Re: hebrew, the movie Pi

On Sat, 15 Aug 1998, Jay Bowks wrote:

> >>Na "failure" = 51
> >
> Incidentally most Amerindian language have "na" for the
> first person pronoun... ouch again this is pretty insulting stuff
This is a gross overstatement of some rather questionable work done by
Joseph Greenberg, in which he claimed that the languages of the
Americas (North, Central, and South) can be lumped into three families:
Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene, and Amerind (the proposed family that makes most
linguists gag). Having fun with the numerical values of Hebrew letters
is one thing, but casually repeating dubious "facts" such as the Amerind
first person pronoun is quite another.

More recently, Johanna Nichols (and a author whose name I can't recall
off-hand) published an article in _Language_ which gives an areal/
geographical explanation for the higher than expected frequency of first
person nV- forms which is much more convincing than Greenberg's
"paradigms".

Let's be careful out there!

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu                   "All grammars leak."
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~elzinga/                 -Edward Sapir