Is Greenberg's "Macro-Carib" viable?

Abstract

In his landmark work Language in the Americas, Greenberg (1987) proposed that Macro-Carib was one of the major low-level stocks of South America, which together with Macro-Panoan and Macro-Ge-Bororo were claimed to comprise the putative Ge-Pano-Carib Phylum. His Macro-Carib includes the isolates Andoke and Kukura, and the Witotoan, Peba-Yaguan, and Cariban families. Greenberg's primary evidence came from person-marking paradigms in individual languages, plus scattered words from individual languages collected into 79 Macro-Carib 'etymologies' and another 64 Amerind 'etymologies'. The goal of this paper is to re-evaluate Greenberg's Macro-Carib claim in the light of the much more extensive and reliable language data that has become available largely since 1987. Based on full person-marking paradigms for Proto-Cariban, Yagua, Bora and Andoke, we conclude that Greenberg's morphological claims are unfounded. For our lexical comparison, we created lexical lists for Proto-Cariban, Proto-Witotoan, Yagua and Andoke, for both Greenberg's 143 putative etymologies and for the Swadesh 100 list. From both lists, a total of 23 potential cognates were found, but no consonantal correspondences were repeated even once. We conclude that our greatly expanded and improved database does not provide sufficient evidence to convince the skeptic that the Macro-Carib hypothesis is viable

Cultural Phylogenetics of the Tupi Language Family in Lowland South America

“…Using the LDND matrix for all Tupi languages, using Proto-Carib as reconstructed in Gildea and Payne [74] to form an outgroup, a Neighbor Joining tree was constructed in MEGA v. 5 [75] . The Carib language family is used to root the Tupi tree because classical genetic markers [76] , more recent autosomal data [77] , and previous comparative linguistic work [48] all suggest that Tupi and Carib are more closely related to one another than either is to any other language family.…”

Notes on Yurumanguí grammar and lexicon

“…Rivet (1942), however, has already noted similarities between this form, which he prefers to analyze as <co-una>, with the Chocó root of the verb 'to see': Waunana has oon (Mejía Fonnegra 2000), Emberá u'nu-, and Epena unu-. But there are still wider similarities: Proto-Cariban 'eye' is reconstructed as *ônu-ru (Gildea & Payne 2007); in Cariban, like apparently in Yurumanguí, this is derivationally related to a verb meaning 'to see', reconstructable as *ône (Gildea & Payne 2007). Notable is also Cayuvava ruune ~ un-~ uun-'to see' (Key 2015a) as well as Cuiba tane (Mosonyi et.…”