born May 28, 1915, New York, N.Y., U.S.
died May 7, 2001, Stanford, Calif.
U.S. anthropologist and linguist.
He received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University. He eschewed more orthodox methods of historical linguistics for the approach he termed "mass" or "multilateral" comparison, which involved looking for phonetic resemblances among words in many languages simultaneously. His 1963 classification of African languages into four families ( Afroasiatic , Niger-Congo , Nilo-Saharan , and Khoisan ) was widely accepted. However, his 1987 classification of all American Indian languages into just two families, Amerind and Na-Dene (see Athabaskan languages ) provoked a rancorous denunciation by specialists, who faulted both his data and his method.