Talk:Paleo-Sardinian language

"Nuragic languages" page
Su 'inari già lu cherides, tames sezis igue parados a che bogare su chi no bos piaghet. A besu meu,azis a fagher fine mala — Preceding unsigned comment added by Burundi51 (talk • contribs) 11:58, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

Right on the infobox about the classification of the Nuragic language it says "Nuragic languages". Now I know that there is a hypothesis stating that there might have been more than just one language but I think that there should be a different page containing hypotheses of either different dialects of the language or an extinct language family or different languages from each other which are characterized with the "geographical term Nuragic languages". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.166.250.227 (talk) 09:56, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

"SineBot" thank tou for signing my name, because I do not know how. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.237.212.80 (talk) 18:58, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

Borrowed from Macedonian?
The "borrowed from macedonian" part must be a joke.

Modern macedonian and bulgarian are 88% the same language. Both in the slavic language group. Bulgarian has a lexical distance to albanian > through modern macedonian. Interesting: Articles are not a typical "slavic trait", almost all slavic languages do NOT have articles. The definite article as a suffix is typical albanian and romanian. Which is also found in only two slavic languages; modern macedonian, bulgarian. We are talking about slavophon ppl surrounded by non-slavophon ppl. It's quite obvious that bulgarians, modern macedonians adopted foreign grammar. Now tell me how "pure" "macedonian" vocabulary is... I cannot take this "borrowed from macedonian" mess serious. ILYHDRAB (talk) 01:23, 10 January 2018 (UTC)


 * Do you have reasons for the idea that there can be *no* loanwords from Bulgarian in Albanian? It at least appears you are saying that "Bulgarian borrowed from other Balkan languages, so it's impossible for Balkan languages to have borrowed even a single word from them"? Languages borrow from each other at a small scale all the time, and it's much more complex than some simplistic one-way picture: English has borrowed from many languages and many languages have borrowed from English, for example. Greek and Latin eventually borrowed from each other, even if Latin borrowed more from Greek to start with. It is more likely to happen when speakers of one language have power over another (at the height of the Bulgarian empire, Bulgarian did, and we can call the older Bulgarian spoken nearer Albanian "Macedonian" if we like), but this isn't necessary. Sure, there was a Balkan language area that influenced all of them (whether 'foreign' or a substrate is another matter, though Byzantine Greek is a very likely candidate in most cases of the Balkan Language Area, and some argue for Illyrian or Thracian) - this isn't *necessarily* relevant to a particular loanword. I don't know about this case with lloç, I can't find any firm evidence, but here's a source that tries to discuss it:

http://www.diacronia.ro/ro/indexing/details/A1051/pdf Harsimaja (talk) 06:36, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

Cleanup
This article badly needs a major cleanup. Citatations are messy or lacking, solid scholarship appears next to amateur musings. We need to sift out pseudoscience, and also potentially wrong or biased citations from reliable sources.

The last two paragraphs of "Pre-Indo-European hypothesis" are a good example. Even the first reference "Bertoldi & Terracini" is spurious; actually these are to completely different sources, check this page from Blasco Ferrer (1984), Storia linguistica della Sardegna. The rest goes on with "A says this", B says that", without any citations. I guess most of the stuff can be cleaned up with the help of Blasco Ferrer (1984) and (2010). has made a good start, we just need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. –Austronesier (talk) 19:48, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

Exclusion
To justify my exclusion, I read that: "self published publications don't pass WP:RS plus this looks like self promotion" oh, where ever is written that one can't expose his researches because there is the risk to appear "self pronotioned"? But are they true or at least likely? 15 evident correlations between albanian and sardinian: are they false or aren't? Have You the experience to judge them or for You is more important the IPSE DIXIT (Blasco Ferrer a completely deficient scholar)?. And excuse me, Mr. Akerbeltx, how do You know that my texts are "self published publications", where have Yoy read that? But even if it were so, Alberto Moravia too published his first novels paying to publish himself, Benedetto Croce, the most significant italian intellectual of the twentieth, wasn't an "universitary scholar";anyway if for You is more important the name, I have published on "Romance Philology (Berkeley) and Romanische Forschungen (Bonn). The mission of Wikipedia, if I remember correctly, was to permit the free expression (and access) of hypothesis that the mainstream had guilty banned.Is the mission changed? Therefore: or You are so able to criticize may opinions even with a radical corrosivity, or if You can't, You have a duty: to leave to free interpretations them. Are You agree? (Albaredd (talk) 21:28, 13 September 2019 (UTC)).


