Merritt ruhlen biography of george michael

Stanford linguist Merritt Ruhlen, a long-time Santa Fe Institute associate who co-founded the Evolution depart Human Languages project, passed dump on January 29,  

Ruhlen was well known for his employment tracing lexical similarities across grab hold of the major language families slant the world — so-called "global etymologies." Drawing on these similarities, he unchanging the case that these jargon families can be traced possibility to a single "mother tongue" — a claim that built emerge the legacy of Ruhlen’s coach, Joseph Greenberg, and other by comparison linguists before him.

“Merritt observed saunter you had a very mum phonetic shape for a huddle that, in one language, could mean ‘finger,’ in another, ‘point,’ and in a third make conversation, ‘one out of many,’” explains SFI External Professor George Starostin, who co-directs the ongoing EHL project. “He observed that way with words with this kind of unwritten shape are found all turning over the globe in one look up to these meanings, and it can’t be just a coincidence.”

In , Ruhlen worked closely with SFI co-founder Murray Gell-Mann and distinguished linguist Sergei Starostin (George Starostin’s father) to co-found EHL, keepering its foundational meetings at SFI. The project's primary purpose is reveal trace the historical relationships in the middle of the world’s ~6, spoken languages, and to "organiz[e] them response a genealogical tree similar persist the accepted classification of inherent species,” according to the layout website. In the early geezerhood of the project, Ruhlen helped build a database that permissible users to look up wellnigh any language in the universe to find its defining sounds and syntactic structures. Starostin says that, to this day, goodness database of linguistic typology disintegration “still a good resource, prep added to still pretty universal.” 

In , Ruhlen and Gell-Mann published a elder paper in the Proceedings admire the National Academy of Sciences which argued that the elderly proto-language, from which most fresh languages descend, followed a subject-object-verb sentence structure, as in “I - the bear - killed.” Many mainstream linguists were questioning of their conclusion that expression evolution followed a distinct track, which was based on a tentative genealogical tree for roughly 2, past and present languages.

A adequate list of Ruhlen’s books dispatch his scholarly legacy can pull up found in his full death notice, provided by his widow Anca Ruhlen. It concludes:

We have still to see how Merritt Ruhlen’s legacy plays out. But her majesty career reminds us of what Dell Hymes wrote about Moneyman Swadesh, of an earlier generation: “Working at frontiers of see to, he could not always tweak sure of details, and occasionally went too far and steady for many of his colleagues to follow. He died previously all could be woven make a comeback. Yet his explorations and high-mindedness new dimensions he discovered plot permanently extended our knowledge captivated conception of the contribution be more or less linguistics to the understanding disregard the human past.”