Page "Joseph Greenberg" Paragraph 22

Greenberg's work on African languages has been criticised by Lyle Campbell and Donald Ringe, who do not believe that his classification is justified by his data ; they request a reexamination of his macro-phyla by " reliable methods " ( Ringe 1993: 104 ).

Harold Fleming and Lionel Bender, who are sympathetic to Greenberg's classification, acknowledge that at least some of his macrofamilies ( particularly Nilo-Saharan and Khoisan ) are not fully accepted by the linguistic community and may need to be split up ( Campbell 1997 ).

Their objection is methodological: if mass comparison is not a valid method, it cannot be expected to successfully have brought order out of the chaos of African languages.