This is an ambitious book, considering that there are so many linguistic families in the Americas, far more than in Europe or Asia, more than in Africa, more even than on New Guinea. But Campbell handles this huge task as well as he could, considering that he wants to fit it all into only 512 pages.
Three of the chapters list all the known families and isolates in the Americas, providing for each family a list of languages, often grouped according to some subgrouping, mentioning where some languages are located, in some cases providing a list of phonemes of the proto-language, mentioning what families each family has often been linked with. Though at least in case of the alleged Paezan stock, he puts the stock among these families, even though the stock is far from proven, as he himself admits. He also puts Otomanguean family there, claiming it is proven, though I consider it an unproven family.
Then he has an excellent chapter assessing the faulty methods used to try to relate families to each other, when the evidence is really insufficient. This is followed by a chapter evaluating in some detail several of the more popular unproven groupings, and assessing some other proposals. He gives also his assessment of the probability of each proposal being true, and how confident he is of the assessment. For most of the proposals, very little is given here, after all, he has to fit it all into one book.
He also has a chapter on linguistic areas, showing for each area what are the typological linguistic features of the area.
In general, it is a very useful book, a good contrast to the lumping of families together that some linguists have tried to do. After all, the Americas are not like Europe or Asia, where huge conquests have eliminated much of the former linguistic diversity, and so only a few families and isolates are left. Or in Australia, where some ancient conquest, maybe due to the ancient invasion from India, has resulted in most of Australia having only one family, Pama-Nyungan. The Americas have apparently never had such large conquests (until the recent conquests from Europe), so the rich diversity of families and isolates has been preserved, except of course some languages are already extinct due to the European conquests, and Campbell notes for each language whether it is already extinct. But not unexpectedly, languages which became extinct without science getting any linguistic information about them, are usually not even mentioned, as nothing can really be said about them besides location.
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Thomas Martin
Excellent overview of all the known families and major proposals of families in the Americas.
2014年2月28日にアメリカ合衆国でレビュー済みAmazonで購入
Theodore Keer
Where's the Data?
2002年4月22日にアメリカ合衆国でレビュー済みAmazonで購入
