The Joseph Greenberg Problem: Combinatorics and Comparative Linguistics

“I usually had preliminary notebooks in which I took those elements of a language, which, on the whole, we know are the most stable over time. These are things like the personal pronouns, particularly first and second person, names for the parts of the human body... I would look at a very large number of languages in regard to these matters, and I did find that they fell into quite obvious groupings.”