6 - Comparative linguistics of other language families and regions

Summary

In the distant past, no one could speak, which is one reason that people were destroyed at the end of the First and Second Creations. Then, while the sun deity was still walking on the earth, people finally learned to speak (Spanish), and all people everywhere understood each other. Later the nations and municipios [towns] were divided because they had begun to quarrel. Language was changed so that people would learn to live together peacefully in smaller groups.

(Tzotzil oral tradition, Gossen 1984:46–7)

Introduction

Much of the discussion of how language families are established so far has involved the history of Indo-European research, appropriately so, given its role in the development of comparative linguistics. In this chapter, we survey how several other important language families came to be established. The particular language families discussed are well known, universally accepted, were for the most part established relatively early in the history of linguistics, and so potentially had some impact on the development of the historical linguistics. We examine the methods used to establish these families in order to determine what criteria and principles were involved and what lessons we can take from them. We also consider language classification in Africa, Australia, and the Americas, with an eye towards the methods utilized in language classification in these regions.