 * As for how do You know that my texts are "self published publications, easy, I checked LookInside on Amazon, plus I searched for the publisher name on the internet and drew a complete blank, it doesn't even seem to have a website, much less a credible academic affiliation.
 * As to the rest, no, Wikipedia is not a platform for stuff that publishers and academic bodies turn down for publication, maybe you're thinking of Wikileaks. We don't have to prove or disprove your stuff. The onus is on you to prove that there are credible scholars or scholarly institions who agree with your stuff. That's what RS is about. Akerbeltz (talk) 12:58, 14 September 2019 (UTC)

I don't know why the same person who exludes me here, passionately follows me on Academia.edu. Oddities of this world!(Albaredd —Preceding undated comment added 16:34, 30 September 2019 (UTC)


 * I think you have me confused with someone else ... Akerbeltz (talk) 17:40, 2 October 2019 (UTC)

On the Areddu controversy
I think there has been unneccessary heat between the parts involved in this quarrel. Areddu has got a third party publication and some citations among scholars (surely few compared to Blasco Ferrer or Wolf, but still he has some reliability) therefor I think his theory deserves a spot in this page. If Mary Carmen Iribarren Argaiz got a citation in this article, I don't see why Areddu shouldn't have one. I propose myself to write a small (1-2 line) paragraph regarding the Illyrian hypothesis. Herakliu (talk) 23:00, 29 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Free from WP:COI, and without the excessive (self-)promotional character, and with a secondary source (you mention Areddu being cited)❌, this should be ok. You cannot compare the citation of Iribarren Argaiz with that of Areddu. Iribarren Argaiz is a secondary source for De Felice's observations. Areddu remains a primary source and citing him alone is not sufficient to establish due weight. –Austronesier (talk) 20:27, 5 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Hi, thank you for the reply. You are right, Iribarren Argaiz and Areddu are two different things and they are not comparable. As for the secondary source, the balkanologist Emanuele Banfi cited his Illyrian theory in 2009 in the "Rivista Italiana di Linguistica e Dialettologia". I think it can do the work, let me know your opinion. All the best Herakliu (talk) 21:01, 5 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the reference! I have access to Banfi's review article and will have a detailed look at it later. What immediately caught my attention is that at the end of his review (I always read reviews bottom-up), Banfi criticizes Areddu's polemic style as fuori luogo e davvero eccesivo—unsurprisingly. But of course, that's not essential for evaluating due weight. –Austronesier (talk) 09:04, 6 June 2021 (UTC)
 * If anything I agree with Banfi ahaha, Areddu is hot blooded but yeah, one has to separate the man from his work. I have actually read some of his essays, it's not crackpot linguistics but he uses sound etymological analysis, if his theory (or any other ones) is correct only time will tell. Anyway, I'll add the reference now. If for whatever reason it isn't valid feel free to remove it but I think it should be ok. Cheers Herakliu (talk) 12:36, 6 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Areddu is an amateur scholar and his theory enjoys no consensus. --Tursclan (talk) 23:57, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Hi Areddu isn't an amateur. As for scholar consensus, where in those two lines is it even remotely suggested that this theory has consensus? To that paragraph it has been given its due weight, nothing more and nothing less. Herakliu (talk) 18:33, 7 October 2021 (UTC)

To weigh in here: there no consensus at all about the nature of Paleo-Sardinian due the very nature of evidence, all of which is rather tenuous. There is a downward cline of notability from Blasco Ferrer to Pittau to Areddu. The question is just about the cut-off point for due weight. Of course we give more space to scholars like Blasco Ferrer who has a track record of high-profile international publications, compared to scholars who mostly published on a regional scope, or even only via books that haven't gone through scholarly peer-review.

