Talk:Proto-Berbero-Semitic language

Dubious validity
It's highly unlikely that a Berbero-Semitic branch is even valid, since the Afroasiatic branches are all roughly equidistant to each other. — Sago tree spirit  (talk) 17:17, 4 December 2020 (UTC)
 * That's to say it must be wrong coz it can't be right. I am a priori sympathetic to all endeavors that try to break an insipid "rake-model" consensus, but I see the problem here rather with WP:UNDUE. The proposal is novel, still undiscussed/assessed in other RS, and very inconclusive. The shared features are projected to some common ancestor of Berber and Semitic, but that doesn't autmatically make them innovations (they could be retentions), let alone exclusively shared innovations (they could have existed in other branches, but are still undetected or were eroded out). So I suggest we'd better merge and redirect this to Afroasiatic languages (somewhere in "Similarities in grammar and syntax"). What do you think? –Austronesier (talk) 08:49, 5 December 2020 (UTC)
 * If you're asking me what I think about the probability of PBS as a branch, I have no idea: I don't work on Berber languages & know relatively little about them. I will note that a problem in other reconstructions has been that we tend to see the greatest correlations between the best documented languages precisely because they're the best documented. So everything Afroasiatic looks Semitic. I don't think it's even plausible that 'the Afroasiatic branches are all roughly equidistant to each other'. I do, on the other hand, think that higher-level reconstructions are largely wishful thinking & bad scholarship, given how much work remains to be done even within Semitic, let alone within or between other branches. To put that another way: The most specific thing we can responsibly say right now is probably not the best possible representation of the true state of affairs. I feel like I haven't been redundant enough, yet, so: 'We can't say for certain how distant the various branches of Afroasiatic are from one another.' is a different claim from 'The various branches of Afroasiatic are equidistant from one another.'
 * If you're asking me what should become of this article, it seems to me right now that it isn't very substantive. I think merging it into Afroasiatic languages makes sense unless has plans to expand it substantially. Just glancing at Google Scholar, it seems to me that it might be difficult to do this effectively given the paucity of published resources. A third way might be to write a more substantive article on the relationships between Semitic & Berber languages that includes phylogenetic proposals as well as subsequent interactions. Pathawi (talk) 11:17, 5 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Kossman's article rather speaks of a "system", the article's title is misleading and suggests a branch within afroasiatic (and that's what I initially understood untill Austronesier rewrote it). I agree with the merge. Sami At Ferḥat (talk) 13:32, 5 December 2020 (UTC)
 * I have no expertise in comparative linguistics, and no opinion whatsoever in this matter, so I better don't participate in this discussion. When there is enough scholarly impetus to establish Proto-Berber, and there is no severe backlash against it by other scholars, I think it will be okay to have an article on Wikipedia on it. But I can't judge whether we have reached that state yet. Landroving Linguist (talk) 18:56, 5 December 2020 (UTC)