling the ghost to interact with the physical world. Furthermore, once integrated, the shaman takes on the knowledge & wisdom of the ghost as well as their personality. Though it is unknown when Yoh learned this technique.
;オーバーソウル [[Over Soul|Over Soul]]
"The big question is how long would that take. 10,000 seems to be beyond reach of the traditional method; I would rather not guess a limit for mass comparison, but given its reported failure in joining North and South Caucasian, it could be as short as 30,000 years."
:Initially, Yoh learns how to create the magical Over Soul indirectly during his battle with the Shaman Fight officiant, Silva. By integrating Amidamaru's spirit with that of his sword, Harusame, and subsequently, the heirloom antiquity, the Futsu-no-Mitama no Tsurugi, Yoh forges the ethereal Over Soul. This shamanic technique quickly becomes Yoh's quintessential mode of shamanic combat and his most versatile tool.
;'''超占事略決 - 巫門遁甲 Chō Senji Ryakketsu - Fumon Tonkou'''
I'm not sure whose study you're referring to with Caucasian.
:One of many spells Yoh learned from the contents of the Ultra Senji Ryakketsu that Anna brought to him from Master Yohmei. Using this spell enables one to read the flow of furyoku and determine its course. Effective use can render most magical attacks ineffective.
;'''超占事略決 - 三日月ノ祓 Chō Senji Ryakketsu - Mikazuka no Harae'''
But you're right, the question is how long should this take. Greenberg addresses this in detail in (1987), and Sergei Starostin has some ideas on this you might find valuable - I am neither a statistician nor a glottochronologist,but I'm quite certain than 10,000 is not right, and even more certain that this has often been asserted, but never adequately demonstrated.
:This was a secret exorcist magic left to Yoh by Matamune, to help vanquish the Oni that Anna created. However this magic depleted the reserve furyoku within Matamune, and as a result, sent him to the hereafter.
;'''阿弥陀流 真空仏陀切り Amidaryū: Shinkuu Buddha-giri
Even so, there is a crucial point here which is usually overlooked in this type of discussion: supposing the threshhold of randomness really is 10,000 years, this would only apply between two languages relative to one another. If we can reconstruct two protofamilies which are 5,000 years old, then we might be able to reconstruct their ancestor at 10,000, and so on.
:'''Translation:''' ''VIZ'' "Amida-Style: Shockwave Buddha-Slash", ''literally'' "Vacuous Buddha-Slash"
:Amidamaru's signature technique developed when he was still alive. Its principal use is to strike at adversaries outside of his sword's range. Essentially, it breaks the air with a slash and forces out a powerful shockwave at the adversary. Through constant "Spirit Integration" Yoh learns this technique, albeit through muscle memory. With the introduction of the Over Soul, this technique has been somewhat modified, instead expanding the Over Soul over a distance, rather than a shockwave slash. The name of this technique was changed to "Celestial Slash" in the English dub, possibly to avoid religious implications.
;'''阿弥陀流 後光刃 Amidaryū: Gokōjin
But doesn't this apply only to the traditional comparative method? No. Mass root comparison takes a different route to exploting the same phenomenon, the transitivity of relationship. Languages may be classified relative to one another even if they share NO items in common, provided we can place them within a group which is then relatable to another group as a whole.
:'''Translation:''' ''literally'' "Amida-Style: Halo Blade"
:Amidamaru's most revolutionary technique. It is a dual-sword battō-jutsu technique executed from his unique and legendary fighting stance, called ''[[Tathagata]]''. During execution, both swords are unsheathed at incredible speed at dead-range of the adversary, unleashing a strike with enough power to bust an adversary to shreds. Since then this technique has been modified for use in Over Soul mode; instead using the magical power of the Over Soul to cut the enemy to pieces in one swift sword-draw.
;'''阿弥陀流 大後光刃 Amidaryū: Dai Gokōjin
"By the way, was the African tree also obtained with that method?"
:'''Translation:''' ''literally'' "Amida-Style: Grand Halo Blade"
:The advanced form of the normal Gokōjin. Using the normal, 'Over Soul'-ed Gokōjin as a primer, and powered by Amidamaru's newly-acquired seirei-class powers, this high-level technique focuses furyoku and destroys anything with a decisive strike of cutting furyoku waves using his Over Soul "Spirit of Sword".
