Merritt Ruhlen

Merritt Ruhlen ( born May 10, 1944 in Washington, DC) is an American linguist. The focus of his work is the classification of languages ​​in the world and the evolution of man in the light of his ability to speak.

Career

Ruhlen studied at the universities of Paris, Illinois, and Bucharest. He received his doctorate in 1973 at the Stanford University with a dissertation on the generative analysis of Romanian morphology. He then worked for several years at Stanford as an assistant to Joseph Greenberg. Since 1994 he is a professor of anthropology and human biology at Stanford and, along with Murray Gell-Mann and Sergei Starostin Anatoljevich director of the Santa Fe program evolution of human language. He is a visiting professor at the University of Hong Kong. Over 35 years, he worked closely with his mentor died in 2001 Joseph Greenberg.

Work areas

Merritt Ruhlen was and is a champion of interdisciplinary methods that combine the results of historical linguistics with human genetics and archeology. This led him to intensive cooperation with the geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli - Sforza and the archaeologist Colin Renfrew. As one of the main representatives of the taxonomic techniques Joseph Greenberg's he was one of the main supporters of the Amerind hypothesis. In Nepal, he participated in the exploration of the isolated language Kusunda, which he assigns to the same old speech layer, which includes the Nahali and the so-called Indo-Pacific languages ​​belong. He examined the relationship of Jenisseischen with the North American Na - Dene languages, which is for the ent - macro Caucasian family of central importance. Another special interest Ruhlens are global etymologies (word equations ) that should ultimately prove the monogenesis all languages.

In particular, the possibility of establishing valid global etymologies is skeptical rated by the vast majority of comparative linguists, since they are not empirically detectable and can only be inferred speculative. Ruhlen and Bengtson write in their article Global Etymologies (1994 ):

Writings

• A Guide to the World's Languages ​​. 1987th Edward Arnold, London, Melbourne, Auckland 1991.
• On the Origin of Languages ​​: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy. Stanford University Press, 1994.
• The Origin of Language. Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue. John Wiley, New York 1994.

A list of other publications is available on the website of Merritt Ruhlen.