Talk:Syncretism (linguistics)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 14 January 2019 and 11 May 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Mlibz936.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 10:36, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

More examples needed
I am thinking about working on this article a little more, and I would like to include more examples from different languages, and I would like to include a section on theoretical (systematic) approaches to syncretism. --Smcgury (talk) 08:45, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

"Natural Class" link
This article links to the article "natural class", saying that Sebastian Bank distinguishes incidental homophony from syncretism via reference to natural classes. The "natural classes" he refers to are morphological classes defined by grammatical features like [PAST] (citation 3: Bank 2014, p. 239); the Wikipedia article on "natural classes" refers only to phonological natural classes. Since the use of the term is overwhelmingly restricted to its usual phonological meaning, would it make sense simply to remove the link in this article, and expand the paragraph to ensure that readers are not misled into thinking Bank distinguishes homophony from syncretism via phonology? 82.17.191.251 (talk) 23:11, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

Syncretism vs syntactic merger
Linguists such as Donald Ringe distingiush the syntactic merger of morphosyntactic categories (e.g. the merger of the instrumental and ablative case in Latin) with syncretism, the latter being used purely descriptively for multiple syntactic features sharing the same inflectional marker — without implying that a merger or replacement ever took place. This page seems to cite syntactic mergers as examples of syncretism (e.g. merger of oblique cases in English). Even if there is support for this use of the term within the literature, I think work needs to be done to acknowledge that some linguists do not consider this an example of syncretism, moreover that syncretism is used by some linguists purely descriptively. jajaperson (talk) 11:31, 29 August 2023 (UTC)