;'''阿弥陀流 無無明亦無 Amidaryū: Mu-Mu-Myou-Yaku-Mu'''
Yes, it was, although with the benefit of a greater amount of preceding work to draw from than in the Americas.
:The ultimate technique of Yoh's "Byakkou" Over Soul, conceived during his venture into the underworld. In essence, it's a powerful thrust of the Over Soul's sword which "purifies the very soul". The configuration of the OS and mana released during this technique resembles that of swan taking flight.
;'''Over Soul Manipulation'''
"Besides, I suppose that linguists have already tried to replicate Greenberg's analysis with corrected data, and it would be nice if someone reported on the results of such attempts."
:Not necessarily an ability, but rather creative use of currently-existing ability. Before the time at Amidamaru evolved into a seirei-class spirit, and his Over Soul was still immature, it fell upon Yoh's talent of a shaman to fully utilize the abilities of his Over Soul. To that end, on various occasions, Yoh has altered the shape and formation of his Amidamaru Over Soul. Such formations include a defensive '''Amidamaru Shield (阿弥陀丸シールド)''', which makes use of the Over Soul's armor for protection. As the Over Soul evolved, the Amidamaru Shield was incorporated thusly, eliminating the need to alter its shape for protection.
:Also, though canon only in the anime, was the ''''Over Soul Missile'''', which induces an explosive thrust of his Over Soul to launch himself at his target. He makes use of this method during his final battle with Hao in the anime.
==Funbari no Uta==
Following the conclusion to Shaman King, it is revealed in Takei's shorts, Funbari no Uta, that Yoh and Anna have a son named [[Hana Asakura|Hana]]. He travels around (while wielding Yoh's Futsunomitama blade (the Antiquity) with Ryu looking for five legendary warriors (meaning the legendary warriors are Tao Ren, Chocolove, Horohoro, and Lyserg Diethel) while his parents are away. It appears that [[Tamao Tamamura]] is responsible for looking after him while Yoh and Anna are away.
{{Shaman King}}
Ha ha ha! Linguistics should be a science, but usually is not. To attempt to replicate his results would take lots and lots of time that is better spent denouncing him for thinking it possible!
[[Category:Shaman King characters| Asakura Yoh]]
There have been no such attempts that I know of, and if there are to be, they are more likely to come from his sympathizers than his detractors, who after all are saying that comparison at such depths is by definition a waste of time.
[[Category:Fictional Buddhists| Asakura Yoh]]
[[es:Yoh Asakura]]
[[User:Timothy_Usher|Timothy_Usher]]
[[fr:Yoh Asakura]]
[[pl:Yoh Asakura]]
[[sk:Yoh Asakura]]
Dear colleagues,
Jorge wrote,
"Or is it only a choice between "Greenberg's tree" vs. "no tree"? "
Quite correct, at least in the Americas. One currently in-vogue counter-theory is that dozens of totally different migrant families exchanged their most basic vocabulary including personal pronouns, while passing through Beringia, even though no such phenomenon has been directly observed, and Beringia would have to have been a surprisingly lively and multi-ethnic place c. 12,000 or so b.p....
"Are there linguists who specifically disagree with Greenberg's trees and have proposed different (incompatible) groupings for those languages?"
In Africa, Hal Fleming suggested changes (the recognition of Omotic) which were immediately accepted by Greenberg - just one region where provisional acceptance of JG's results, followed by vetting and modification, proved more fruitful than hostility and reflexive denial.
There have been many other minor changes to this classification, and also Gregerson whose joining of Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan into a large Kongo-Saharan family met with JG's general approval.
In the Americas, radical skepticism and just-so stories (see above), now fueled by the absurd theories of Johanna Nichols, have been the norm. No doubt there are errors to be found, but not this way.
In New Guinea, I have spent much of the last decade figuring out what is going on, and have arrived at a very substantially different (improved, actually!) classification with the benefit of piles of new data.
"IMHO, only a few decades from now we will be able to tell whether "mass lexical comparison" was another prion hypothesis, or another cold fusion affair."
I'd suggest that some of the classifiations are right, some are wrong, some wrong in one way but right in another, etc. It is not as stark as prions or cold fusion. People deal with this in the way they do because to get involved and gain expertise is a life-long endeavor. What is needed is not to negate Greenberg's findings a priori - unless we'd like to start with Africa? - but to vet this work with the traditional techniques that are being promoted. If it is held that traditional methods don't work within this timeframe (I happen to disagree), that is a limitation of the traditional methods, not of Greenberg's.