Regardless of where we want to set the cut-off point between Pittau and Areddu, a bigger flaw is the omission of Wolf from the discussion. Blasco Ferrer owed much to Wolf's work and cites him a lot, although he stressed the limitations of Wolf's methodology (which btw looks like sensible caution to me). It would be great if someone with a better command of Italian than I have could add bits about Wolf based on Blasco Ferrer as secondary source. –Austronesier (talk) 07:33, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I quote everything said by it would be indeed crucial for the improvement of this page to add some of Wolf's material Herakliu (talk) 17:45, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

The only thing that keeps afloat this section is that this autopublished piece has been recapped at the end of a publication. This "review" does not promote this theory, a theory put forward only by Areddu in the whole world, but, at best, finds it interesting in some parts. Using those three pages as a validation for an encyclopedia I think it's a bit of a stretch for what's written in WP:RS. There's plenty of this kind of citations in the field, if every one of them, regardless of popularity or content, is worth a place in wikipedia then every page in here should be ten times longer. --PedroPistolas (talk) 15:13, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Actually, this embarrassing behavior shouldn't influence our considerations about due weight. Nevertheless, I will take this as an occasion to agree with you as objectively having the better arguments about the inclusion of this lone wolf "scholar". –Austronesier (talk) 19:17, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

Uhm, I don't think what PedroPistolas says, is really correct. I find here (https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/zrph/137/2/html) (Zeitschrift fur Romanische Philologie), one of the most important journal in the linguistic discipline, a review on two works by Areddu. Typically, an odd hypothesis is not even reviewed. Get informed more, dear PP — Preceding unsigned comment added by TommasoBom (talk • contribs) 08:35, 14 October 2021 (UTC)

Hello A. I see you made another account. Once again. Anyway, these reviews are not on the mattere hereby discusses so why are you linking it, A.? Anyway the review clearly doesn't validate the thesis (that is not the one here discussed) and states that at best this can be a basis for discussion. Here I paste (sorry for the format) what's written: "Alles in allem können wir also sagen, dass nur eine Minderheit der von Areddu für vorromanisch gehaltenen Orts- und Flurnamen einer wahrscheinlicheren romanistischen Erklärung standhalten und somit für das Illyrische in Frage kommen. Denn wenn man lautliche Sonderentwicklungen gelten lässt,37 lassen sich fast alle Namen zufriedenstellend und in ihrer Bedeutung ganz natürlich aus dem Romanisch-Neusardischen erklären. Man wird diesen romanischen Erklärungen trotz den oft nicht immer exakt lautgesetzlichen Entwicklungen den Vorzug geben, da es von vornherein ganz unwahrscheinlich ist, dass die Masse der für die mittelalterliche und jüngere sardische Transhumanz so wichtigen Flurnamen noch aus dem vorrömischen Altertum stammen soll. Auf strikte Einhaltung der Lautgesetze kann auch bei Tier- und Pflanzennamen nicht gepocht werden, da sich in diesem eher peripheren und seltener gebrauchten Spezialbereich des Wortschatzes erfahrungsgemäß vielfach motivierte und unmotivierte Einkreuzungen, Neu- und Umdeutungen einschleichen, die das ursprüngliche Etymon bisweilen nur noch schemenhaft erahnen lassen Hinzu kommt noch, dass auch die lokalen Lautgesetze der einzelnen Dörfer oder Regionen sich erstens diachron geändert haben können und zweitens ein Beharren auf ausnahmsloser Geltung solcher lokalen Lautstände bei der Verleihung von Ortsnamen durch auf ganz Sardinien umherziehende Transhumanten vollkommen seine Berechtigung verlieren dürfte.39 Verschiedene Lauttendenzen mögen sich gekreuzt haben, es mag sich eine Koiné gebildet haben, gerade die Schriftsprache der Kanzlei wird oft eingewirkt haben, da sie ja als erste die Orts- und Flurnamen aufzeichnete. All dies bewirkte leider, dass die etymologische Deutung der sardischen Orts- und Flurnamen eine äußerst diffizile Angelegenheit darstellt, in der es wenig Gesichertes gibt, weshalb auch weiterhin die illyrische oder illyroide These vertreten werden kann. Unabhängig davon, ob die einzelnen Etymologien letztlich wirklich zutreffen – was weder beweisbar noch eindeutig widerlegbar ist – bieten die beiden Werke eine Fülle interessanter Materialien, die für die weitere Forschung eine willkommene Diskussionsgrundlage darstellt." this is not a validation of Areddu's thesis and it clearly says that it is far from perfect and the review states that he (Areddu, not you, a totally different person) is the only one proposing it. --PedroPistolas (talk) 10:49, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
 * There seems to be a kind of misunderstanding on your part. The criterion for inclusion in an essentially speculative matter such as the topic of this article is not validity (who says that Blasco Ferrer is "right"?), but notability. Nothing else matters. And Schmidt's review looks like a game changer to me regarding the question of notability.
 * Odd hypotheses often get reviewed; the world deserves to know from a competent voice whether a hypothesis is compelling, meritless, or at least useful as a data source (as in the current case). –Austronesier (talk) 11:19, 14 October 2021 (UTC)


