Obituary: Joseph Harold Greenberg

Joseph H. Greenberg, one of the most original and influential linguists of the twentieth century, died at his home in Stanford, California, on May 7th, 2001, three weeks before his eighty-sixth birthday.¹ Greenberg was a major pioneer in the development of linguistics as an empirical science. His work was always founded directly on quantitative data from a single language or from a wide range of languages. His chief legacy to contemporary linguistics is in the development of an approach to the study of language—typology and univerals—and to historical linguistics. Yet he also made major contributions to sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, phonetics and phonology, morphology, and especially African language studies.

Joe Greenberg was born on May 28th, 1915, in Brooklyn, New York, the second of two children. His father was a Polish Jew and his mother, a German Jew. His father’s family name was originally Zyto, but in one of those turn-of-the-century immigrant stories, he ended up taking the name of his landlord. Joe Greenberg’s early loves were music and languages. As a child he sat fascinated next to his mother while she played the piano, and he asked her to teach him. She taught him musical notation and then found him a local teacher. Greenberg ended up studying with a Madame Vangerova, associated with the Curtis Institute. Greenberg even gave a concert at Steinway Hall at the age of fourteen, and won a citywide prize for best chamber music ensemble. But after finishing high school, Greenberg chose an academic career instead of a musical one, although he continued to play the piano every evening until near the end of his life.

Greenberg’s fascination with languages began equally early. He went to Hebrew school, which offered only an elementary education in Hebrew, essentially how to read the script. But Greenberg got hold of a Hebrew grammar and taught himself the language. He studied Latin and German at James Madison High School. He had a friend at the Erasmus High School who studied Classical Greek, but James Madison High School didn’t offer Greek. He learned as much Greek as he could from a parallel-text edition of Sophocles’s plays and the etymologies of the Oxford dictionary, and asked his father if he could transfer to Erasmus High School. They went to see the principal, who asked Joe why he wanted to study Greek, Joe simply said ‘I’d like to study Greek’, and the principal refused his transfer. On the way home Joe cried and his father took him into town and bought him a Greek grammar and dictionary from a used-book store. So he taught himself Greek—in fact, that was the usual way he learned languages.

When Greenberg began college at Columbia in 1932, he continued Latin and Greek and taught himself Classical Arabic. He also signed up for classes in obscure languages such as Akkadian and various Slavic languages, annoying professors who thought they could get away without teaching by offering classes they thought nobody would take. Joe discovered comparative linguistics in his junior year and anthropology in his senior year. In his senior year he also audited a class given by Boas on American Indian languages, and on his own read all the Native American language grammars in Boas 1911, 1922. Because of his Classical and Semitic background, Greenberg entertained the idea of becoming a medieval historian specializing in contacts between Christianity and Islam in Africa. But opportunities in the humanities in the Depression were nonexistent, and his anthropology professor, Alexander Lesser, suggested he apply for a Social Science Research Council Ph.D. grant to study under Melville Herskovits, a major Africanist at Northwestern University, and obtained references for him from Boas and Ruth Benedict. Greenberg received the grant and studied with Herskovits at Northwestern. In his third year he did fieldwork among the Hausa in Nigeria (learning Hausa in the process), and wrote a dissertation on the influence of Islam on one of the few remaining non-Islamic Hausa groups.

Greenberg’s intellectual interests continued to expand. Herskovits encouraged him to spend his second year at Yale (1937...