Talk:Iroquoian languages

message: http://www.mingolanguage.org/ Lachler, McElwain, and Burke Listen to Mingo Greetings,  Mingo (Iroquois) etymology about boating: kaháwa' noun means boat. kényua'. This switch-interactive verb means to row a boat or more to ferry someone across a stretch of water. It belongs to the semantic fields the sea and transportation. Etymology kényua' -NYU- Verb Root. Grammatical Info Base -nyu-.Stem Class LX. Conjugation Class XX. kényua' "I row boats". kaháwa', (boat) grammatical info base -haw- Stem Class C, Prefix Class Agent, Linker Vowel ö. Note that the -h- at the beginning of this base is strong, and so does not drop out when it would come between two vowels. Varies with kahôwö'. Possessed Form akháwa' my boat. Plural Form kahawa'shö'ö boats. káhu' means "this way" or in this direction.To include the Mingo groups on the language map, one will "red-colour" over the region of West Virginia and eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania otherwise the upper Ohio Valley to nearly the Susqueahanna region. The Anacostan Nuetralls, according to the earliest Baltimores records (1621-31) report they were trading with the Irowuois from beyond the Allegheny Mountains and Potomac Valley. Conaughy (talk) 18:09, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Previously headerless discussion

message: Hello again Conaughy, I've added the "expert opinion" template on this article because I think it would be a very good idea to try and have some firm guidance at the onset regarding this subject. Iroquoian cultural studies in general is a vast and complex subject area and has been heavily written about over the past half century, linguistics in particular is very tricky. At this point it seems logical to me to get a reliable framework down from someone who really does know what they're talking about, once that's established the rest of us can plug away at fleshing it out. Once again, my advice is to go very easy on relying heavily on "older" sources, say pre 1950's-60's, as the field has changed a great deal in comparison to before that time. It's certainly not the case that any work done before that time is valueless, it's just that the sum total of scholarship in the area has increased to such an extent in the interim that a lot of information that was once regarded as the last word on the subject is now widely questioned (and sometimes completely rejected) by those who specialize in the subject. The Sanson map is a case in point. Archaeologists have completely rejected its accuracy here in southern Ontario, which should be a 'word to the wise' for others who are attempting to extrapolate and utilize it in other geographical areas. cheers Deconstructhis (talk) 19:13, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Regarding Sources

message: Hi all,
I was cleaning up a few misspellings in the lead when I noticed that some phonological aspects of Iroquoian languages were being contrasted with Indic languages. I'm a bit of an amateur linguist and I recognize, as does Wikipedia's own Indic disambiguation page, that Indic is generally recognized to refer to topics, including those linguistic, relating to the Indian subcontinent, so I added a clarification request template. Any idea why the Indic languages might have been singled out as a contrastive element in this fashion, as opposed to Basque or Ugric or...? I suspect, given the subject matter, that Native American might have been a better choice, but I am not an expert, so thought I'd bring it here for discussion. Cheers, Northumbrian (talk) 03:21, 17 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Indic?

message: Can anyone shed any light on the relationship between the Iroquoian and Algic (Algonquian etc) language groups? There must be some linguistic relationship, even if it has to be traced back to the general vicinity of Siberia!    Heavenlyblue (talk) 23:54, 1 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Relationship between the Iroquoian and Algic (Algonquian etc) language groups 

message: True or false: origins--Inayity (talk) 22:39, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Surprisingly enough, it might be true:  Basque trade jargon > Montagnais > French.  But an Algonkian etymology is still possible.  See Iroquois: An Etymology and the editor's footnotes here. — kwami (talk) 00:49, 25 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  True or False 

