Microsoft Word L 2-03-Greenberg-paper doc

part of the nineteenth century. 
In cultural anthropology there was a long-continued debate in the first part of the 
twentieth century concerning diffusion versus independent invention as sources of 
cultural similarities. This debate was largely confused by the indiscriminate use of the 
term diffusion for both genetic (migration) and contact processes (borrowing). The 
concept of the 
Kulturkreis
school in Germany and Austria was based on migration and 
in fact compared by some later members to genetic classification of languages; whereas 
in the United States during roughly the same period (1925-1955) the notion of the 
“culture area” developed on the basis of the spread of cultural traits by borrowing. 

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Joseph H. Greenberg
134 
Genetic relationship with its branching representation is occasionally appropriate 
in culture history. For example the relationship among the various sects of the same 
religion may sometimes be conceived in this way. However, genetic relationship clearly 
does not have the same central position here that it occupies in language. For example, 
we would certainly say that Islam is far more similar to Judaism and Christianity than to 
Buddhism or Confucianism. However it arose through a single gifted individual who 
incorporated elements of both Judaism and Christianity with some of indigenous Arab 
provenience, and still others which were purely personal, to produce a new and unique 
synthesis. 
The complex internal organization of language, which the average speaker is 
basically unconscious of, its fundamental and ubiquitous position in human culture, and 
its early acquisition and basic mode of transmission in family lines make it, so to speak, 
all of a piece. While the process of differentiation as shown in dialect variability can be 
reversed by standardization and softened by interdialectal influence, for the most part it 
proceeds inexorably so that ultimately forms as different as English and Armenian can 
have been derived from the same source. Moreover, the situation is favorable in 
language as contrasted with non-linguistic culture for detecting the results of the 
process of differentiation, as we have seen, because of the arbitrariness of the relation 
between sound and meaning and the existence of numerous independent elements 
exhibiting this relationship.