Talk:Linguistic homeland/Archive 1

Early discussion
I think that instead of patato", we should use maize, as it's even more divergent in Romance languages.

Catalan: blat de moro French: maïs Italian: granturco Portuguese: milho Romanian: porumb, p&#259;pu&#351;oi, cucuruz Spanish: maíz

Bogdan | Talk 17:44, 29 Sep 2004 (UTC)

'Patato' is kind of a strange example, having it's origin well known, kindof like taking 'automobile' as an example.

I don't know if lion is a good example, it could be confusing for these people who believe that similar words indicate genetic relationship. Btw, I'll include two etymologies of english "Lion"
 * "Word History: Old French lion is the source of English lion, and the Old French word comes from Latin le, lenis. After that the etymology is less clear. The Latin word is related somehow to Greek len, leontos (earlier *lewn, *lewontos), which appears in the name of the Spartan king Leonidas, &#8220;Lion's son,&#8221; who perished at Thermopylae. The Greek word is somehow related to Coptic labai, laboi, &#8220;lioness.&#8221; In turn, Coptic labai is borrowed from a Semitic source related to Hebrew lb&#8217; and Akkadian labbu. There is also a native ancient Egyptian word, rw (where r can stand for either r or l and vowels were not indicated), which is surely related as well. Since lions were native to Africa, Asia, and Europe in ancient times (Aristotle tells us there were lions in Macedon in his day), we have no way of ascertaining who borrowed which word from whom. " (American Heritage Dictionary)
 * "Lion c.1175(first use in English), from O.Fr. lion, from L. leonem (nom. leo), from Gk. leon (gen. leontos), from a non-I.E. language, perhaps Semitic (cf. Heb. labi "lion," pl. lebaim; Egyptian labai, lawai "lioness"). A general Gmc. borrowing (cf. Ger. Löwe) found in most European languages, often via Germanic (cf. O.C.S. liva, Pol. lew, Czech lev, O.Ir. leon, Welsh lew). Used figuratively from c.1200 in an approving sense, "one who is fiercely brave," and a disapproving one, "tyrannical leader, greedy devourer." Verb lionize "to treat (someone) as a celebrity" was used by Scott, 1809, and preserves lion in the sense of "person of note who is much sought-after" (1715), originally in ref. to the lions formerly kept in the Tower of London (referred to thus from late 16c.), objects of general curiosity that every visitor in town was taken to see. Lion's share "the greatest portion" is attested from 1790." (www.etymonline.com)

Comparative Method
This page should mention something about the "Comparative method", and how the Proto-Indo-European roots have been decided. Without that, the information here seems rather useless...
 * Yeah, yeah. I'm going to expand the intro, hoping to take the space off the other end. We want to reference Tree model and Proto-language.Dave (talk) 03:26, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

Vaca
"Vaca" is also not such a good example, since that seems to be a purely Romance root, and not Proto-Indo-European. There are better roots to choose for cow, such as *gwou (cow, bull, ox, not necessarily female), *uksen (bull, ox) and *(s)teuro/*tauro (bull,ox).

The reconstruction part is an example of inductive reasoning, it is obvious that the writer was looking for a way to justify the answer. Why not use herb (herbe, hierba, erba)? It's similar but also spread into languages not classified as romance such as English. In fact, most of the modern English vocabulary comes from Latin and Old French... Does that make English a romance language? No. See also above "lion" for an example, it's a mess.193.132.242.1 11:53, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

Reinventing the wheel
This article does a halfhearted job of proposing and solving an irrelevant question regarding the original location where Latin was spoken, which is not even at issue. Why make up a homeland problem when there's already one available, namely, the Indo-European homeland problem? BrianGCrawfordMA 23:43, 27 February 2006 (UTC)


 * To illustrate the process and its pitfalls, of course. Since we already know where the homeland of Latin was, we can check the results and see how well they fit the reality. We can't do that with the Indo-European homeland question. Not without a TARDIS, anyway. --D. Manrique, 12.107.67.3 19:45, 15 June 2006 (UTC)
 * No, we don't know where it was. For these homelands, there's almost no reality check on most of them. We aren't or should not be proposing or solving anything. All that is the thinnest lace of spiderwebs. This article is Arachnidic. All we should be trying to do is summarizing in much briefer form where some creditable persons have assessed the homeland to be. It is a good guess that Latin originated in Latium, as it is adjacent to Faliscan.The proximity is there. That's the sort of thing that should be said.Dave (talk) 03:36, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

