Talk:Khamnigan Mongol

Requested move
Hamnigan subdialect → Khamnigan Mongol – Move to "Hamnigan subdialect" is uninformative and against the overall makeup on Mongolic articles on Wikipedia that assume an additional language level in contrast to the Mongolian language terminology. See my more detailed argument below. G Purevdorj (talk) 14:02, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

The name of this article is problematic, of course, and so is the status of Khamnigan as such. People I spoke to in Höhhot consider Khamnigan to be a subdialect of Mongolian proper / Southern Mongolian which in turn are dialects of the Mongolian language which also includes Buryat and Oirat. This happens to confirm with the official ethno-political position of China, be it coincidence or political pressure or a mix of it. Janhunen, the principial researcher on this variety, considers Khamnigan to be a language. In Chinese / Mongolian, English “language” corresponds to “dialect group”. Janhunen so far failed to publish the conversational materials he collected, which makes assessing this issue quite difficult.

Be this as it may: 1. English Wikipedia throughout follows the western terminological position, be it justified or not, and has to be consistent in that respect. This means that Khamnigan is not a subdialect, but either a language or a dialect. As a dialect, it would have to be called either “Khamnigan Buryat” or “Khamnigan Mongolian” according to the conventions currently used for Mongolic, and who is to decide? As a language, it would have to be called “Khamnigan language”. “Khamnigan Mongol” discreetly hinted at the second position without saying so too clearly. It was a nice name, if inconsistent. 2. The only somewhat detailed argument for Khamnigan as a language is made by the same person who hasn’t published his data (and might have a personal interest in ascribing a taxonomically high status to Khamnigan), while I am not familiar with any detailed arguments to the contrary (though I confess to not knowing all the very limited literature). 3. Ancientsteppe’s move to “Hamnigan subdialect” was not accompanied by any internal editing of the article. I take this to be a sign that he is either not knowledgeable to do such editing, or not interested, as long as Khamnigan doesn’t get into the picture and can be made a non-entity. He didn’t familiarize herself with spelling conventions either, for if it was a subdialect (presumably of Mongolian then), “kh” would apply instead of “h”. Anyway, “subdialect” is uninformative as to the language it belongs to and thus a title to be avoided.

Personally, I am skeptical about Janhunen maximal claim without supplying all the evidence necessary for a third party to assess it. After all, his analysis doesn’t pertain to anything larger than morphemes, and his sample text (Janhunen 2005: 55-58) is fairly understandable, which you wouldn’t expect for a language. But in the absence of sufficient evidence, I would prefer to avoid the issue and not rename the article again. I would prefer to move it back. Obviously, it cannot remain where it is. So I am making this move request.

Ancientsteppe, I suppose you are aware that any renaming of a Mongolic language article is controversial, because I am (more or less) in agreement with all current names, and so I am likely to disagree. So if you see the need to rename any article, please announce it on the talk page first so that we can discuss it. Moving a Mongolic language article without previous discussion (even if done in the good faith, e.g. the moves of Yu Hai) is inadvertently a kind of disruptive behavior and causes me more work than a previous discussion would have done.

Best, G Purevdorj (talk) 13:57, 21 June 2013 (UTC)


 * I reverted the move per BOLD. — kwami (talk) 20:47, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

It's not interesting to me what foreigners write. Ancientsteppe (talk) 08:07, 22 June 2013 (UTC)