message: The table indents Lake Iroquois from the Northern Iroquois, but the terms are likely alternative names of the same thing. Removing that level of indentation would better organize the table. The Tuscarora aren't listed with Southern Iroquois either, but as a separate group. This strikes me as a single source error--whomever wrote that para didn't ever see (or understand) other scholars had classified the language with the Cherokee, iirc. Best regards, FrankB 23:28, 14 November 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: These are linguistic classifications, not geographical, with the term Iroquoian, not Iroquois, in the same way that English is a Germanic language, but is not German. Although the Tuscarora people lived in the south before most moved to New York in the 1700s, their language is part of the Northern Iroquoian branch. Only Cherokee is in the Southern Iroquoian branch. However, you're right that the indentation is a problem. Tuscarora-Nottoway should be under Northern Iroquoian, as a sister to Lake Iroquoian. Huronian should be a sister to what's called here 'Five Nations Confederation of the Iroquois and Susquehannock', which should be changed as it is a novel term (at this moment a Google search finds that phrase on only this one page. See the references below for the usual terms). The limited knowledge we have of Neutral shows it was more like the Five Nations languages than Huronian. Since an Unclear category has been put here, Neutral, Erie, and Wenro should all be placed there due to the limited amount of data available. These are standard understandings of the Iroquoian family from many different scholars, who differ mostly on what to do with the Unclear languages. Eliminating Lake Iroquoian as a separate part of Northern Iroquoian is from the single source used by Glottolog (Julian 2010). For the usually accepted arrangement, see these references: Iroquoian: Composite. MultiTree: A digital library of language relationships. Institute for Language Information and Technology: Ypsilanti, MI. 2013. Web. Accessed November 14, 2016. Published July 27, 2013 . <http://multitree.org> Mithun, Marianne. 1979. Iroquoian. In Campbell and Mithun. The Languages of Native America: Historical and Comparative Assessment. Austin: University of Texas Press. 133-212. Mithun, Marianne. 1984. “The proto-Iroquoians: cultural reconstruction from lexical materials,” in Extending the Rafters: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Iroquoian Studies. Edited by Michael K. Foster, Jack Campisi and Marianne Mithun, pp. 259-281. Albany: State University of New York Press Blin-Lagarde, Pierrette. 1972. Une étude historique dans les langues de la famille huronne-iroquoise. Master’s thesis, McGill University, Montreal. Hoffman, Bernard G. 1959. Iroquois linguistic classification from historical materials. Ethnohistory 6:160-185. Hickerson, Harold, Glen D. Turner, and Nancy P. Hickerson. 1952. Testing procedures for estimating transfer of information among Iroquois dialects and languages. International Journal of American Linguistics 18:1-8. Lounsbury, Floyd G. 1978. “Iroquoian languages,” in Handbook of North American Indians, Northeast, Vol. 15. Edited by Bruce G. Trigger, pp. 334-343. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution. MT301 (talk) 01:20, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Table organization Questioned 

message: I again undid the changes claiming Conestoga is a currently living language due to the continued lack of evidence from reliable sources:
#The link to the Conestoga language webpage on Living Dictionaries/Living Tongues  has only one contributor, the same as the wiki editor claiming the language is still widely spoken, so is circular self-citing.
#The website of the Conestoga Language and Culture Authority  referenced by that same wiki editor also appears to be the work of the same individual, furthering circularity and self-citing.
#The Living Tongues Institute itself doesn't check validity of submissions, e.g. if there is an actual community of speakers or if there is just a conlang, so is not in a position to justify the speaker status of a language. Cf. their entry for Dlëshood’ian -- it's given the ISO 639-3 code for Aari, a language from Ethiopia whose entry in Wikipedia doesn't mention the term Dlëshood’ian as a variant. It is also given geographical coordinates in New Jersey, not Ethiopia, and managed by someone named Hdjdjxh Hdhdhruieh.
#The same editor has modified the Susquehannock language page to give an estimated 3,000 to 20,000 speakers. The smaller number is almost as many as for Mohawk, and the larger is nearly 8,000 more than for Cherokee, and so puts Conestoga as the third largest Indigenous language spoken in the United States. With such massive numbers of speakers, the language would not be so overlooked as to be considered dormant any more than, say, Apache would. Those numbers alone suggest a hoax or severe misunderstanding of what the term "Conestoga" refers to.
#The grammar and vocabulary mentioned by this editor in the Susquehannock page and the Living Dictionaries grammar page  are not of any Northern Iroquoian language, while the already-existing documentation of the Conestoga language shows it is clearly Northern (cf. the Susquehannock page's reference to Mithun (1981) analyzing previous documentation). What the editor gives appears to be a variant of Cherokee, the Southern Iroquoian language. The complete difference between the historically documented language and what the editor calls Conestoga here needs to be explained, as well as why his Conestoga is so much like Cherokee, the most divergent Iroquoian language, instead, to even begin to accept their "Conestoga" as accurate.
I don't know whether this is simply a hoax, which has happened before when a Mohawk speaker claimed to be a Susquehannock speaker in about the 70s, or someone's Iroquoian-based conlang, which has also happened before with Poliespo, or involves a family idiolect of Cherokee that ended up in Pennsylvania with a change of name to something local also starting with a C. In any of those cases, this is not what is known as Conestoga, Susquehannock, or Andaste.
MT301 (talk) 20:11, 2 January 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: The modern Conestoga-Susquehannock tribe itself does not purport to have even close to a complete language, let alone any “native” speakers. They even list documents and confirm descended families who were officially documented as Native and list those who participated in the 1845 Conestoga land claims and the 1872 joint resolution. If there were truly any Native speakers remaining they would be known to the tribe and there would certainly be more than one single source claiming any knowledge beyond the existing materials. Even the 1757 record of the language spoken at Conestoga town made by interviewing Bill Sack (killed in the 1763 massacre) consisted not of Conestoga but largely Mingo language. 2600:100E:B06C:AE14:D116:6F28:1B2F:856A (talk) 21:36, 27 October 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Conestoga/Susquehannock/Andaste