Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/M-T pronouns


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus‎__EXPECTED_UNCONNECTED_PAGE__. There seems to be some consensus to rename the article, but that is outside the scope of AfD. Owen&times; &#9742;  16:42, 9 July 2024 (UTC)

M-T pronouns

 * – ( View AfD View log | edits since nomination)

Almost exclusively from a single source, and fails to establish WP:N. Practically zero mention of the concept outside of that single source and veers dangerously into WP:PROFRINGE territory with the WP:OR links to fringe theory language families like Nostratic, which aren't mentioned in the source. Without establishing notability this seems to not really belong here, and I'm unable to verify that this is at all taken seriously in linguistics.

For anyone unfamiliar with this topic:


 * "The M-T pattern is the most common argument for several proposed long-distance language families, such as the Nostratic hypothesis, that include Indo-European as a subordinate branch. Nostratic has even been called 'Mitian' after these pronouns."

Nostratic is emphatically a fringe theory within linguistics and is not mentioned in any of the sources, and this article seems heavily like WP:ADVOCACY. Any sources linking Nostratic to M-T Pronouns are inherently fringe sources, but even then many of the claims here are entirely un-cited. It doesn't seem this article can be saved. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 09:51, 18 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Language-related deletion discussions. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 09:51, 18 June 2024 (UTC)


