Talk:Sun Language Theory

message: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumer does not corroborate what this article's NY Times quote asserts.  The people who inhabited modern-day Iraq predated the Chinese word "Turk" by a long time.  The Sumerian civilisation in Mesopotamia, if it came from Central Asia/Mongolia, needs to have its origins added.  This should all be referenced and indicated in the article. COYW (talk) 20:33, 21 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Sumerians as "Turks"

message: Ha ha ha!!! it is like a joke!
:Is there any problem in labelling this pseudo-science?--Chris 13:19, 3 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No, the Sun Language Theory was clearly pseudoscience. The people who proposed it were not historical-comparative linguists, and it has never had any credibility at all in the wider world of historical linguistics, not even among Turkish linguists. It was put forward for rather obvious political reasons. The evidence offered for it was not the sort of evidence accepted as valid in historical linguistics. The only people who don't consider it a joke are Turkish nationalists who know nothing about historical linguistics.Bill 00:29, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: How can you know all Turkish nationalists are don't know anything about historical linguistics? It is nonsense.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.140.128.36 (talk) 11:23, 13 November 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, although the Sun Language Theory is fell into oblivion today, it was regarded as an important attempt for many linguists that day. Bill is mentioning the "history" of linguistics but forgeting that this was more than 60 years ago. The sun language theory is a history now, but this does not necessitates to shame these linguists as pseudo-scientists or nationalists. One of them is Agop Dilacar well known Armenian linguist (DİLÂÇAR, A.; Les bases Bio-Psychologiques de la Theorie Güneş Dil, İstanbul 1936). There are many others such as Anagnastapulos, Bartalini, Denison Ross, Hilaire de Barenton, Jean Deny, Mescaninof, Nemeth Guyula, Samoilovic, Zayanckovski, ... For this reason, i'm totally against calling it as a pseudo-science or nationalist movement. It's just a hypothesis turned out to be incorrect. Especially, shaming these linguists as "Turkish nationalists who know nothing about historical linguistics" or pseudo-scientists is rather simplistic POV. e104421 13:11, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It is simply not true that the Sun Language Theory had any real credibility among historical linguists, not even sixty years ago. Yes, there were people here and there who supported it, but they were a tiny minority. Furthermore, the "evidence" presented in support of this theory was not the kind of evidence considered credible by the mainstream of historical linguistics since the latter part of the 19th century. You will not find any of the major figures of historical linguistics of the time who considered it a serious hypothesis. It is all too common for people who are not historical linguists to pursue crazy ideas, not realizing that they don't  know what they are doing. Agop Dilacar is a good example of the problem. While he certainly knew a lot about Turkish, he was not expert in comparative historical linguistics. Even in its own time, the Sun Language Theory was not well motivated in terms of the evidence regarded as relevant at the time and was not taken seriously by the mainstream of the field. It was indeed pseudoscience. Bill 04:29, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Joke?

message: This sounds like nonsense, and the article implies it is nonsense by mentioning that it "fell into oblivion", but it really needs to say why it is nonsense, eg state the basic flaws of the proposition and give (very brief) details on accepted origin of language theories. RegRCN 10:03, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: This article does not evaluate the topic effectively

message: I recently commented that the quote from the NYT article of 1936 wasn't even written in proper English.  User Lambian then made corrections to the quote's grammar.  Given that Lambian says "unverified" in his (?)edit summary, I have to assume that the corrections are interpolations, and not from the source.  But we can't just guess, no matter how plausible and easier on the eyes Lambian's guesses are.  So I am reverting the edit.  If I am wrong and the corrections are based on reading the actual article, my apologies, and please restore them.μηδείς (talk) 01:24, 1 August 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: They were compiled from various versions, none of which is verifiably an accurate copy of the Times article. The article is available if you are a Home Delivery or Times Reader subscriber – which I am not – or willing to fork over $3.95 – which I am not. In particular the "&c." (see here, p. 23) seems authentic to me, as this way of abbreviating etcetera has fallen in disuse. I have no reason to think that the version that was added to the article and to which you have reverted is a better approximation of the quote from the actual article than my conjecturally reconstructed version; on the contrary: also in 1936 the NYT employed copy editors, who surely wouldn't have let that many grammar errors (all cases of a missing word) slip through in just one or two paragraphs from what is a short article anyway. There is also MOS:QUOTE, which states that trivial spelling or typographical errors should be silently corrected – I've stretched that a bit to include some other trivial errors that are probably not in the original text but were introduced in copying the text from the Times article.  --Lambiam 05:23, 1 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  accuracy of quote from the times 

