Talk:Substratum

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I removed two paragraphs in their entirety, because they do not seem to benefit this article:

• "For instance, some linguists contend that Japanese consists of a Altaic superstratum projected onto an Austronesian substratum, or that the Insular Celtic languages resulted from a Celtic superstratum over an Afroasiatic substratum." -- Both of these hypotheses are highly speculative, and only supported by a handful of fringe scholars; it does not seem like a good idea to illustrate a common and general term with speculative examples when numerous well-established cases are known.
• "When the influence of another language is too remote in the past for its influence on the surviving language to be adequately characterized, 'substrate' is used by default, though the situation might have really been that of an adstratum or even a superstratum. With Japanese, even 'adstrate' is probably too narrow a term to adequately describe the situation." -- This is just incorrect; in reality there is no practice of using 'substrate' as some kind of "default" term.

--AAikio 06:57, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

Sorry to disagree, but I know this practice from Indo-Europeanist usage in particular and can even point to an example: Indo-Iranian substratum, right on page 1, on the bottom. The problem seems to be that there is no neutral term which does not imply a sociolinguistic dominance relation, which, for prehistoric times, is often difficult to reconstruct. Florian Blaschke 19:45, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

merged discussion: I am opposing the merge with language contact, because this article presents the model of Substratum-Superstratum-Adstratum specifically and not any language contact in general, although any language contact may be classified by this model. But it is worth to keep seperate articles. If you do not want to have seperate articles for each term (sub- super- adstratum) than why not make a general lemma for all the three of them? --El bes (talk) 15:21, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

There is obviously a lot of overlap but not all scholars support this hypothesis therefore its best kept separate. However the discussion is more than just on "substrate" so the title needs changing or a general lemma used. Adresia (talk) 12:49, 7 February 2008 (UTC)