Talk:Shabo language

message: The discussion of grammar is VERY short, but it depends on how much info on grammar is actually available on this language. If it was readily available, this article would have to be demoted to B (or maybe even C) class status. But I don't know, so could anyone tell me? Best, G Purevdorj (talk) 19:11, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure about how readily available it is, but that combined with zero inline citations makes this not a GA, I know that much. Wizardman 18:45, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: GA status

message: I was surprised to see this article rated "top importance". This is a poorly-known language spoken by 600 people in southern Ethiopia which was identified only within the last 25-30 years; hardly as important as Oromo or Amhara, which have more speakers & a larger cultural impact on their neighbors. Checking the criteria for assessing the importance of articles -- which I don't agree with, but they are what we have to work with -- I feel that Shabo fails the measure & is better rated as having "High" importance. -- llywrch (talk) 00:16, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Disagree. The project's scale sees all of the 6000 languages as of top importance to the project. Only dialects or elements of a dialect continuum are rated as high. Shabo is especially important as a language isolate and as an endangered language, which will endear it to most participants of the project. Don't forget that this is the importance scale of the language project. It may be an entirely different matter for the Ethiopia project, where indeed Shabo has a lower importance rating, in line with its number of speakers and body of available knowledge. Probably we will need to go through many of the Ethiopian languages to adjust their importance to top, where this is not the case yet. Landroving Linguist (talk) 11:48, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
replies: text:  I have a few concerns here. One is with the WikiProject's decision to make every language "Top" importance: the intent with importance ratings is to identify the core, or most vital, articles that need attention. Ranking all of the articles on languages as "Top" importance defeats this purpose & makes it harder to determine which articles deserve more attention; but this is an issue better discussed elsewhere. A second is the way I came to this article: I had a look at the list of "Top-importance" Language articles, & of the 42 so graded at that time, I was surprised that a number of languages which, by any measure, are "Top-importance" for the study of languages -- either due to quantity (numbers of speakers) or quality (depth of analysis, influence on other languages) -- were not so graded. (I've been working on this problem by making the effort to identify & grade indisputably important languages as "Top".) Lastly, I actually was following the definition for "Top" -- "Asturian language (as the most relevant language of its linguistic group)"; this example suggests to me that some languages can be consider as not "Top" importance. And honestly, if Shabo can be shown to be the most important member of its family -- or a language isolate -- I would concur with any promotion of this article back to "Top". But the essential problem is that the guidelines for assessing WP Languages isn't adequate, & that problem needs to be addressed. -- llywrch (talk) 21:49, 10 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Linguistic importance 

message: After a discussion on the reliable sources noticeboard, there are serious concerns about whether the Ukrainian journal Virtus is a reliable source, as its contributors pay for publishing and there appears to be no peer-review. The author is not a linguist. The claim below is extraordinary, and looks to be very much WP:FRINGE, therefore I have removed it provisionally pending better documentation or more information.
 Rassokha (2020) (unlike Blench, not a reputable African linguist) attempts to establish a relationship between Shabo and the Sumerian language and that both of them belong to the Austroasiatic language family.Rassokha, Ihor. On a possible similarity between Austro-Asiatic languages, Shabo (Ethiopia) and Sumerian as confirmation of the genetic relationship between the population of Northeast Africa and Southeast Asia // Scientific Journal Virtus, November # 48, 2020: pp. 61 — 65.
Boynamedsue (talk) 17:03, 24 January 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes. That's plain bs, linguistically. People claim all kinds of relationship between language isolates and their favorite families. In social media one would call it clickbait. --Thogo 13:17, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removal of Austro-Asiatic/Sumerian claim 

message: If Chabu is the preferred term and the people themselves react with anger if called "Shabo" (cf. Kibebe Tsehay's grammar, p. 3), shouldn't the article be moved to the more preferred name instead of just saying so in the intro? --Thogo 13:17, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Name/Lemma