Merritt Ruhlen

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 controversial methods of language classification.

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.

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.

While Hock, for instance, claims that only reconstruction proves genetic affinity, and that Indo-European, Uralic, Dravidian, Austronesian, Bantu, and Uto-Aztecan have all been proved by successful reconstructions, Ruhlen disagrees, saying: And yet all of these families were universally accepted as valid families before anyone even thought of trying to reconstruct the protolanguage. As an example, Ruhlen mentions Delbrück (1842–1922), who considered Indo-European to have been proved by the time of Bopp at the beginning of the 19th century; the basis for this proof was the "juxtaposition of words and forms of similar meaning." However, Ruhlen's claim was refuted by Poser and Campbell.

Ruhlen believes his classification of the world's languages is supported by population genetics research by the geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, who has identified the distribution of certain human genes in populations throughout the world. He has used this evidence to construct phylogenetic trees showing the evolutionary history of these populations. Cavalli-Sforza's findings are argued to match up remarkably well with Ruhlen's language classification. …