Talk:Eurasiatic languages

Citations (and explanation) for non-acceptance
The summary states that [many] linguists do not accept the methods, but it doesn't provide any citations for that. (The Mass Comparison page may be a source for citations.)

It also isn't clear whether mainstream linguists are rejecting the very concept of Eurasiatic, or just saying that one specfic paper didn't prove it yet. (I suspect that there are linguists taking each of these positions.)

JimJJewett (talk) 20:24, 4 November 2013 (UTC)


 * I don't have any citations to hand (might have a dig a little later) but the fact that linguists don't take these methods seriously means it's relatively difficult to find people even talking about it beyond the odd blog post. As for the concept of Eurasiatic languages, ask most linguists and I suspect they'll probably say "we don't know and it's unlikely we'll ever know". 阝工巳几千凹父工氐 (talk) 06:14, 5 November 2013 (UTC)


 * I've never heard of anyone who actually rejects the possibility that Eurasiatic once existed. I've also never heard of a mainstream linguist who seriously thought we'll ever have any evidence either for or against it. Richard Keatinge (talk) 12:33, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Is not Dravidian languages included in the family?
Burgaz 00:29, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

No, but it is Nostratic, which is the higher branch to which Eurasiatic-Amerind belongs. 86.140.250.213 (talk) 15:03, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Alleging that an edit was perverse
Today, an anonymous contributor deleted two simple words from the opening sentence. They changed "the late Joseph Greenberg" to "Joseph Greenberg". Now, while a case could be made that this is righteous, that Greenberg's being dead is irrelevant, I would observe that the edit was a perverse action in view of the *way* it was done and in view of certain facts.

It is easy to argue that Greenberg's being alive or dead *is* relevant. Furthermore, it *is a fact* that Greenberg is dead. Since it is a fact, I object to someone suppressing the fact *while exercising bad Wikipedia citizenship*. This person acted anonymously and felt no duty to justify their edit -- they neither discussed the deletion on this page nor made a note for the History page. Hurmata 03:20, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

"Buyeo."
Reverted edit by Licqua alleging the putative Korean-Japanese-Ainu node endorsed by Joseph Greenberg is "known outside Greenberg's work as the Buyeo languages". Licqua, you don't support this claim with any reference. Wikipedia requires that statements be verifiable and yours is not. Anyone familiar with the literature knows that the Korean-Japanese-Ainu grouping is not claimed by anyone to be descended from the Buyeo-Goguryeo languages. Martine Robbeets, for instance, has been emphasizing that the Goguryeo language is not an ancestor of Japanese, but (if actually related to it) a parallel development from a common ancestor. Modern Korean, likewise, is also not descended from the Buyeo-Goguryeo language but, more probably, from the language of Silla. A further problem is that most of the scholars who endorse a Japanese-Korean relationship don't endorse their relationship to Ainu and often vigorously reject it. Get your facts straight before reverting. VikSol 19:23, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Acceptance of Greenberg's classifications

 * Others, citing the wide acceptance of his classification of African languages (cf. Nichols 1992:5), withhold judgment.

Well, given that Greenberg's classification of the African languages isn't that widely accepted anymore, either (Khoisan has been completely abandoned, and many smaller units have been split off from the macrophyla as their relationship to them has never actually been demonstrated, even though Khoisan is the only macrophylum that is completely discredited and Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Kordofanian, renamed Niger-Congo, are retained in practice and their validity has rarely been challenged, only their membership reduced), this point, while true at the time Nichols wrote (1992), can be said to be outdated now, twenty years later. There are about 20 genetic units in Africa that are generally accepted, but not 4 (excluding Austronesian in Madagascar) as in Greenberg's scheme. How about writing "the (at the time) wide acceptance"? --Florian Blaschke (talk) 23:25, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Evidence
It seems that there might be evidence outside of mass comparison that this is true. Se this URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-ice-age-language-ancestor-superfamily-eurasia-20130507,0,1515430.story. This does not prove the family is real, but it is a major advance.

Anonymous192.231.40.3 (talk) 15:34, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

this was apparently posted several hours after I included a brief discussion with a reference to the original paper. What gives? --dab (𒁳) 14:25, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

Addition of Prose on Pagel et al.
I am not sure this was entirely useful. Care must be taken to be accurate on exactly what has been or has not been claimed. No claim on "independent statistical evidence" was made. Indeed, the paper peruses LWED and Tower of Babel, which of course believe in Eurasiatic to begin with. Indeed,
 * Twelve words were excluded because proto-words had been proposed for two or less language families

The paper is a review of the suggestion, it does not present "independent evidence" of any kind, it just appears to make a quantitative statement to the effect that the authors think the reconstruction is plausible.

also,
 *  Their research was able to date a group of core words back roughly 15,000 years.

I am sorry, ThaddeusB, did you even bother to skim the article? I am tempted to revert your edits whole-sale, but perhaps you can still fix it. The fact of the matter is,
 * We use this framework to predict words likely to be shared among the Altaic, Chukchi-Kamchatkan (sometimes called Chukotko- Kamchatkan or Chukchee-Kamchatkan), Dravidian, Eskimo (hereafter referred to as Inuit-Yupik) (SI Text), Indo-European, Kartvelian, and Uralic language families. These seven language families are hypothesized to form an ancient Eurasiatic superfamily that may have arisen from a common ancestor over 15 kya (17) [Bomhard A, Kerns J (1994) The Nostratic Macrofamily (Mouton de Gruyter, Amsterdam, The Netherlands)]

