Talk:Paleo-Siberian languages

Article
Took out the wording of "unsuccessful" attempts to link Yeniseian to N Caucasian or ST, as that's a bit POV. (Dene-Caucasian isn't widely accepted, but the wording suggests it's been disproven, rather than not well demonstrated.) Also mentioned Ket isn't really an isolate; Yugh may still be spoken by a couple people, and if not, it only recently went extinct. Starostin and others have recently proposed a Karasuk family consisting of Yeniseian and Burushaski; the proposed cognates include parallel irregular morphology in the 2SG pronouns. That hypothesis doesn't depend on the success of Dene-Caucasian as a whole.

Also, I've never heard of links between Ainu and IP, though I thought there were some speculations about Ainu and Austronesian, which makes more sense geographically. --kwami 05:32, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * Me neither, but I thought the Ainu links were with Austroasiatic (Vovin.) - Mustafaa 21:05, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * Ainu has been linked to pretty much every other language family in Eurasia, but Austronesian and Altaic are a little more plausible than Indo-Pacific or Kalto. And Ainu isn't usually considered to be a Paleosiberian language anyway - most sources just list four families and isolates. Also I changed 'Kamchadal' to 'Itelmen', since it's the term generally used for the language surviving today. Chamdarae 18:16, 16 July 2005 (UTC)


 * Kalto? Do you mean Nihali? Helenuh (talk) 13:10, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

Whether it gets verified or not, Inuit is the wrong term to use for a supposed connection to New World languages, as it leaves out the Yupik and Aleut languages. Substituting Eskimo-Aleut. Ergative rlt 23:23, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Inclusion of Yeniseian
Ket/Yeniseian languages should definitely be reincluded in this article. The assumption that a "Yeniseian-Dene" link has been "convincingly demonstrated" is premature. True enough, there is the publication mentioned, but the discussion has barely started yet. Lyle Campbell, of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, has recently published an informed rejection of this hypothesis (latest number of International Journal of American Linguistics, 2011), and more critical statements are to be expected. The established view is still that Yeniseian languages are not demonstrably related to any other language family on the planet. The text now is definitely not reflecting a neutral POV. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.220.151.61 (talk) 17:47, 22 October 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree, and have therefore acted accordingly. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 14:29, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I hink "well-received" is a good wording for this. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.220.151.61 (talk) 18:49, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

Is Korean sometimes included among the Paleo-Siberian languages?
Would the Korean language be considered a Paleo-Siberian language, since the ancestors of the Koreans originated in Siberia? Jarble (talk) 23:17, 23 March 2013 (UTC)
 * This is only speculation on my part - I'm just wondering if it's ever been classified this way. Jarble (talk) 23:18, 23 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Alexander Vovin: Korean as a Paleosiberian Language. Note that it's a very uncommon opinion, as most linguists still view Korean more likely to be related to so-called "Altaic" (or "Transeurasian") languages rather to anything else. Finstergeist (talk) 14:47, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

Is this a useful article?
As the article rightly admits, "Paleosiberian" is a geographically defined wastebasket grouping. The languages share no particular common features, and aside from presenting the dictionary definition of the term, this article only assembles indiscriminate information on them from disparate sources.

Are there any reliable secondary sources that treat "Paleosiberian languages" as an entity (as opposed to simply tertiary sources on languages classification)? If not, we should probably delete or merge this article (e.g. to Languages of Russia; or to Siberian linguistic area, an article that could well be written). -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 16:26, 12 October 2015 (UTC)