Introduction to Handbook of American Indian Languages

Language ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 584
Author(s):  
William Bright ◽  
Franz Boas ◽  
J. W. Powell ◽  
Preston Holder ◽  
James Constantine Pilling ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
American Indian ◽  
Indian Languages

Of Two Minds About Minding Language in Culture

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Silverstein
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Indian Languages ◽  
Universal Truth

Analyzing Franz Boas's critically new insights under the lens of philology, this chapter redefines Boasian linguistics as a globalizing mode of mutual enlightenment through the exchange of grammatical concepts between selves across borders of sound and sense—a process he calls “comparative calibrationism,” the asymptotic pursuit of the always-inaccessible yet ever-closer universal truth. It focuses on the Handbook of American Indian Languages, where Boas dismantled every plank in the language-focused platform on which inferences of evolutionary primitivism stand. Boas also went after the very applicability to American languages of the comparative method of historical linguistics, from which inferences of so-called linguistic families descended from single proto-languages emerged in the nineteenth century.

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