1. linguistic typology

THE LANGUAGES OF NEW GUINEA, TASMANIA AND THE ANDAMAN ISLANDS

In 1971 Greenberg proposed the Indo-Pacific macrofamily, which groups togeth­er the Papuan languages (a large number of language families of New Guinea and nearby islands) with the native languages of the Andaman Islands and Tasmania but excludes the Australian Aboriginal languages. Its principal feature was to reduce the manifold language families of New Guinea to a single genetic unit, with the exception of the Austronesian languages spoken there, which are known to result from a more recent migration. Greenberg's subgrouping of these languages has not been accepted by the few specialists who have worked on the classification of these languages since, in particular Stephen Wurm (1982) and Malcolm Ross (2005), but their work has provided considerable support for his once-radical idea that these lan­guages form a single genetic unit. Wurm stated that the lexical similarities between Great Andamancse and the West Papuan and Timor-Alor families "are quite striking and amount to virtual formal identity in a number of instances", but considered this to be due to a linguistic substratum.

3. 
   THE LANGUAGES OF THE AMERICAS
   

Americanist linguists classify the native languages of the Americas into two lan­guage families spoken in parts of North America, Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene, and some 600 to 2,000 language families (Diamond 1997:368) that occupy the rest of North America and all of Central and South America. Early on, Greenberg (1957:41. 1960) became convinced that many of the reportedly unrelated languages could be classified into larger groupings. In his 1987 book Language in the Americas, while supporting the Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene groupings, he proposed that all the other Native American languages belong to a single language family. He termed this pos­tulated family Amerind.
Language in the Americas was greeted with a firestorm of criticism. Even before the work had appeared in print, Lyle Campbell, an Americanist, called for it is to be "shouted down" (1986). A virtual who is an Americanist is lined up against Am­erind. The criticisms are directed not so much toward the classification, but primarily to the method of mass comparison used to establish it, which the majority of historical linguists consider inherently unreliable; and toward the large number of errors that have been shown to be present in the sources used by Greenberg, such as wrong or non-existent words, incorrect translations, words attributed to the wrong languages, and unsupported or wrong identification of prefixes and suffixes.

4.