Barry Fell (was: comparative dictionaries & grammars )
Sarah G. Thomason (sally@isp.pitt.edu)
Sun, 15 Oct 1995 09:38:40 -0400
The late Barry Fell, a retired Harvard professor of marine
biology, became famous for his books on prehistory, which included
comparisons of lists of words from Native American languages and
various Old World languages. But anyone wanting to make use of the
data in his books, including America B.C., should be warned that
professional linguists virtually unanimously reject ALL his linguistic
data as evidence of links between New World and Old World languages.
This rejection is not based on prejudice, as Fell and his followers
have claimed, but on analysis of the material, which shows pervasive
errors in interpretation (for instance, prefix+root combinations
in which the prefix and first root consonant are erroneously compared
to a root in some other language, or drastically wrong semantic
interpretations of place names). Of course the critics may be wrong
and Fell right; but at least the unanimous rejection by people
trained in linguistic analysis might suggest a need for caution
in using Fell's research.
Anthropologists and archaeologists have been similarly critical
of the aspects of Fell's work that pertain to those fields. See,
for instance, Stephen Williams' book FANTASTIC ARCHAEOLOGY: THE
WILD SIDE OF NORTH AMERICAN PREHISTORY (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), a book that received numerous
favorable reviews, e.g. in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN (July, 1991).
-- Sally Thomason
sally@isp.pitt.edu