Talk:Pama–Nyungan languages

message: I'd like to see some information here about the number of native speakers of this 'language family' (the one described by Hale and disputed by Dixon) and also the languages with the highest number of native speakers    —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.104.195.115 (talk) 06:20, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: number of speakers

message: * I think it's pretty much agreed these days that Tangkic is non-Pama-Nyungan. Claire 02:56, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Specifics of Classification

message: To what extent do you want to use established community orthographies? Yuulngu as you have it has had community literacy for about 50 years now, and it's Yolŋu in the estiablished orthography. I'd be in favour of giving priority to established community spellings as well as giving variants, if that's ok? Claire 02:57, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Spelling issues

message: There are a fair number of language stubs we don't have links to, which can be found at Category:Australian_Aboriginal_languages and Category:Indigenous_Australian_language_stubs. Some of those articles should be moved to "X language". Arrernte has a fair amount of language data too. Sorry, but I'm operating on only 64MB of memory at the moment (an archaic computer that's the only one functioning), which is way too slow to go through all these myself. kwami 10:37, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  more article links 

message: Is this language super-group a hunch based on some shared characteristics and a driving desire to find order in randomness... or is there a fully reconstructed proto-language with specific sets of transformations leading to each of the present day language groups?
Could you present a little bit of the phonology, lexicology, and grammar that lets you describe Pama-Nyungan as fact and not (vague?) theory in this article?
:They are all based on the pro-nouns that are similar to some extent (Blake 1992), this is the proto-form of the overall language family.
The table below is a reconstruction of the original language that is proto-Pama-Nyungan. 1st person is 1, 2nd person is you and 3rd person is they.
             	Singular	Dual	Plural
First person 	        	    	
Second person	        	    	
Third person 	        	    	
(Dixon 1980 cited in Blake 1992) 
nyan (she) I cant place.  
Enlil Ninlil 05:13, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The forms above do not match other sources. O’Grady and Hale ("The coherence and distinctiveness of the Pama-Nyungan language family within the Australian linguistic phylum", Bowern and Koch, 2004) give, inter alia, 1ps *ngayu, 1pd *ngali.
μηδείς (talk) 22:14, 25 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  How Well Established is Pama-Nyungan 

message: Should Non-Pama-Nyungan really redirect here? I suggest it should be a separate article outlining why it's even used as a psuedo-natural class, and use it basically as a linking page to all the non-Pama-Nyungan families as well as Pama-Nyungan proper.
Aidhoss 04:01, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Redirects 

message: Please stop deleting notable verbatim criticisms from the article.  Indeed, having an entire section devoted to Dixon borders on undue weight and Hale's quite notable comments serve to balance a section devoted to his objections alone.   Reverence for Dixon is fine, and I suggest you find reliable sources to quote in praise of him in his article.  The comments you describe as "ad hominem" are no such thing - ad hominem is the argument that because a person is evil or the like his arguments are invalid - no such claim is made here, the emotion of the comments does not make them ad hominem.  
In the case of controversies, attributed verbatim quotes are relevant, which is exactly what we have here.  "Forcefully" is an unsourced evaluation that you reflects your opinion of Hale's words - the critic's words speak for themselves. 
μηδείς (talk) 21:19, 2 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  hale's criticism 

message: See the reference to Evans and McConvell.
And apart from Hale's venom, is there any chance of evidence ever being presented on this page?
Just saying that one has used the --- gasp --- comparative method isn't particularly convincing.
And these hundreds of cognates, where are they?
The mainstream appears to consist of Evans, McConvell and Bowern, more or less, with "Nobody" doing the cleanup --- or mostly clicking the undo-link. Even Lyle Campbell, who should be pretty dispassionate about the subject calls for much more information and research and assigns Pama-Nyuangan the label of family status not confirmed.
And please don't let poor Medeis do all the rollup. He's just a camp follower.
Please present something convincing and, most of all, answer the question, whether Hale committed the sins of glottochronology and mass comparison. (Dubbing the last one lexicostatistics doesn't make it any more respectable.) Io (talk) 01:39, 22 May 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: PS: I almost forgot. Having Bowern here on board as an interested party does not lend credibility to unbiasedness, Io (talk) 01:44, 22 May 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Pama-Nyungan appears to be generally accepted by historical linguists, even if most of them (or even almost all of them) may never have investigated the evidence closely by any measure. But the same is true for such large families as Austronesian, Northeast Caucasian, Sino-Tibetan, Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo or Nilo-Saharan, let alone the most obvious comparison, Trans-New-Guinea, all of with are supposedly highly ancient. In all these cases, there are extremely few experts, but other scholars, just like the general public, basically take the experts' word for it. That even though my impression of (say) the evidence for Niger-Congo (let alone Nilo-Saharan) has never been particularly good (and I'm not the only one with a very sceptical attitude in this case), and even though the big three African families are supposed to be on the order of at least 10,000 years old, hence perhaps twice as old as Indo-European, Semitic or Pama-Nyungan are estimated to be (and the fact that the membership of Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan, perhaps also Afro-Asiatic, has lately been reduced significantly could be seen as bolstering not only the case of the defenders, but also the suspicions of the sceptics, in a way). However, there's simply no way to make a general assessment of plausibility for such proposals (let's assume the time-depth estimates are roughly correct for the sake of the argument). Perhaps many non-IE families have really simply changed considerably more slowly (there are various cases which seem to confirm this impression) and borrowing hasn't confused the picture significantly (intra-family borrowing wouldn't matter for the general coherence of a family as such). Semitic, for instance, surely does not seem to have changed as quickly as IE. So I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss Pama-Nyungan out of such general considerations. Wikipedia can only report the general consensus in the field as reflected in relevant sources, and if the consensus is in favour of Pama-Nyungan and various other big families, we can't help it if the consensus is based on poor evidence and method and blind acceptance of the pronouncements of small circles of experts – it's not our job to judge the consensus. Scholars should not fall prey to the appeal to authority, sure enough, but Wikipedia is all about appeal to authority. We can't engage in our own research to confirm or debunk Pama-Nyungan and similar cases. I don't like this situation either, but it's simply the way academia works, and the way Wikipedia works, respectively. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:17, 15 April 2014 (UTC)

text: The only real doubter I'm aware of is Dixon, and other Australianists dismiss his arguments as methodologically flawed.  Even Glottolog, which does not accept Nigor–Congo, Eastern Sudanic (let alone Nilo-Saharan), or even Omotic as demonstrated families, and which trims TNG significantly, accepts Pama–Nyungan.  That might be because the editors are better informed about non-Australian families, but there aren't many sources that evaluate all the families of the world.  — kwami (talk) 01:05, 16 April 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is the hypothesis in such a sorry state that references have to be repeated?