Name
Though this term is used frequently, is it applicable universally. Wouldn't it be easier if the article was entitled "language original homelands" or something more user friendly. Wapondaponda (talk) 20:06, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

The term is used widely in linguistics as a term of art. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.245.203.178 (talk) 05:09, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

info in the wrong place
IMO the info in this article largely does not belong here. Information about the proposed homelands of one or another language family belongs in the article on that family. This is similar to how we don't create a single article "Language phonologies" or "Language grammars" listing (respectively) the phonologies or grammars of all major languages, but put them on the pages of the languages in question. Benwing (talk) 04:51, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
 * You're right, Benwing, of course. One thing WP does do is lists and summaries. There is a list of Proto-languages. This article I think might have a place as a summary article. In that case, each homeland would have a "main" pointing elsewhere. Somebody wants such an article or they would not have gone to the trouble of creating this monstrosity. Can we really say, "you may NOT have such an article?" There is, in other words, a demand for it. We can't give them the complete exposition they desire. Goodness gracious, how many people are on earth speaking how many languages? It makes one humble just to think about it, further, frightened and wondering what our place is among them.Dave (talk) 03:22, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

Clean-up
A massive clean-up of course is required. As I said above, this has to be a summary article. One major flaw I notice right away is the use of Kossinna's Law without reservation. A second is that assumptions are made concerning the validity of family trees. If there's no node, there's no Urheimat. So I think we will have to make the proper cautions and prune this down to only a few of the better studied homelands. More theory, less detail. But, even disregarding those flaws (which I am not going to do), there are inaccuracies all over the place, some rather bad. That just goes to show the topic is bigger than the creators imagined. For example, the centum/satem isoglass isn't used in phylogeny any more. There are no such proto-languages, no urheimats. It is satem and not statem, by the way. Moreover, the Balkans were mainly centum. Proto-Greco-Armenian certainly was. One clarification. The article is about Urheimats. An Urheimat is not the current location of the speakers of a modern language or group of languages. It is the location of a proto-language. Sometimes the two might coincide. The urheimat of Greek was probably Greece, but that is debatable. That's the problem. The Urheinats are equally debatable as the proto-languages.Dave (talk) 03:22, 1 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Agreed. --Daviddwd (talk) 03:36, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

Mixed reference formats
Most of the text used footnotes. Some uses harvard refs in the text. Is this mixed method not confusing? If you don't mind, I am switching to the footnote method, and harvnb.Dave (talk) 05:08, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

Removed unreferenced passages
"There is considerably less dispute regarding the time and place at which particular subfamilies of the Indo-European language family arose,:
 * No there isn't

"with many of these families having origins within the last four thousand years or less."
 * You mean, all of them?

"For example, there is widespread consensus that Latin, from which all of the modern Romance languages are derived, became a distinct dialect of the Italic languages in and around the city of Rome in Italy in the early Iron Age."
 * Rome was not founded then. Latin is older than Rome. Latium is a better candidate. What has this sentence to do with the previous? What's the point?
 * Rome is much older than latin. Before latins there were etruscan people and even they arrived and replaced some people before them. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.22.71.149 (talk) 12:08, 14 May 2014 (UTC)

"Proposals that favor older Proto-Indo-European language origins either assume that the Proto-Indo-European language was confined to a relatively small geographic region for a number of millenia until it started a rapid expansion, or that the unattested languages that were replaced by the attested Indo-European languages were mostly Indo-European languages themselves (as they did in the attested example of the Indo-European Germanic languages replacing Celtic languages in much of the British Isles), or both."
 * I find this incomprehensible. What do you mean? Where did you get that? I don't see the logic or the relevance. We are summarizing IE urheimat theories. What has this to do with it?

"Proposals that favor more recent Proto-Indo-European language origins tend to assume that the language family began to expand not long after the proto-language arose, and that in most cases the oldest attested Indo-European languages replaced non-Indo-European languages (as Latin did, for example, in the attested case of the replacement of the Etruscan language in Tuscany)."
 * That isn't true and furthermore why bring that up?

"At the root of these disagreements at a nuts and bolts level are differing assumptions about the languages spoken by archaeological cultures for which we have no direct attestations concerning their language because they did not have written languages and whose languages were not attested in any detail by people who had written languages, and differing assumptions regarding the extent to which archaeological cultures are derived from each other or represent strong breaks from prior archaeological cultures. For example, an inference regarding whether or not the Beaker culture was associated with a common Indo-European language, based on one's interpretation of the archaeology of this culture, materially influences one's assumptions about the time and place at which the Indo-European languages originated in Western Europe."
 * This English is below WP level. I don't even know what it says.

