Talk:Language families and languages/Archive 1

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Archive This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Contents

Grouping

What exactly is the point of trying to divide the language families into continents. 1. It is inaccurate. 2. It is incomplete. 3. It is misleading. It makes Hungarian or Finnish seem related to German or Russian, and it it draws an unnecessary distinction between Sanskrit and Greek or Latin. Besides, in today's world, why would English be listed as European, when it has more speakers overseas (ditto with Portuguese). Does that make Tok Pidgin a "European" language too? I think it should be reverted to linguistic families, without the continents, etc. Danny

Agreed; I've changed it back. Brion VIBBER
Uh-oh, i edited w/o reading the talk. But
  • hopefully my version does a better job of disclaiming relationship implications from the grouping.
  • IMO, some kind of grouping aids comprehension (7+/-2 as noted at Short term memory and Human scale).
  • As i imagine it, the geography should feel less blatant now that you've cut down the detail.
In fact, as it was, there was a geographically oriented flow to the list, and IMO i've lessened the covert tendency of that to suggest geography correlates with phylogeny, by acknowledging the possibility and denouncing it.
Or it can be reverted. [smile] --Jerzy 08:56, 2003 Oct 16 (UTC)

Detail

Are we aiming for any particular level of detail here? I'd expect either more on (e.g.) Indo-European, or less on Semitic. Vicki Rosenzweig

Rename/Redirect

Should this be moved to language family, or language families? Or should they redirect here? Thought I'd ask before I start creating redirects... I'll let those who watch this article deal with it. -- Sam

language family as the new page title gets my vote since this conforms to our naming conventions. --mav

Detail again

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Why are subdivisions of some language families listed (down to individual native american langauges) but most of them don't? Is there a difference I'm not aware of?

Some of the more thoroughly listed families have been broken off into separate pages to keep the list a manageable length. --Brion 06:17 Jan 22, 2003 (UTC)
I applaud that refactoring. I was not bold enuf to move out second-level bullet-items, but i'd like to see more of them go.
However, i demoted Tai languages from first level bullet to two seconds, based on what i found on that article (part of which i moved to its talk). Now, on reflection, i'm thinking it should leave this page completely & just have links under both Austronesian languages and Sino-Tibetan languages. Seems like it probably got passed over in the detail-reduction. --Jerzy 08:56, 2003 Oct 16 (UTC)
I don't think the Taic (aka Daic) language family should be demoted, it is usually considered a distinct language family.

Rosetta

I took the following out of the article:

Anyone interested in details of the world's language families may wish to know about the Rosetta Project. This project has as its goal the creation of a language archive on a micro-etched nickel disk with a 2,000 year life expectancy. 1,000 languages are to be included. This is a cooperative project which encourages participation by those with knowledge about languages, particularly those that are less common. The Web site includes a knowledge archive with searching by language family, as well as by country, language name, etc.
In addition to the disk, The Rosetta Project is developing an archive of word lists and sample text in the world's approximately 7,000 languages. They are currently at 1,200 languages and know of resources to get them to around 4,000. An interactive comparative word list chart generator for 1,200 languages is available here.

Zoe

Leave that on talk a while; i may try to make it a Rosetta Project article & find somewhere to link it. --Jerzy 08:56, 2003 Oct 16 (UTC)

Sign Languages

I've shifted the sign languages article out of the section on Languages other than natural languages. There are quite a few sign languages that arose spontaneously among deaf communities; Nicaraguan Sign Language is one such example. Either way, I would argue that sign languages are no less natural than are creoles. In fact, many sign languages now are signed creoles, originating from pidgins created by the communication between hearing people and deaf people. thefamouseccles 00:46 27 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Good! There are many 'sign languages' that are true languages, learned by children as a first language and capable of expressing anything that any spoken language can. Of course there are also 'sign languages' that are, like writing, merely ways of encoding a natural language, one such is Signed English, but despite the name similarities, these are quite a different thing from true Sign Languages.
I agree; that's why I made the shift. I'd argue, though, that most sign languages are true languages, not just many. :) Every deaf sign language anywhere in the world has some native speakers. If you look up the Ethnologue on sign languages, just about every country has its own national sign language, and these all have native speakers. (Although, if one were interested in the linguistics of sign languages, I wouldn't like to try and find resources to learn Yucatec Maya Sign Language. :D) There are, of course, exceptions: the signed pidgin of some North American Indians, particularly the Cree (I think), and, as you mentioned, Signed English. There are even countries that have two or more native sign languages; Adamorobe Sign Language and Ghanaian Sign Language, for instance, are both native to Ghana.thefamouseccles 22:23 06 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Actually, many of the national sign "languages" are just the national language in the medium of sign - Malaysian SL, for example. Many of these have been set up fairly recently, and, as far as I can tell, don't have any more native speakers than signed English does. Any children raised with these SLs would quickly modify them to better suite their needs, since correct use would require a knowledge of the spoken language. Sometimes where there's more than one SL listed for a country, this is the reason. More likely, the true sign languages are simply considered bad grammar and go unrecorded, or else there are so many local creolizations that none receive recognition. --kwami 09:43, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Nilo-Saharan languages

There's a charge of vandalism being done against this entry in the Page History of Language families and languages. Perhaps there is more history supporting that charge; if not, IMO the charge is premature.
However, having visited the Nilo-Saharan languages article and its external reference (whose credibility is not burdened with the controversial topic of super-families), i think it's worth noting that there's a prima facie case been made for retaining it. IMO, anyone wanting to delete that entry again needs to give a reason on this talk page. IMO, another deletion without such discussion would be evidence of vandalism. --Jerzy 03:33, 2003 Dec 14 (UTC)

I made the charge of vandalism. See my note at Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress. This "user" has gone on two editing sprees destroying all reference to Nilo-Saharan in every page it appeared in, as well as to Joseph H. Greenberg. This included wrecking the redirects; look for instance at this and this. I spent about forty minutes cleaning up after this mess, restoring a total of eighteen articles. So, yes, there is a history; I am quite confident about calling this person a vandal. -- VV 06:11, 14 Dec 2003 (UTC)

XXX Language or XXX Languages ?

I see no sign of discussion of the convention of titles like Nilo-Saharan languages. (But perhaps it is on a more specific page and the discussion has never yet been moved here.)

This is contrary to the WP naming conventions calling for singular titles, as far as i can see. Yes, there is often more to say about the group as a whole, but we talk about many cities under City and so on. What is wrong with

A Nilo-Saharan languages is any of group of languages of northern-African languages believed to be descended from a common ancestral language; these languages....

--Jerzy 04:55, 2004 Feb 22 (UTC)


Wheres braille? japanese braille? moon? etc etc etc?

Braille's not a language, it's a writing method. There's a one-to-one correspondence between Braille letters and English letters. Pitman shorthand is more complex, but essentially the same. No-one speaks the Braille "language", they write a language in the Braille system. thefamouseccles 00:30 04 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Maps

When browsing through the language section of Wikipedia I was surprised by the extensiveness of each entry. Although I really missed maps with information of what language is spoken where, similar to the geographic maps that accompany the country/city entries. I really feel there is a gap here.

artificial langauages

I removed this, since these languages do not fall into families:

Languages other than natural languages

Besides the above languages that have arisen spontaneously out of the capability for vocal communication, there are also languages that share many of their important properties.

--Erauch 20:32, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)