Talk:Salish peoples

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 25 September 2019 and 18 December 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Raeonaire, PerryVanHouten, Hareredj, Boiesk.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 03:17, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Recent Additions and Areas for Future Expansion
This article on Salish Peoples was expanded in November 2019 by a group of students from Oregon State University. We're new to contributing to wikipedia. This was a group project and while I think we made a good start on this article, there is still a lot of information that could be added. I just wanted to share some ideas on topics this article is still lacking, for future editors: --Boiesk (talk) 17:53, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Religion/Belief Systems
 * Methods of subsistence
 * Art and Material Culture - Salish baskets & basket weaving, Usage of cedar, Longhouses, Canoes.
 * Interior Salish Art and Material Culture
 * Famous/Notable Salish people - ie. Chief Seattle
 * Territory (translate this wikimedia SVG map to English: File:Carte populations salish de la cote.svg)
 * New article: Interior Salish peoples? (There is a page for Coast Salish peoples, but none for Interior Salish peoples).

Concerned about the first paragraph of the "Salish language" section
The following claim struck me as a little bizarre: "There was an indefinite period when the Salishan language was mainly based on tone and gesture. There was no discernible evidence of sentence structure or any arrangement of words. The words themselves were contingent upon tone and where they were situated in the sentence. However, the Salishan language has since developed past this stage to a point where components such as structure and parts of speech could be identified, but at the same time, some terms lost their originality and the once pliant language has become more rigid and defined." Since this seems to violate several of the fundamental tenets of modern linguistics, I had a look at the source.

It's from 1905, and expresses the above ideas in the context of a general schema of linguistic development which has long since been superseded in academic linguistics. Hile-Tout believes certain supposed features of Salishan exemplify a "transitional stage" between wholly unstructured point-and-grunt proto-speech and sophisticated (i.e. fusional) languages like those of the Indo-Europeans. He attributes these characteristics to Salish languages on the basis of very little evidence and, it seems, quite a lot of prejudice (he regards the Salish as exemplary of "primitive man", "the primitive mind", "the savage"). He cites no specific sources for his description of the language family, and provides only a very few examples of the tendencies he attempts to ascribe to it. The judgements he makes are nebulous and unscientific, and his terms are vague in the extreme (ironic!). The idea that languages' morphologies reflect the lifestyles of their speakers in any regular or substantive way has been discarded as unevidenced, while Hile-Tout takes it completely for granted. It is also now more or less uncontroversial that grammar and syntax are fully present in all natural languages, while Hile-Tout seems to believe in a teleological progression from less to more linguistic "definiteness" and "cultivation".

I have no idea what it would mean for a language to lack sentence structure while its words (morphemes?) changed meanings "contingent upon where they were situated in the sentence". This paragraph seems to unreflectively transmit outdated and frankly regressive ideas about historical linguistics in general and the Salish languages in particular. The source it cites would be an exceptionally poor one, even if the paragraph itself weren't completely baseless.

Hile-Tout's paper is genuinely interesting as a window into the development of academic views on the Salish peoples and their languages, but I don't believe it should be used as a source of information about the languages themselves. I also don't believe these sentences reflect any genuine characteristics of Salish languages or their history, and I think they're likely to be actively misleading to readers. I suggest leaving this passage deleted, or reworking it to reflect current scholarship on (say) Proto-Salish, or on the characteristics and history of the Salish language family.

If you want sources for this, I refer you to any introductory book about linguistics written in the past 20 years, or any of the relevant pages on this website. I'm leaving a link to the 1905 paper here, for reference, since I've removed it from the article itself: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/659114.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A9de2698649340eff72d18509077aa8da

I've also made a few miscellaneous changes to sentence structure, grammar, and word choice in the rest of the article.

Arvenine (talk) 00:19, 14 May 2020 (UTC)