Talk:Adurgari

Merge
I had merged this article because, given the sourcing in the article, it's not clear that this language variety is notable. It doesn't have a language code, and the article states it's a jargon rather than an independent language. I'm not super familiar with this variety, so you may know better, but it looked to me that this content would be better maintained there until sizeable enough to be spun out. — Wug·a·po·des​ 03:21, 4 January 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm not super familiar with this either, but from what I've seen so far it appears that: 1) not much is known about it and it may well be that not much more will ever be known (this lends support to a merge proposal in principle), 2) some vague mentions have been made of a putative relationship to Kohistani (I don't know which Kohistani is meant, but even if we knew we'd need very solid evidence before merging there). I have no issue with this being a standalone article (I think secret languages, if sufficiently unique, should be inherently notable), and I don't see a suitable merge target at present. Of course, if at some point in the future a proper article is created about the Shaikh Mohammadi (and not just a fork-out of the one paragraph we currently have on that redirect's target), then a merge there would make sense. – Uanfala (talk) 03:38, 4 January 2020 (UTC)
 * I'll let it be then, thanks! — Wug·a·po·des​ 15:01, 4 January 2020 (UTC)
 * A heads up,, about the section immediately below. The moral is that it's never a good idea to boldly merge or split articles based solely on what wikipedia says about the topics without checking the sources, and it's almost never a good idea to do so based only on other tertiary texts. – Uanfala (talk) 22:31, 4 January 2020 (UTC)
 * I disagree with your moral since (1) readers still get to the same content through the same links (see WP:PRESERVE), (2) it's easily reversed if someone disagrees or shows it's in error, and (3) draws attention to articles in need of it from people with knowledge and interest (See PageChurn). It's not like there's any harm and clearly the article has benefited from the attention, so I'll continue to follow WP:BRD since it works fine. — Wug·a·po·des​ 01:30, 5 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Sorry but what you appear to be saying is that making a mess was a good idea because after it eventually got cleaned up everything got nicer than before. And the fact that this particular mess got clean up was a stroke of luck, most other articles about smaller languages don't really have any watchers. Maybe what happened here – the merging of two articles that had nothing to do with each other – is an extreme example, but in any number of cases it's a terrible idea to be making big changes to the topic structure without doing at least some of the background reading first. – Uanfala (talk) 01:54, 5 January 2020 (UTC)
 * I think you and I place different value or emphasis on WP:BOLD. If you have further suggestions for the article feel free to leave them here; if you have problems with me, my user talk page is a more appropriate place to raise concerns. For what it's worth, I like this thought from your user page If you think of yourself as efficient, chances are others will see you as sloppy. Conversely, if you expect people to be careful, you'll most likely be seen as a curmudgeon. and perhaps we can both reflect on it. Thanks for being the R in BRD. — Wug·a·po·des​ 11:30, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

The Kohistani connection
I've just removed the mention of the purported similarity to Kohistani from the article. It was sourced to David Phillips' 2001 encyclopedia Peoples on the Move: Introducing the Nomads of the World, which states that Adurgari resembles Kohistani in Pakistan, but this is almost certainly a misinterpretation of the following claim in Olesen's 1987 paper: a detailed analysis of this language would perhaps, indicate the predominance of a particular ethnic group, such as the Kohistāni (of Parwān), among the Sheikh Mohammadi. The rub is that Parwan is in Afghanistan and has nothing to do with Pakistani Kohistan (where the language most commonly known as "Kohistani" is spoken). I'm not quite sure what to make of this statement, maybe it suggest some language of Parwan (like Pashayi) as a source of the vocabulary? Rao 1995 gives five words in the language, and judging from her footnotes, two of these are from Arabic/Persian, while there's one word each with a parallel in Magati and in European Romani. – Uanfala (talk) 22:31, 4 January 2020 (UTC)