* I was referring to the mass comparison method, not of the classifications. By the way, was the African tree also obtained with that method?<br>[[User:Jorge Stolfi|Jorge Stolfi]] 15:28, 4 May 2004 (UTC)
Opus33 wrote,
"...readers will not get the impression that Greenberg's views on language comparison or on language families were mainstream."
But some very salient views, such as his view on African classification - this is what, 30% of human languages? - are nearly universally accepted. His last work on Eurasiatic has been criticised for all sorts of reasons, but is actually not too far in its results from those of the Nostratic school, and as Jorge highlights, the alternative is no tree at all.
The main place where his work has been savaged is in the Americas, where splitters predominate - if one takes the current SIL classification at face value, by the age-area hypothesis, human language should have originated in the Americas!
But geneticists and physical anthropologists have confirmed the basic outlines of his classification. You are more likely to find problems by burying yourself in the data and suggesting alternative classifications than by negating the whole thing by a priori objections (which I note require a much lower time commitment than actually engaging the data in a better way!)
"Many of them report errors in the majority of the items that they examined, and some even report that every form examined is erroneous."
Can you name a scholar who reported that "every form examined is erroneous", along with the language/list name Greenberg used, as well as the source cited by the objector? I will check the two lists against one another, and I will be extremely surprised if there is any list in which "every form is erroneous". This is just garbage other people have told you which you have not checked for yourself, but what if you discovered that your source hadn't checked it for themselves, either?
"Make it clear that the "traditional historical linguists" are not just a bunch of fuddy-duddy humanities types poring over manuscripts. They've got their own method, which is very rigorous and has accumulated an excellent track record over the last fifteen decades or so."
Anything you'd care to cite in say, the last thirty years? I'd have a few suggestions myself, but I'm curious as to what you have in mind.
to all:
And for the sake of full disclosure, I knew Joe Greenberg, and I have lots of criticisms of/suggested improvements to his work and methodology, but he was definitely no charlatan. Further, it's clear to me that much of this criticism is just second-hand repetition of what you've heard from others.
If you're going to take the time to accuse a dead man of data fabrication, don't you think you should have checked the dataset yourself?
Someone asserted that the rate of linguistic change is so high that all genetic resemblances will be lost in random noise after a certain period of time - can anyone offer any proof that this has actually occured, and what this period of time must be?
Again, you are only repeating what you have heard from others, who did not know themselves.
*You are presumably referring to a remark of mine. That is essentially a truism, not specific to languages but to any kind of "signal". Even the most fundamental features of a language can be eroded away in time, to the point that resemblances become are virtually undistinguishable from random coincidences and later borrowing. (The Indo-European case system has essentially disappeared from Romance languages and from English; the English plural switched from Germanic-like to Romance-like; and the second person pronoun "you" has almost completely disappeared from Brazilian Portuguese, over a couple of centuries). The big question is how long would that take. 10,000 seems to be beyond reach of the traditional method; I would rather not guess a limit for mass comparison, but given its reported failure in joining North and South Caucasian, it could be as short as 30,000 years.<br>[[User:Jorge Stolfi|Jorge Stolfi]] 15:28, 4 May 2004 (UTC)
[[User:Timothy_Usher|Timothy_Usher]]
____________________________________
[[User:Scythian99|Scythian99]] is quite right, I think, to make sure that readers will not get the impression that Greenberg's views on language comparison or on language families were mainstream. Indeed, he was one of the most controversial linguists of his century, and not easy to write a NPOV article about.
I've tried to be a bit more positive than Scythian99 without glossing over the intellectual scandals. My impression is that the early African work is indeed generally respected, and so were the early contributions to typological study. It was in his later work that Greenberg got into the biggest controversy, to the point of people questioning his competence.
[[User:Opus33|Opus33]] 01:26, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)
----
Dear colleagues,
I've edited the article with the intent of making clearer that there really two objections to Greenberg's mass-comparison work:
*whether we can trust the basic method
*whether we can trust the data that Greenberg fed into the method
Both are important. For instance, if it turns out that only the second criticism is valid, we can hope that future scholars will be able to apply the method with greater scholarly acceptance. But both points should be made.