 * Comment Feels like Original Research to me. Only two sources though the Google search gives plenty sources. Whether they back up the article and are reliable or not I have no idea. Not my field — Iadmc  ♫ talk  10:02, 18 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Asia and Europe.  WC  Quidditch   ☎   ✎  10:45, 18 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I'm not advocating for Nostratic. This is simply a piece of evidence claimed by those who do, and Nostratic has been deemed appropriate for a WP article.
 * As noted, the M-T pronominal pattern is well attested in the lit. I relied on a single source to create the article, but others could be added.
 * Some conclusions drawn from the pattern, such as Nostratic, are FRINGE. Yet we have articles on them. WALS is most certainly not a fringe source. IMO it's worth discussing one of the principal pieces of evidence given for fringe hypotheses when we have articles on them. A similar pattern in America, N-M, has been used to justify the FRINGE hypothesis of Amerind. Yet it is discussed in non-fringe sources, which conclude that it's only statistically significant for western North America, and disappears as a statistical anomaly if we accept the validity of Penutian and Hokan. That's worth discussing, because it cuts the legs out from under Amerind; without it, people might find the argument for Amerind to be convincing.
 * I have yet to find a credible explanation for the M-T pattern. But the lack of an explanation for a phenomenon is not reason to not cover it. There are many things we can't convincingly explain, but that's the nature of science: we don't refuse to cover them. — kwami (talk) 11:49, 18 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ seems to be motivated to object to this because they think I have a PROFRINGE statement on my user page. What I have is a sarcastic statement, one that other WP linguists have laughed over because it is obviously ridiculous. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ fails to see the sarcasm.
 * An equivalent might be to say that our personalities are governed by Arcturus, which is in Gemini; therefore we're all Geminis and have share a single hive mind. That wouldn't be advocacy for astrology. (Though I'm sure people have come up with more imaginative ways of mocking it.) — kwami (talk) 12:05, 18 June 2024 (UTC)
 * It’s not exactly obvious sarcasm when you’re making articles that advocate the perspectives of fringe theorists, but sorry if I missed that. It wasn’t my intention to have it sound like an attack. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 12:32, 18 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I'm not advocating the perspectives of fringe theorists, I'm describing a pattern that they have used to justify their theories. I've done the same for Amerind; there the conclusion is that if we accept Penutian and Hokan as valid clades, then the statistical anomaly (and thus the purported evidence for Amerind) disappears. I don't know of any similar conclusion in this case, but the pattern remains and is worth discussing if we're going to have articles on Nostratic and the like (and we have quite a few of those articles!)
 * What comes off as advocacy to me is covering FRINGE theories in multiple articles and then refusing to discuss the evidence, when consideration of that evidence would cast doubt on the theories. That would be like refusing to discuss the evidence posited for astrology or UFOs, leaving readers with only the perspective of advocates to go by. — kwami (talk) 12:40, 18 June 2024 (UTC)
 * This is WP:Original research, by your own words, and has no place in the encyclopedia. Use a blog to promote your personal research. Delete — Iadmc  ♫ talk  12:45, 18 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Nostraticists have a long and storied history of claiming basically anything they can as evidence. These claims aren’t taken seriously among linguists for good reason. I’m unaware of a single piece of scholarship that’d pass WP:RS (or even not those that’d pass) claiming this as evidence for Nostratic, and frankly I find your accusations here inappropriate so I’ll bow out of engaging and let the rest of the AfD play out. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 12:47, 18 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Note — kwami is the creator and sole contributor to this article— Iadmc  ♫ talk  12:08, 18 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Comment I'm speaking as a non-expert, but I would like to get more context on the matter. Do such patterns, outside of advocating for certain theories, have any value? Could, for example, there be a place in the Nostratic article to add a few more of these details to the Proposed features section? I'm not familiar with the sources in the article, what is their reputation generally? AnandaBliss (talk) 16:30, 18 June 2024 (UTC)
 * As far as credible sources go, which is just the one page linked as the main source in the article, it's a statistically noted feature but no signifficance has yet been attributed to it. Certainly not to Nostratic. Nostratic is itself a fringe theory and likely doesn't need more on the proposed features as none of the proposed features are real, and nobody is proposing a link to Nostratic because of this as far a sourcing goes except the author of the article and perhaps some blogs. This article has, frankly, some big "teach the controversy" energy.
 * @Austronesier is a little less viscerally anti-Nostratic-on-wikipedia and may have a different perspective, however. Also, I think this should probably be my last reply here lest I WP:BLUDGEON.
 * Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 16:50, 18 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Keep, or probably expand and modify its scope to include the other notable pronoun pattern (N-M) along the lines of the WALS page cited in the article. As is, it is underreferenced, but we can easily get more sources by following the trail of Johanna Nichols's paper on this subject and subsequent papers by other scholars who take a typological look at the matter. Sure, this pronoun pattern is cited as evidence by Nostraticists, but they don't own the topic. Yet, you can hardly leave Lord Voldemort, uhm I mean Nostratic unmentioned in relation to this notable topic, because most mainstream linguist writing about the topic of global pronoun patterns will at least mention the fact that Nostraticists have tried to build a language relationship hypothesis out this real observable. You can't blame observables for the bad and motorious hypotheses that are made to explain them.
 * Finally, this is not advocacy, and to believe so earns you a megatrout, @Warren. Kwami has built literally hundreds of language family and subgroup articles in WP from a mainstream perspective, generally leaning towards a "splitter" approach (ala Hammarström or Güldemann). Ok, unfamiliarity with kwami's role in this project is one thing, but jeez, labelling an important piece of Nichols's research as fringe just because of an indirect association to the Nostratic hypothesis is a knee jerk that makes the knee jerks in WP:FTN look like an élevé. –Austronesier (talk) 20:58, 18 June 2024 (UTC)
 * For all the "delete" !votes because of WP:OR issues, there's WP:NOTCLEANUP. Here's more sources covering the topic:
 * "Selection for m : T pronominals in Eurasia" by Johanna Nichols (co-author of the WALS chapter)
 * "Personal pronouns in Core Altaic" by Juha Janhunen
 * Needless to say that these book chapters do not promote or endorse long-range fringe speculations. –Austronesier (talk) 22:13, 18 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Moving this to 'M-T and N-M pronoun patterns' might be worthwhile. The latter is already written and referenced, so we only need to merge it in. Nichols et al. note that these are the only two patterns that jump out in a global perspective. There are others at a local scale, of course, such as the Č-Kw pattern in the western Amazon, but these tend to not be all that contentious as arguments for the classification of poorly attested or reconstructed families. They also don't lend themselves to fringe ideas, because really, who but a historical linguist (or the people themselves) care whether Piaroa and Ticuna are related?
 * I wonder whether a Pama-Nyungan-like pronoun pattern extends beyond that family, as a pan-Australian feature. If it does, that -- and how people explain it if they don't believe it's genetic -- might be worth discussing as well. — kwami (talk) 06:36, 19 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Okay, I took your suggestion and merged in the N-M stuff and moved the article to M–T and N–M pronoun patterns. I haven't had a chance yet to incorporate your sources, and this week's going to be rather busy, but it's on my to-do list. — kwami (talk) 07:36, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