i.e., they picked the seven branches a priori and "their research" didn't make the remotest attempt at dating. They just used a 1994 publication on Nostratic and stuck to what they found there. If you must go out of your way to turn the article into journalistic prose, at least make the prose accurate. Imho a terse but accurate summary is preferrable to a sweeping elaboration littered with factual inaccuracies, but maybe I am being a nerd and nobody cares about the facts here, they just want to savour the headline. --dab (𒁳) 14:25, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Dbachmann, while I agree that Pagel et al's paper does not provide anything remotely resembling definitive evidence and we don't need to go on about it at excessive length, I have at least read the whole thing and I think we could afford to be a little more generous than your characterization. They did try to calculate some dates and their language families do not lack mainstream support. Richard Keatinge (talk) 15:02, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
 * First of all, thanks for not mass reverting - the way to build consensus is editing and discussion, so we are on the right track. I have certainly read the paper; if I was relying on news sources, I would reference them not the paper.  I'm not saying the current article is great, but you can't exactly say the old version was better.  It will take some time to properly flesh this out given its controversial nature.  Hopefully you can stay around and help.
 * Note that "evidence" is not proof. Additionally, I said "believe" to further distance their conclusions from truth.  That said, I dropped the word independent - I agree it is not the best choice of words.  I have always changed "proposed" to "used" and tweaked teh dating wording as well.  Thanks for pointing out my imprecision in my summary sentences.  In the body of the article, I have (already) noted that they picked the language groups and then did the study.  I agree that the fact that they (apparently) only examined groups they expected to make up Eurasiatic is a serious weakness in their paper, but I can't put my opinion in the article.  When critiques of it come out, then we can make note of the complaints.
 * As to the weight issue, I'll direct you to my edit summary where I said I plan to expand the material on prior view points as well. Since it was the Pagel paper that got me interested in the subject, and most people visiting this article in the next couple weeks will have come hear b/c of it, it is a logical place to start.  Unfortunately, Greenberg's book is currently checked out from my library, so it may be a little while until I get to read it.  I have several critiques of it though, so that will be my next agenda most likely.  I am open to suggestions on material (either of) you think should be added to the article.  Between the three of us, we should be able to hash out a nice article. --ThaddeusB (talk) 01:25, 10 May 2013 (UTC)
 * We should. Reflecting on Dbachmann's wise words, this is an article entirely about a concept that isn't generally accepted by an academic consensus and quite possibly never will be. This needs to be clear in the lede and throughout the article. Within that constraint however I suggest that a good role for an encyclopaedic article is to give a little space to those who - like myself and I suspect ThaddeusB - do want to savour not only a headline but a concept offering space for the imagination, possibly maybe perhaps a little insight into the history of humanity, and to savour also some new and ingenious (although weak) ideas/analysis in its support. This is a very different thing to expressing support in our voice for un-evidenceable ideas or for non-evidence claimed to support them. I have no interest in doing that and I appreciate the depth of irritation among real linguists for repeated rubbishy ideas and analysis. Richard Keatinge (talk) 13:30, 10 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Can someone please think of a more descriptive title tham "Pagel et al"?

ITN
I have nominated the Pagel research for "In the news" posting. Feel free to comment on the nomination. --ThaddeusB (talk) 04:39, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

News?
These new "discoveries" have received a great deal of mainstream media coverage, but actual linguists (the people who understand this deeply flawed project) don't seem to be buying any of it - see http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4612 - yet the presentation of this article as a "news" item on the front page gives no indication of it even being controversial. Not good at all. 阝工巳几千凹父工氐 (talk) 15:51, 11 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Two notes - the news blurb clearly indicates it is a tentative data and merely a proposal, not a fact. Second, the article itself makes it quite clear the theory is not well accepted.  That said, suggestions for improvement are always welcome. --ThaddeusB (talk) 17:28, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

nivkh vs gilyak
I have changed the references to Gilyak, which is also the name of an unrelated Tungusic dialect, to Nivkh, which is the autonym. μηδείς (talk) 19:51, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

Linguist blogs and peer-review
Piotr Gąsiorowski will be doing some blog posts critiquing Pagel et al. I know blog posts are not ideal reference material, but it's going to be a while before the lingustics journals get around to publishing any formal responses. While Pagel et al was "peer reviewed", it's not clear whether any of the peers were linguists, or whether it was published in spite of negative peer review. It seems like most linguists were caught by surprise by the paper (or at least by its take-up in the general news media) and are starting from cold. It would be an exaggeration to say they are scrambling, much less panicking; it's more annoyance at a distracting nine-day wonder. jnestorius(talk) 14:29, 12 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Another review by Finnish linguistic Jaakko Häkkinen: here. --Mikoyan21 (talk) 21:59, 14 May 2013 (UTC)


 * And one in Russian "to be published in English soon"; of which Piotr Gąsiorowski says "I think it's important that Alexei Kassian, one of the contributors to the Nostratic database, and a fine historical linguist ... has published a well-considered refutation of the paper and its methodology. He's very open abot the fact that the current version of the database is a hodge-podge of half-processed data, sometimes from outdates sources, and that it will take a few years to turn it into something usable. Coming from a Moscow School linguist, it's a nail in the coffin of the PNAS study." jnestorius(talk) 22:02, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

Roots
I have commented out the Roots section for now. The roots presented are those Ruhlen suggests link Eurasiatic to proto-world. They are not roots that are considered diagnostic to Eurasiatic as such, and there forms are highly speculative. Listing them as roots without a lot off prelude and caveats causes more problems than it solves. A better source would probably be the specifically Eurasiatic ones given in the beginning of Ruhlen's On the Origin of Languages. μηδείς (talk) 20:33, 26 June 2013 (UTC)

"History"
I prefer the title used by the Wiki article on Proto-Human Language, viz. "History of the idea", since that is what this section provides, and not, as I anticipated, the history of Eurasiatic language.--Richardson mcphillips (talk) 03:37, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

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