Talk:Proto-Algonquian language

Urheimat of Proto-Algonquian
Last fall, somebody added a map of Siebert's 1967 proposal that the urheimat of Proto-Algonquian was deep in eastern North America, around present day Toronto. There is a proposal that's a generation newer, but i guess nobody produced a map of it for Wikipedia, so the editor grabbed the mapping of Siebert. "Grab any illustration you can" is a popular criterion at Wikipedia, but it's not an academically sound criterion.

Besides, Siebert's proposal defies historical common sense, it defies a general principle of language diffusion, and most compellingly, it defies the fact that Algonquian is but a branch of Algic, whose other members are in northern California. We know the Americas were colonized from Asia. Now while there certainly must have been migrations north and west in the last 15,000 years as well as south and east, all the way from Lake Ontario to the Rockies (Blackfoot)? Come on! Besides that, it's an established language history observation that when you have a single language (like Russian or Mandarin), or group of relatively nondivergent languages (like Turkic) spoken over half a continent, then the colonization was (relatively) both quick and recent. As languages of the Americas go, Algonquian languages are relatively not very divergent from each other. Moreover, the greatest amount of divergence is to be found among the Plains languages, both mutually and between them and the rest. Clearly, Siebert's proposal is naive. We extend this reasoning up to the entire language family to which Algonquian belongs. There's huge divergence among Algonquian and the two Californian languages Wiyot and Yurok, more than within Algonquian. You don't give a hugely contrarian proposal top prominence (like the most conspicuous graphic) without lots of explanation. You learn all this If you read just a few pages here and there on historical linguistics. Dale Chock (talk) 13:19, 10 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Oops, misdid the italicizing for the above. Dale Chock (talk) 13:20, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

I have received a criticism of the tone and attitude of the above comment. I now think that some of my concerns were only implicit, which means they might go unnoticed. Let's focus on how previous editors--collectively--could have edited this article better without knowing the subject. The article identifies two scholarly proposals on a given point, but includes a map illustrating just one of them. That this is undue weight is obvious to an intelligent editor. People should be scolded for not seeing the flaw that you could see even if you are ignorant of Algonquian studies. When I factor in that there is probably an additional reason why previous editors collectively did not fix this flaw, the reason that they think an illustrated article is always better than an unillustrated one, my righteous indignation increases. I have seen from other articles, outside linguistics and languages, that Wikipedia has indeed created a mindset that rewards flash even when the content is foolish. Dale Chock (talk) 21:56, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

A reflex of PA 'his head' in Blackfoot
In the section on clusters, Pentland argues that Ojibwa oshtigwaan 'his head' is a borrowing from Cree and so presumably does not contain the unique Proto-Algonquian cluster *št. However, Blackfoot o'tokaani 'his head' is also a reflex of this word and it doesn't look like a borrowing from Cree or Ojibwa. Should this additional cognate be added to the article? 66.212.65.6 (talk) 01:42, 14 May 2015 (UTC)Howard Berman
 * Hi Howard! Yeah, Pentland's article is from a while back so it's useful to have more recent sources/data. Goddard also mentions Munsee has (or had?) wì·ləští·kan. I've added a note to the article citing that and your paper from 2006. Maybe it would be better to remove that discussion altogether? Although I do think the fact there's only one correspondence set for the cluster is notable enough that it should be included... --Miskwito (talk) 18:46, 18 May 2015 (UTC)