Joseph H. Greenberg
| Joseph Greenberg | |
|---|---|
| Born | Joseph Harold Greenberg May 28, 1915 Brooklyn, New York |
| Died | May 7, 2001 (aged 85) Stanford, California |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | linguistics, African anthropology |
| Institutions |
Columbia University Stanford University |
| Known for | work in linguistic typology, genetic classification of languages |
| Influenced | Merritt Ruhlen |
| Notable awards | Haile Selassie I Prize for African Research (1967), Talcott Parsons Prize for Social Science (1997) |
| Spouse | Selma Berkowitz |
Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was an American linguist, principally known for his work in two areas, linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages.
(Main source: Croft 2003)
Joseph Greenberg was born on May 28, 1915 to Jewish parents in Brooklyn, New York. His first love was music. At the age of 14, he gave a piano concert at Steinway Hall. He continued to play the piano daily throughout his life.
After finishing high school, he decided to pursue a scholarly career rather than a musical one. He enrolled at Columbia University in New York. In his senior year, he attended a class taught by Franz Boas on American Indian languages. With references from Boas and Ruth Benedict, he was accepted as a graduate student by Melville J. Herskovits at Northwestern University in Chicago. In the course of his graduate studies, Greenberg did fieldwork among the Hausa of Nigeria, where he learned the Hausa language. The subject of his doctoral dissertation was the influence of Islam on a Hausa group that, unlike most others, had not converted to it.
In 1940, he began postdoctoral studies at Yale University. These were interrupted by service in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II, where he worked as a codebreaker and participated in the landing at Casablanca. Before leaving for Europe in 1943, Greenberg married Selma Berkowitz, whom he had met during his first year at Columbia.
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