Relisting comment: Please do not move articles while their AfD is open. Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Owen&times; &#9742;  11:47, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Comment This is definitely original research. The article presents this as related to Nostratic and Etruscan language families, neither of which are mentioned in the source the article is based on. A lot of the article needs to get deleted, probably. Mrfoogles (talk) 21:18, 18 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Delete. At the very least, this is a non-notable topic propped up by a healthy dose of OR.  There's a single source for the main article topic along with who-knows-how-much-personal-observation in the article currently, such as "However, doubling the number of pronouns to be considered in this way increases the possibility of coincidental resemblance, and decreases the likelihood that the resulting pattern is significant."  Where does this come from? Where does any of these statistical conclusions come from? It's not in the source.  This is a pretty concerning case and may warrant further scrutiny. 35.139.154.158 (talk) 21:22, 18 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Agree that this isn't a fringe theory, but it does seem hard to find secondary sources on. Keep assuming any other secondary sources exist. Mrfoogles (talk) 21:31, 18 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Actually, make that Delete unless at least one more secondary source can be identified, after looking at the article again. Almost all of it is not based on the source it actually uses, and it seems difficult to write an article given nobody seems to have any other sources than that one. Mrfoogles (talk) 21:40, 18 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Would a redirect to Nostratic languages be possible here? This seems to be WP:SYNTH. Walsh90210 (talk) 19:29, 20 June 2024 (UTC)
 * No, not a good idea. The topic is notable outside of the Nostraticist bubble. The author that has most contributed to our understanding of the topic, Johanna Nichols, does not endorse long-range speculations. –Austronesier (talk) 17:35, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Keep and probably clean up. Gbooks turned up this sound-looking source. Johnbod (talk) 03:52, 21 June 2024 (UTC)
 * This is a brief mention simply referring back to Nichols again; there's not the sort of in-depth analysis that you'd expect for a notable topic...or any analysis for that matter. The OR/SYNTH here is strewn so inextricably throughout the article, and the topic so niche, contributed by a single author, that cleanup seems exceedingly improbable.  At the very least, WP:TNT applies here if anyone thinks that they can demonstrate notability. 35.139.154.158 (talk) 15:44, 21 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Inextricable? Don't turn subjective unwillingness to extract the obvious bits of OR/SYNTH into an intrinsic property of the text. WP:TNT is not an excuse for laziness. –Austronesier (talk) 17:35, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Owen&times; &#9742;  16:16, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
 * I'm leaning delete, but I think kwami is right that there can be articles about arguments used for dubious language families, and I think calling the article "original research" is overly critical. However, the WALS map is not clearly about an argument used for certain proposed families, but about the distribution of sounds in certain pronouns - whether or not these have been used as arguments for Nostratic/Altaic/Indo-Uralic or whatever - at least in my reading. I would like to see more sources that are specifically about the pattern, otherwise it seems to get undue weight by having an article. The topic could instead be covered under the name of "(Personal) pronouns in Nostratic/etc", which would make sense under a very different structure (so not sure a move would be useful, or?), and maybe even better to start it as a subsection in the relevant proposed family's article. This would probably better reflect the context that the pattern is discussed in, in the sources. //Replayful (talk &#124; contribs) 18:00, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.


 * Keep but rename to "phonetic patterns in pronouns" or something like that. The best of multiple bad options. Walsh90210 (talk) 18:48, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
 * I don't think that would be recognizable. I think "M–T and N–M pronoun patterns" as suggested above would be best. Those are the two patterns that are notable globally. We can still have an 'other patterns' section. — kwami (talk) 07:01, 5 July 2024 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.