In connection with this, I've re-inserted [[User:Billposer]]'s sentence:
:Many of them report errors in the majority of the items that they examined, and some even report that every form examined is erroneous.
which strikes me as very important and relevant in this connection. I hope this will not strike editor [[User:Jorge Stolfi]] as unfair. Cheers, [[User:Opus33|Opus33]] 22:29, 2 May 2004 (UTC)
----
I an unhappy about the last round of edits chiefly becuse they moved the "data accuracy" criticisms into the section about the weaknesses of the methodology. The two issues are largely independent and should be addressed as such. Besides, I suppose that linguists have already tried to replicate Greenberg's analysis with corrected data, and it would be nice if someone reported on the results of such attempts.<br>Moreover, from the references given, it seems that that the "data accuracy" criticisms were directed mostly against the Amerind family work, whereas the Eurasian work is mostly rejected because of the methodology alone. (If that is not the case, then some references about errors in the Eurasian data are in order.)<br>Now, speaking as an outsider, I can appreciate (perhaps better than most linguists) the statistical and conceptual problems in Greenberg's method, and I cannot criticize those linguists who prudently reject it. Yet the strong feelings which I see in the debate, and the use of terms like "the ''community'' of historical linguists", make me think that the polemic may be fueled in no small part by academic socio-politics, rather than purely scientific issues.<br>That such "fuel" exists is undeniable. Linguists who have been teaching for decades that the bogus lexical comparisons of armchair linguists are worthless pseudo-science may be understandably upset at seing the idea being given academic status. Experts in the comparative method will undestandably feel a visceral antipathy for any development that threatens to make their expertise "old fashioned" if not obsolte, and make them followers rather than leaders. And so on.<br>These observations of course do not affect the valididity of the method and its criticisms, but weaken the significance of the "veredict" passed by "the community".<br>Having seen several such situations in my own field, I cannot avoid seeing parallels betweeh Greenberg's case and other "iconoclastic" revolutions in science, like Wegner's [[continental drift]] theory (which was strongly rejected by the "community" of geologists, before becoming a new dogma), Prusiner's [[prion]] theory (which took decades to be accepted), etc..<br>It is disturbing, for instance, that there seems to be little attempt by critics to separate (1) the data and methodology from (2) the proposed classification; on the contrary, it seems at times that some criticisms of (1) are chiefly motivated by "a priori" rejection of (2).<br>So in my opinion it is too early to pass judgement on the validity of Greenberg's method. At the very least, the article should explain the arguments for both sides, estimate the amount of support that each side has got, but leave the decision to the reader. IMHO, only a few decades from now we will be able to tell whether "mass lexical comparison" was another prion hypothesis, or another cold fusion affair.<br>All the best,<br>[[User:Jorge Stolfi|Jorge Stolfi]] 15:38, 3 May 2004 (UTC)
----
Hi Jorge,
I see your point, and would welcome further editing that made the article satisfactory from your point of view.
My priorities for the article are these:
*Maintain NPOV--hard though that may be to do!
*Make it clear that the "traditional historical linguists" are not just a bunch of fuddy-duddy humanities types poring over manuscripts. They've got their own method, which is very rigorous and has accumulated an excellent track record over the last fifteen decades or so.
*Keep separate the evaluation of the mass-comparison method from the evaluation of the data that Greenberg fed into it--I think we are agreed on this point, and it's only a matter of what gets put where. I now understand why you want to keep the Amerind and Asian discussions separate.
*Make clear that the quality of the data fed into the method was such that a lot of well-informed scholars were outraged (hence my restoring of User:Billposer's sentences). Alas, I don't know of any attempts to rerun the method with better data since Greenberg published his work--perhaps people have been deterred by the huge amount of labor that would be involved.
I would welcome some rewriting on your part that maintained NPOV as you see it, fixing the problems you mentioned while respecting the goals laid out above, with which I suspect you would agree.
One last bit: chucking all the stuff I put in about the "research community" I put in would be wise; that's just bullying and I regret having written it.
Yours very truly, [[User:Opus33|Opus33]] 16:09, 3 May 2004 (UTC)
----
OK, I have moved the data-quality criticisms back to the Amerind section. I have also kept [[User:Billposer]]'s note that many critics found errors in most items that they checked, and also the "garbage in, garbage out" comment, which I believe accurately described the view that many linguists have of that work. (Was that phrase actually used in some of the articles?) Please check and fix as you may see fit.
Should we add that the method has yet to be re-run with corrected American Indian data?
