Merritt Ruhlen

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Merritt Ruhlen is a lecturer in Anthropological Sciences and Human Biology at Stanford, and a co-director of the Santa Fe Institute Program on the Evolution of Human Languages. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1973.

Ruhlen is an extremely controversial figure in the linguistics community, from which he has been all but ostracized, due to his vocal support of the Proto World Hypothesis, which claims that all the extant languages of the world can be traced back to a single proto-language, and that this proto-language can be accurately reconstructed. Most mainstream historical linguists believe that Ruhlen's assumptions and methodology are unsound and unfounded, and think that there is simply no possible way to reconstruct a language that would had to have been spoken at least 30,000 years ago, and most probably many thousands of years before that.

The majority of criticisms of Ruhlen center around his use of mass comparison, which instead of using common historical linguistic methods of comparison, involves comparing the lexicons of however many languages one is investigating and examining them for words in two or more languages which appear similar phonologically and have a similar meaning. Historical linguists argue that most results turned up with mass comparison could easily be cases of simple coincidence. Furthermore, by using mass comparison, Ruhlen makes his data unfalsifiable. If he were to develop regular phonological correspondences between languages as in mainstream historical linguistics, then it would be possible to find examples which violated these correspondences, thus falsifying the hypothesis. This is impossible to do with Ruhlen's data, however, which makes linguists skeptical.

Linguists are also wary of Ruhlen's arguments because of the large volume of errors which have been uncovered in the data he presents, most frequently, mistranslations, citing a form when the form in the parent language is known and is more distant phonologically and semantically from the proposed Proto-World root, and separating cited words with arbitrary morpheme boundaries which do not actually exist.

Ruhlen and his followers reply that the sheer volume of the correspondences which their mass comparisons have turned up is far too large to possibly be due to chance. They insist that even if many of the results were chance similarities, it is beyond belief that there could be so many similarities. More evidence to support Ruhlen can be found in the work of the geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, who has studied the genes in human populations throughout the world and constructed a phylogenetic tree, a structure similar in many respects to traditional trees of language families, showing where in the "tree" given genetic groups separated. The results show a remarkable match-up with Ruhlen's proposed structure or the languages and language families of the world. The typical criticism of this post hoc, partial concordance is that language is far more fluid than genome and has the potential to be completely transformed in a single generation, emphatically unlike genes, so that the relevance of genetic and linguistic histories to each other becomes increasingly tenuous the farther back in time one goes.

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References

  • Cavalli-Sforza, L, Gènes, peuples et langues. Paris: Odile Jacob, 1996.
  • Picard, Marc. 1998. The Case Against Global Etymologies: Evidence from Algonquian. International Journal of American Linguistics 64:141-47.
  • Ruhlen, M., On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy. Stanford University Press, 1996.
  • —————, The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue. Wiley, 1996.
  • Trask, R. L., Historical Linguistics. London: Arnold, 1996.