Talk:Pseudoscientific language comparison

message: I would seriously question this assertion. Not only is it unsourced, I think common experience indicates that false etymology is much more common. I have very seldom heard people assert non-existent connections between languages; but I think everybody has heard many, many false etymologies proposed, whether "Jolly Roger = Jolie Rouge", "news = North East South and West" or "posh = Port Outward, Starboard Homeward," not to mention false sources of profanities. My favorite, though, is the one that appeared in The Straight Dope years ago, where somebody proposed that when Marie Antoinette said "let them eat cake", and Cecil Adams replied "it's possible that one day, while under the influence of powerful hallucinogens, Marie said 'Le theme est quete'...". Fool4jesus (talk) 15:10, 30 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  "most widespread type of linguistic pseudoscience" 

message: Re: "Certain types of languages seem to attract far more attention in pseudoscientific comparisons than others. These include languages of ancient civilizations such as Egyptian, Etruscan, Sumerian, and Classical Hebrew, […]": Should it be clarified that Egyptian and Classical Hebrew are related to each other? —RuakhTALK 00:34, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Certain types of languages" 

message: I have read the above notes and could not help a grin: "...someone who really disklikes pseudoscience"? What a naughty bad person indeed.</br>
The value judgement is not the central part, nor is it what this page is trying to convey. There is no witch-hunt going on, and we certainly should not get all fired up about the evil machinations of variously-spelled Finno-Ugrists and their lust for wreaking the ruin of Hungary's great nation by denying it its well-deserved place in history as Sumer's little sister. A truly blessed hunt for proof ought to have yielded a better prize than Deimel's allowing for a possibility. At least, Deimel did not claim that Jesus of Nazareth was the son of a Parthian princess. :-)</br>
Dilligence is needed.</br>
Humour aside: The main point is that, in order to maintain as high a degree of objectivity and as low a risk of jumping to conclusions as possible, any science, including linguistics, necessitates a certain set of standards, which have been tested, tuned and improved since the 1700s (the scientific method, which not only applies to science in the sense of natural science). Any new linguistic theory will have to face the global (democratic) scientific community's scrutiny.</br>
As far as theories in historical linguistics are concerned, it is important to make the following distinctions:
#Controversial, but feasible theories with partly circumstantial or limited evidence in their favour(such as the laryngeal theory). While at first struggling against older (and more comfortable) notions and perhaps never attaining scientific mainstream status, theories of this kind will be generally accepted as one possible explanation.
#Feasible theories based on very limited and therefore non-conclusive evidence (e.g. the possible, but inconfirmable Nostratic theory and other mega-families); feasible meaning here that, though they may initially have been sparked by interference from nationalistic motivations or other forms of chauvinism, they neither fundamentally clash with common sense nor construe prehistoric migrations too far-fetched to be possible. However, a lack of available data, be it due to time-depth beyond reconstruction or to sparseness of inscriptions (cf. the relationship between Raetic and Etruscan), will force scientific opinion to settle for a non liquet on such a thesis until conclusive evidence is produced.
#Linguistic theories positing prehistoric connections that range anywhere from unlikely to nigh-incredible. As extraordinary theories require extraordinary proof, such positions cannot be preferred over simpler and therefore intrinsically more likely theories unless supported by a conclusive amount of evidence. Nonetheless, such theories should not be considered pseudoscience as long as they do not blatantly disregard the scientific method.
#Theories put forth by individuals who have not or only very superficially been trained in historical linguistics, therefore already clashin with linguistic science on the methodic level. Generally speaking, most theories in this category are less marred by their noted lack of positive evidence than by either a quite considerable amount of negative evidence or by the dubious background and ideological constructions of their proponents (from the top of my head I could name "researchers" identifying rock-carvings in Oklahoma as Punic-Celtic bilingual inscriptions, the Tamil language as the "Primary Classical language of the World", or claiming all history between 500-1300 to be a fabrication and the true foundation of European toponymy to be only "Burgundian", Latin, Hebrew and Greek). Not surprisingly, Gstarst referred to such theories as "nutty", which they are.
Personally, I think such a distinction is self-evident, but it might have to be included in the article as long as common sense is not automatically decried as WP:NOR by a well-meaning contributor. 
Nevertheless, in my view, this page as it is now is a very rational and useful yardstick for anybody confronted with one of the various linguistic theories that the web is teeming with, some more defensible than others. As far as I can see, it is WP:NPOV. It is not aimed against one set of theories, but can be used by people only superficially familiar with linguistics to gauge whether a particular theory they have read about seems more kosher than treif. And for those among us more familiar with linguistics, we are informed enough to look beyond such phrasings as one might find suboptimal, which I would say are not many. Trigaranus (talk) 00:23, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Diligence

message: Re: the section of the article reading-
:There may also be political or religious reasons to connect languages. An example is the Turanian or Ural-Altaic language group, which had a motivation of connecting Sami (spoken by white people) to Mongolian. This justified explicit racism towards the Sami in particular.[1]. [italics mine]
Is the second sentence meant to mean "This linguistic link to an Asian group was then used to justify explicit racism against the Sami.[1]." I'm still a bit unclear, however. Does the article mean that the postulation of a the Turanian or Ural-Altaic language group itself is a pseudo-scientific exercise, rather than legitimate linguistic analysis, primarily motivated by anti-Sami racialism? I don't know enough to evaluate the validity of the assertion, but that is what it seems to say in English? Can anyone clear this confusion up?--FurnaldHall (talk) 03:00, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wording Question? 

message: I've just noticed this WP article about one of our common pet peeves that at the same time is an example of another one of our common pet peeves (= unsourced or undersourced essays/coatracks etc.). There is an entertaining article about it (btw co-authored by a quite prolific Wikipedian). What do you think, maybe we can make use of it to bring this article a bit closer to WP standards? Austronesier (talk) 20:12, 22 January 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi, Austronesier, in the long term I'd be interested, although I'm kind of busy on a project to expand our very spotty coverage of French criminal law. (If interested, see, e.g., this draft glossary which when done, will help inform many of the red links at this nav template and help expand it.) I'm not sure about the use of pseudoscientific in the title, in the context of a discipline in which I'm not sure if scientific applies (much the same question as I'd have regarding such claims regarding the dismal science), so I'd prefer a title that referred to fringe or even crackpot theories (or both), rather than pseudoscientific. Even where pseudoscientific might be defenisble, such as in Fringe theories about the Shroud of Turin, they don't use tha tword. But other than that, yes, I agree. Mathglot (talk) 10:45, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  From essay to article