"All of the proposals attribute Indo-European language expansion in any given era to one or another cultural package that provided technological and/or cultural superiority of some kind over their non-Indo-European precedessors which led to language shift and/or population replacement. The extent to which language shift or population replacement was most important is another central issue of dispute among scholars looking at Indo-European origins."
 * Sorry, non-grammatical and incomprehensible English. If I knew what it said I could answer it.

"There is no consensus whatsoever among linguists regarding any genetic connection between the Indo-European languages and any other known language families, with many linguistics regarding the question as one that it may never be possible to answer with confidence."
 * No consensus? But there is some consensus is there not? Nostratic? Why bring it up anyway? We're summarizing IE urheimat theories.Dave (talk) 06:18, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

Balkan dialects
The Balkan dialects listed belonged to different language groups. Strictly speaking, they have no place here, which is for urheimats. There is no Balkan urheimat, no proto-language from which the languages listed derive. The Balkans are a kind of mountainous island where over the centuries castaways from many lands have been thrown together. That's the main problem. They don't like being thrown together, but all is not lost. Thanks to them we can now clearly define ethnic cleansing and have enriched our literatures and paintings with the world's great war art! What more can you ask? Oh, when there is no war, civilization dies. The ancients have not disappointed us. The linguistic circumstance might be handled as a dialect continuum. Or, substrates might be brought in. I see those efforts as beyond the scope of this article. The urheimats are linked to the tree model. No tree model, no urheimats. There is a group I can put some of this material under. The rest will have to go as irrelevant.Dave (talk) 02:48, 3 February 2012 (UTC)


 * In other words: Your sole reason to question the tree model is that you're suffering of the delusion that war would be "the father of all things"? --80.187.110.67 (talk) 16:31, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

What's with this proto logic?
Urheimat by default is meant to be place from where ancients of some nations arrived. If we are looking for proto-nation, as it is so widelly mentioned in indo-european origins, then we actually are looking too close - any proto-european along with proto-aryan ancestry is from China. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.22.71.149 (talk) 11:50, 14 May 2014 (UTC)


 * It's not "where people arrived", it's where a language first developed and came into use, and who were the people that spoke it. Also, you appear to me to be trying to contradict either the Out-of-Africa hypothesis or the Kurgan hypothesis. Both would be very questionable reasoning on your side, with shoddy data to base your assumptions on to begin with. --80.187.110.67 (talk) 16:24, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Hmong–Mien homeland
I wish I could understand what is mentioned "Ancient DNA evidence" and what is "Recent Y-DNA phylogeny" and how they differs for the same Hmong–Mien group. I suppose that there is some acceptance of that Hmong-Mien have migrated from somewhere else(to be more precise - from north), so in first place there are no ancient local Hmong–Mien DNA to compare. Second - recent DNA should be similar to anyone among them they are living and Hmong–Mien are living in dispersed environment among many nations, so this is dead end... hungarian language using this "method" would be declared indo-europeann long time ago. Now, is there any Hmong–Mien cultural ties to any ancient states, like Ba-Shu in modern Sichuan, because anything south and around lower part of Yangtze looks like was inhabited by Tai-Kadai, but since Hmong–Mien have arrived from north this might be the place for their homeland.92.22.71.149 (talk) 12:06, 14 May 2014 (UTC)

Racist Terms in an Academic Article???
Is there any reason this article continuously uses the e word without apology???184.155.138.213 (talk) 21:59, 13 April 2015 (UTC)


 * I suppose you're talking about the Eskimo–Aleut languages? See also Eskimo. --80.187.110.67 (talk) 16:20, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

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Who wrote this garbage?
This article is laughable by the basic standards of linguistics. Almost all the subcategories seem to be little more than linguistics school rejects pushing their idiotic pet theories that would get them laughed out of any serious institution. Case in point - Altaic is accepted without criticism (even including Korean and Japanese, something most Altaicists would not do), Uralic-Dravidian is mentioned as a serious theory (I have never ever heard one say, even as a joke, that these languages are related) and all around just poor, sloppy scholarship and a tendency to assume that the most crazy, non-mainstream fringe views are automatically valid just because they are citable. 70.158.101.155 (talk) 15:22, 6 July 2018 (UTC)
 * I agree that the article needs a total rewrite. &#58;bloodofox: (talk) 16:09, 6 July 2018 (UTC)