Merritt Ruhlen (May 10, 1944 – January 29, 2021) was an American linguist who worked on the classification of languages and what this reveals about the origin and evolution of modern humans. Amongst other linguists, Ruhlen's work was recognized as standing outside the mainstream of comparative-historical linguistics. He was the principal advocate and defender of Joseph Greenberg's approach to language classification.
Biography
Born Frank Merritt Ruhlen, 1944, Ruhlen studied at Rice University, the University of Paris, the University of Illinois and the University of Bucharest. He received his PhD in 1973 from Stanford University with a dissertation on the generative analysis of Romanian morphology. Subsequently, Ruhlen worked for several years as a research assistant on the Stanford Universals Project, directed by Joseph Greenberg and Charles Ferguson.
From 1994, he was a lecturer in Anthropological Sciences and Human Biology at Stanford and co-director, along with Murray Gell-Mann (and, until 2005, the late Sergei Starostin), of the Santa Fe Institute Program on the Evolution of Human Languages. From 2005, Ruhlen was on the advisory board of the Genographic Project and held appointment as a visiting professor at the City University of Hong Kong. Ruhlen knew and worked with Joseph Greenberg for three-and-a-half decades and became the principal advocate and defender of Greenberg's methods of language classification.
Books
Ruhlen is the author of several books dealing with the languages of the world and their classifications.
A Guide to the Languages of the World (1975) provides information on the phonological systems and classifications of 700 languages, prefaced by background information for linguists as well as non-linguists. A greatly expanded version of this work was published in 2005 on the Santa Fe Institute web site. A Guide to the World’s Languages, Volume I: Classification (1987) includes classification of the world's languages; a history and analysis of the genetic classification of languages; and a defense of the controversial taxonomic work of Joseph Greenberg. The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue (1994a) On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy (1994b). In 1994, Ruhlen published these two books that have similar themes and titles, but are directed at different audiences. The former book, directed at laypersons, includes exercises in which the readers are invited to classify languages themselves using Greenberg's technique, known variously as "mass comparison" and "multilateral comparison". The latter book is aimed at linguists and maintains that some of the assumptions current among historical linguists are incorrect. One of these assumptions is that the only valid criteria for determining a language family are regular sound correspondences and the reconstruction of its protolanguage. According to Ruhlen, these steps can only be carried out after the fact of familyhood has been established by classification.
Research topics
Multidisciplinary approach
Ruhlen has been in the forefront of attempts to coordinate the results of historical linguistics and other human sciences, such as genetics and archaeology. In this endeavor he has extensively worked with the geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza for three decades and with the archaeologist Colin Renfrew for two decades.
Taxonomic methods
Most of the criticism directed at Ruhlen centers on his defense of Joseph Greenberg's technique of language classification, called "mass comparison" or "multilateral comparison." It involves comparing selected elements of the morphology and basic vocabulary of the languages being investigated, examining them for similarities in sound and meaning, and formulating a hypothesis of classification based on these. Ruhlen maintains that such classification is the first step in the comparative method and that the other operations of historical linguistics, in particular the formulation of sound correspondences and the reconstruction of a protolanguage, can only be carried out after a hypothesis of classification has been established.