 * Of course I'm not giving certificates of truth. I'm saying that a requisite to be inclued in wikipedia should be at least a little bit of recognition. That review is not a gamechanger:
 * -it is not about the work cited in the page but it is about surnames and some name
 * -it is not validative. the reviewer clearly says it is a work with many flaws and doubtful conclusions
 * -the same reviewer says that it is a field where Areddu, an high school teacher, is the only exponent
 * as in other reviews about Areddu work the positive aspects of his work are not the conclusions or the etymologica methodology, but the data gathering of sardinian names.

--PedroPistolas (talk) 11:33, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I wanted to add something before putting the last nail in the coffin of this discussion since I've seen that my addition was removed. : I respect your decision but I of course can't agree with it and I'll simply state that cases in favour to add Areddu in the Proto-Sardinian page are much stronger than the countrary ones. One just need to consider google scholar in order to see why this may be a good decision https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=alberto+areddu&btnG=&oq=alberto+aredd
 * There's kinda few third party publications, mentions or reviews (not least the Romanische Forschungen, UF Schmidt, J Garcia Rodriguez and the aformentioned Banfi). I can somewhat understand the opposition for fringe, but absolutely not for due weight Herakliu (talk) 17:47, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

You shouldn't look to the number of citations but to their content. this article if quite famous for it is a reinvention of calculus in 1994 and tha vast majority of the 458 citations are just people pointing out the dangers of peer review material taken at face value. In Areddu's case you do not find endorsements of his theories but at best some praise for the data gathering of sardinian nouns and verbs and maybe some encouragement to keep exploring an underdeveloped field: the sardinian etymological research. You do not find praise for his methodology and it would be surprising otherwise. A quick exemple: even in this page Areddu cites sar. "lothiu"=muddy as a close cognate of alb. "lloç"=mud. Aside from the fact that he does not give any hint of phonological process behind this, I must point out that he takes advantage of the fact that dialectal sardinian does not have a standardized ortography and takes the normally written root "lud-" (Spano, Casu or any other dictionary) and makes it the unattested (search for it) "loth-" to link it better, in an unexplained way to the albanian term. If "lloç" means "mud" why doesn't he take the sard. for the same word? Because even with this peculiar ortography it would have been difficult to hide the relation between "lothu" (anywhere else as "ludu" meaning, mud, dirt or soil) and latin "lutum". The icing on the cake is that, as Orel pointed out in his dictionary, "lloç" is of slavic origin. If you search among Areddu's etymologies you find plenty of these cases and this is the reason why he is alone in this crusade and who reviews him does not validate his etymological methodology. --PedroPistolas (talk) 19:08, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
 * ′I must point out that he takes advantage of the fact that dialectal sardinian does not have a standardized ortography′
 * Sorry but this can be said about every author working on Sardinian language, I don't see how Areddu "takes advantage" of it, or at the very least more than other scholars. As for the rest, you're certainly welcome to give your thought on linguistical matter but may I remind that Wikipedia is not a forum and our original research have no values whatsoever? If I understand correctly wiki lineguides, notability, not theory accuracy is the criteria to be part of this encyclopedia and this author obviously has some repute in this circle.
 * As for the fact of only him advocating this hypothesis, Pittau too is the only advocate of the Etruscan/Lidian origin yet he has a place in this article. Herakliu (talk) 20:05, 16 October 2021 (UTC)