message: Dingir (in Sumerian) = Tengri (Old Turkic) > Tanrı (in Turkish)= "God"   so the theory was not so wrong! Böri (talk) 11:57, 31 October 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Please see comparative  philology to see why "people say that this word looks like that word" is not a reason for relationship between languages.Xashaiar (talk) 14:11, 18 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Ancalimonungol  -- I really don't think that a Sumerian-Turkic connection is commonly accepted by mainstream scholars.  Before about 500 A.D., Turkic-speakers seem to have been in the southwest Siberia and/or northern Xinjiang and/or western Mongolia and/or eastern Kazakhstan areas, quite remote from lower Mesopotamia... AnonMoos (talk) 19:39, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

text: Unfortunately, the first known incursion westwards from the steppes by non-Indo-European-speakers was by the Huns, who may not have spoken a Turkic language, and in any case did not go anywhere near either Sumeria or Anatolia.  The Turks are not known to have moved into Central Asia (south or west of Lake Balkhash) until ca. 500 AD, and took another 500 years to get to Anatolia... AnonMoos (talk) 17:23, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

text: In 1569, doctor Johannes Goropius Becanus proved, by the same means as stated above, that the Dutch language was similar to the Hebrew language. Scaliger criticized this theory by saying "never did I read greater nonsense". Since then, scores of crackpots have tried to prove that language X resembles language Y by comparing words, with some tweaking (though as crude as the rule above "K" changed into "m" I've never seen): Chinese is like Egyptian, Bantu languages are like Latin, Basque like Etruscan, Mohawk like Swedish, Maori is an Aryan language, Wolof is like Egyptian... I strongly advise to read the hilarious section Pseudolinguistic comparisons in the Wikipedia lemma on Comparative linguistics. Riyadi (talk) 08:12, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dingir 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
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*Added archive https://web.archive.org/20070306094100/http://digital.sabanciuniv.edu:80/tezler/etezfulltext/arkmanceren.pdf to http://digital.sabanciuniv.edu/tezler/etezfulltext/arkmanceren.pdf
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/20100119205732/http://digital.sabanciuniv.edu:80/tezler/etezfulltext/kibrisg.pdf to http://digital.sabanciuniv.edu/tezler/etezfulltext/kibrisg.pdf
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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: After 10 years (see #This article does not evaluate the topic effectively), this article still does not assess debunking the theory. 165.91.12.190 (talk) 10:18, 6 December 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the problem is that this falls into the category of not even wrong. There isn't really a way for us to say anything meaningful about the first human language or anything like that, so there isn't a way to show that these claims are wrong or evaluate them as a coherent theory. Cyllel (talk) 11:37, 9 August 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: These two phrases have been included since the IP started the discussion: During the same congress the vast majority of the international non-Turkish scholars including Friedrich Giese [de] opposed the theory. One of the few non-Turkish linguists who supported the theory was Kvergić. Both are sourced.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 13:06, 9 August 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: I was assuming that the original poster wanted to delve deep into what the actual theory entailed and why it's wrong rather than just a statement that people think it's wrong. --Cyllel (talk) 17:34, 9 August 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Still incomplete

message: This article is very biased and wrong. The Sun Language theory isn’t hostile to any other race. It is pseudoscientific and pseudo-linguistic, but it’s not racist just because some scholars describe it as such. It is anti-Turkish propaganda to call the theory racist and ultranationalist as a fact. LeonChrisfield (talk) 08:20, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: No, it is fundamentally racist. It posits that the Turkish language is the original and primary language from which all other languages derive AND that the Turkish people are the purest and most advanced race on Earth. Racism doesn't require active discrimination; when you get into 'master race' territory, by inference, other 'races' are not 'master races'. And the only part of the political spectrum of any country that pushes racist theories like this are far-right ultranationalists. And the connection to ultranationalism is sourced. Iskandar323 (talk) 14:11, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

text: We are not talking about the 1930s; we are talking about today and today's standards. And by modern standards, this 'theory' is ultranationalist content of the highest order, which is why, in a modern encyclopedia, we refer to it as as such. That other countries in that time period may have held racist policies towards Turkey is irrelevant and does not make Sun Language nonsense any less racist. Two wrongs don't make a right. Yes, there was a lot of racist crap flying around in every direction in the 1930s. And in modern times we condemn it all unequivocally. Iskandar323 (talk) 07:24, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Racist and ultranationalist