Is it correct to say that the Eurasian work is rejected only because of the method, not because of the data?
Are there linguists who specifically disagree with Greenberg's trees and have proposed different (incompatible) groupings for those languages? Or is it only a choice between "Greenberg's tree" vs. "no tree"?
All the best,<br>[[User:Jorge Stolfi|Jorge Stolfi]] 18:21, 3 May 2004 (UTC)
----
I have restored large sections of my contributions that were summarily deleted, aparently without explanation (including a factual section on Greenberg's Eurasiatic work - the baby in the bathtub?)<br>Judging from what had been deleted, it seems that the revisors were unhappy about my "explanation" of Greenberg's method and especially its presumed "weaknesses". Now, I am not a linguist, so it is quite likely that I bungled my criticisms -- which I trust were perceived by Greenberg himself, and are largely based on statistics, something that I feel a bit more confident to write about. However, deleting the discussion of the method without providing an alternative can hardly be considered an improvement. Without such a discussion, the debate will be reduced to a my-daddy-is-stronger-than-your-daddy shouting match, and lay readers will not get anything useful out of the article. If you see mistakes, please fix them -- or just point them out, and I will be happy to fix them.<br>Ditto for the reference list: the proper response to a perceived anti-Greenberg bias is to add references to pro-Greenberg articles, not to suppress those against him.<br>As for errors of attribution, as long as we are discussing the method it does not matter who said what, or how the idea was originally presented: as in any other science, the method should be presented in the clearest possible terms, and discussed on its own merits. However I agree that this page is not the best forum for that, and perhaps we should create a separate [[mass lexical comparison]] page.<br>All the best,<br>[[User:Jorge Stolfi|Jorge Stolfi]] 14:38, 4 May 2004 (UTC)
: I agree on creating a separate [[mass lexical comparison]] page. Greenberg did a whole lot of work apart from mass comparison (his typology work, especially, is still very notable) and discussion of mass lexical comparison's merits and flaws belongs in its own page. - [[User:Mustafaa|Mustafaa]] 16:40, 4 May 2004 (UTC)
Re the removal of the Eurasian section: This reference seems to be about it
: Greenberg, Joseph H. (2000) Indo-European and its Closest Relatives: the Eurasiatic Language Family – Volume I, Grammar. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
So what was wrong with that section?<br>[[User:Jorge Stolfi|Jorge Stolfi]] 15:28, 4 May 2004 (UTC)
PS. Before I started editing this page, its contents was very critical of Greenberg's work; and later edits were all anti-Greenberg. Even though I tried to point out that the idea in itself is valid (just from statistical theory), I have generally tried to preserve the overall negative tone, trusting that it reflected the mainstream view. However, I now believe that the current text, especially the "weaknesses" section, comes out too negative and unfair. I still believe that the weaknesses are real and recognized even by "Greenbergians", but they certainly do not invalidate the idea.<br>[[User:Jorge Stolfi|Jorge Stolfi]] 15:48, 4 May 2004 (UTC)
== Caucasian ==
Hello Jorge,
The quote in the Caucasian article is,
"The South Caucasian and North Caucasian families are unrelated phyla even in Greenberg's deep classification of the world's languages."
This is a misinterpretation of Greenberg's position. Greenberg believed, as do I, that all natural human languages share a common historical origin, from which they subsequently evolved and diverged - evolution in the strict sense of "descent with modification".
Greenberg saw Kartvelian - and this is also supported by Nostraticists such as Sergei Starostin - as being closer to Eurasiatic than it is to N.Caucasian, just as English is more closely related to German than it is to Hindi, Albanian or French.
I don't know that he had any opinion as to whether the two Caucasian families were easily relatable (as opposed to related, which all languages are), but it's a moot point, since it would be more sensible to compare Caucasian with Eurasiatic as a whole, if one accepts this classification.
Supposing no descendent of Eurasiatic had survived, Kartvelian would still be placable in theory, although with less reliability, relative to the other languages of the world (Joe did have ideas about the outlines of such a classification, it's just that this was not the subject of his Eurasiatic book, as was erroneously suggested in earlier versions of this article). The difference would be the lack of a Kartvelo-Eurasiatic node, just as if English were the only surviving and attested Germanic language, it would be considered an independent branch of Indo-European.
