Greenberg and I: the case of Southeast Asian vulva

Abstract

In a recent (1990) note on megalocomparison James A. Matisoff (hereafter JAM) compared the approach of Joseph Greenberg (hereafter JG) to my own. I thought that I came out rather well, on the whole, but I also felt that the note failed to capture the essential difference between the two approaches. At times an example is worth a thousand words and this is one of those occasions. Robert Bauer (1991) has recently reviewed the Sino-Tibetan and other Southeast Asian terms for vulva, avowedly making use of the JG approach, 'I have combined Greenberg's multilateral comparison... "a method that looks at everything at once... at many languages across a few words" (Greenberg 1987:23), with Buck's technique of sorting modern forms by their Indo-European etyma...' (pp.147-48). He makes extensive use of my reconstructions in both the ST and AT fields, but ends up by setting up PST *dzu(k) mat > P-Chinese *1st mat > Austro-Tai *tupi, the latter as the product of early diffusion in the region.