 * . Simply untrue. No one would have written the very common "ludu" that way. Even if not standardized every dictionary has an ortography based on historical document and/or aderence to ecclesiastical latin ortography.

"our original research have no values whatsoever" oh totally agree, this is the reason why a superfringe theory put in wikipedia by his author should have been removed long time ago. I was just pointing out just one of the reasons why in those citations you linked there is no approval of his etymological research. "this author obviously has some repute in this circle" once again: no. He is an high school teacher that in 20+ years just got some page at the end of some publication and in every one of them there is no approval by the reviewer of the purely etymological part, the part relevant in here. Pittau at least was a n university professor in sardinian linguistics and he is a widely cited author in the field, second only to Wagner. In WP:RS you can read "Sources should directly support the information as it is presented in the Wikipedia article." and here that reviews do not support that information, everything positivie written about Areddu work in 2002 or 2021 and everything behind is not about his theory but about the data gathering of sardinian terminology. --PedroPistolas (talk) 04:07, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
 * "Simply untrue. No one would have written the very common "ludu" that way. Even if not standardized every dictionary has an ortography based on historical document and/or aderence to ecclesiastical latin ortography."
 * Sorry but this is again irrelevant, but if you want so much to understand why you can directly ask the author, he has an Academia.edu profile.
 * "I was just pointing out just one of the reasons why in those citations you linked there is no approval of his etymological research."
 * As with the Basque and Etruscan hypothesis in other publications. If this is the meter let's remove them too then.
 * And also not true: Banfi showed himself somewhat supportive of the Illyrian theory, Garcia Rodriguez cites "Cognomi sardi di ascendenze balcaniche" and "Uccelli nuragici e non nella Sardegna di oggi".
 * As for Schmidt' final quote it looks very much supportive to me, he very clearly states there is enough material to start discussing about the hypothesis. Supportivness here isn't given even to Blasco Ferrer, Pittau or Wagner. And how can it be since there's no conclusive evidence for the nature of Paleo-Sardinian and likely will never be?
 * And to be frank directly attacking the author as "amateur", "high school teacher", "superfringe" not only doesn't help your case but also demonstrates partiality, unlucid judgement and immaturity in resolving this dispute. Herakliu (talk) 09:35, 17 October 2021 (UTC)

Data?
In its current state, the article is near-indigestible and should be reworked -- or removed.

To prevent the latter: Can I suggest to put a section with features and sources of/for Paleo-Sardinian before diving into the affiliation discussion? Without sample data (let's say, Sardinian toponyms that cannot be easily traced back to Romance) and/or iterature pointers where to find more (and, possibly, a discussion of the likelihood or personal biases in interpreting that data as Paleo-Sardinian), all that remains of this article is just a list of speculations (at varying degrees of credibility, though, but there just doesn't seem to be enough material to validate any of these hypotheses). That is, without describing problem first (i.e., unaccounted linguistic phenomena in Sardinian, I guess), the current article doesn't give more concrete information beyond "there was language in Sardinia before Romans/Romance and we don't know what it was".

There are some pieces of such information scattered across the article, but they seem to be cherry-picked for one hypothesis or the other. Better describe data first, then the interpretation attempts. Chiarcos (talk) 08:31, 13 March 2023 (UTC)