[[User:Timothy_Usher|Timothy_Usher]]
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Timothy, you say
:Greenberg believed, as do I, that all natural human languages share a common historical origin, from which they subsequently evolved and diverged - evolution in the strict sense of "descent with modification".
I happen to believe that too, but there are other possibilities.<br>Consider the biological evolution of modern Homo sapiens. The "seven Eves" popular theory notwithstanding, it is unlikely (indeed near impossible) that all modern humans descend from a single Adam and Eve pair. The species presumably evolved from a population of proto-humans whose genetic makeup drifted far enough from that of other populations to become a separate species. All the while the members of this population remained interfertile and so the whole population would have been substantially homogeneous genetically (numerically at least, 20-30 generations -- 500 to 1000 years -- seem more than enough to do that for a nomadic population.) The big question is how large was this initial population: one extreme camp thinks it was a small population in Africa which radiated only after evolving into modern humans, the other extreme says that the evolution happened over the entire world more or less simultaneously. The former view seems more popular, but the latter has not been ruled out AFAIK (genetic diffusion may be fast enough for that).<br>So the same thing may have happened with languages. One can imagine that, sometime after the necessary genes diffused over the globe, language was "invented" independently in different areas, with onomatopoeic lexicons and a (very rudimentary) random grammar. The result would be several proto-languages with no linguistic connection between them. Each of these proto-languages could have evolved into an independent family with sophisticated syntax, and perhaps two or more of those families managed to survive to this day.<br>My guess is that the "small tribe in Africa" is more likely for biological evolution, and that all languages of today are descendant of the language of that tribe; but it is only a guess.<br>Anyway, language evolution is fundamentally different from genetic evolution, in such a way that even if there were two or more unrelated linguistic phyla 200,000 years ago, is its extremely unlikely that more than one of them would have survived to this day. For this reason, mainly, I believe that all languages of the world have a common ancestor that is substantially more recent than the first human language — perhaps as early as 80,000 to 100,000 years ago<br>On the other hand, I see the simple tree model of language evolution that is assumed by historical linguists as beeing way too simplistic and useless beyond a few millenia. Languages don't just branch, they can mix, too. Saying that English is a Germanic language, or Persian is Indo-European, are attempts to arbitrarily binarize what should be a continuous measure: one should admit that English is X% Germanic, Y% Romance, an perhaps Z% Celtic (in grammar and morphology as well as in its lexicon). The "minor ingredients" can perhaps be ignored in studies spanning a few millennia, but for longer time periods they may cause the official "genetic" ancestor to become a completely irrelevant concept. Of course, if linguists were to admit that languages can mix, they would no longer be able to draw those neat trees that look so nice in their papers...[[User:Jorge Stolfi|Jorge Stolfi]] 14:20, 6 May 2004 (UTC)
: There are some cases of mixed languages that are pretty convincing on grammar and morphology as well as vocabulary (well, at least one: [[Michif language]].) However, this seems pretty rare, and in the normal course of things pretty slow. As far as I know, only one "grammatical" morpheme in English has been borrowed: ''they'', from a closely related Scandinavian language, whose absorption was no doubt facilitated by its similarity to the previous English form (though this depends what you define as grammar vs other components.) Lexicons mix a lot more easily. Of course, as you point out, even the small amount of basic-level mixing that exists will mess things up over a sufficient time scale; but I suspect that timescale is a lot longer than a few millenia (especially given that inter-communal communication has gone up, not down, in the interim, without creating all that many cases to compare.) It would be interesting to try and extrapolate statistics. - [[User:Mustafaa|Mustafaa]] 18:27, 6 May 2004 (UTC)
== American language families ==
Jorge wrote,
"So we have three linguistic phyla in that small region that could not be connected by Greenberg's method. How much older could be their common root?"
See my comments on Caucasian below. It is not that they could not be connected, only they that a node containing all three of these families and only these three would be invalid - were this not so, only one American family would have been identified, with Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut merely its most distant members. Greenberg's refrained from doing this because it cannot be shown that the three American families are closer to one another than to families outside the Americas - in the case of Eskimo-Aleut this is especially clear, since, according to Greenberg and to most Nostraticists, closer to the Eurasiatic families than to Amerind, and was included in JG's Eurasiatic group. Na-Dene for its part has been placed within a larger Dene-Caucasian group - if this is correct, than the relationship between the three families of the Americas is a function of the relationship between Amerind, Eurasiatic and Na-Dene.
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