Appendices to "Is Greenberg's "Macro-Carib" viable?"
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Date
2008
Authors
Gildea, Spike
Payne, Doris L., 1952-
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Boletím Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi
Abstract
Abstract of the published paper from which the posted appendices are takenː
In his landmark work Language in the Americas, Greenberg (1987) proposed that Macro-Carib was one of the major low-level stocks of South America, which together with Macro-Panoan and Macro-Ge-Bororo were claimed to comprise the putative Ge-Pano-Carib Phylum. His Macro-Carib includes the isolates Andoke and Kukura, and the Witotoan, Peba-Yaguan, and Cariban families. Greenberg’s primary evidence came from person-marking paradigms in individual languages, plus scattered words from individual languages collected into 79 Macro-Carib “etymologies” and another 64 Amerind “etymologies”. The goal of this paper is to re-evaluate Greenberg’s Macro-Carib claim in the light of the much more extensive and reliable language data that has become available largely since 1987. Based on full person-marking paradigms for Proto-Cariban, Yagua, Bora and Andoke, we conclude that Greenberg’s morphological claims are unfounded. For our lexical comparison, we created lexical lists for Proto-Cariban, Proto-Witotoan, Yagua and Andoke, for both Greenberg’s 143 putative etymologies (Appendix 2) and for the Swadesh 100 list (Appendix 1). From both lists, a total of 23 potential cognates were found, but no consonantal correspondences were repeated even once. We conclude that our greatly expanded and improved database does not provide sufficient evidence to convince the skeptic that the Macro-Carib hypothesis is viable.
Appendix 1 presents Swadesh 100 word lists for Proto-Cariban, Andoke, Yagua, Proto-Witotoan and its two sub-branches Proto-Huitoto-Ocaina and Proto-Bora-Muinane.
Appendix 2 lists all Greenberg’s (1985) proposed Macro-Carib etymologies, divided into two parts. Part I contains just those putative Macro-Carib forms that he did not propose also extended to Proto-Amerind. Part II contains putative Macro-Carib forms that he believed did pertain to the Proto-Amerind etymologies. For each proposed etymon, Greenberg’s data is given in the first row in bold italics. Our "modern" data is given in the second row. Numbers in the first column refer to Greenberg's Macro-Carib etyma numbers.
The first file posted here is a Word document, the second a pdf file of the same appendices.
Description
Keywords
Macro-Carib, Cariban, Peba-Yagua, Witotoan, Andoke, Linguistics, Bora, Historical, Greenberg, Joseph H. (Joseph Harold), 1915-2001
Citation
Gildea, Spike and Doris L. Payne. 2008. Is Greenberg's "Macro-Carib" viable? Boletím Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. Ciências Humanas, Belém v. 2, n. 2, p. 19-73.