Indo-European Practice and Historical Methodology

One element of the recent controversy over historical methodology set o by Greenberg (1987)'s classi cation of American Indian languages has been his reliance on super cial lexical resemblances, with no attempt to establish phonological correspondences and no evidence from submerged morphology. Proponents of this methodology argue (Greenberg 1949, 1987, 1990, 1991 Ruhlen 1987) that this is the methodology used to establish the IndoEuropean language family, and that the success of these methods in the Indo-European case shows them to be reliable.