Talk:Soninke people

message: I enlivened some obvious country links, added a link to Soninke language and am moving a couple of phrases there.--A12n 01:15, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: There's some decent content hidden in there (though largely uncited), but the prose is unencyclopedic, overblown, and awkward.  Please help!T L Miles (talk) 17:39, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Needs MUCH editing (January 2008) 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Regarding of your earlier deletions of all mention of the Soninke, as "Mande" or "Mande-speaking", I do not think this is necessary or necessarily constructive/an improvement. Adding the linguistic affiliation of an group can be helpful and help, for the general reader, to situate them in the cultural/linguistic landscape of their region (and globally). 
This kind of information is also not uncommonly included on pages about ethnic groups (including those from outside Africa) such as the Turkic Uzbeks, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uzbeks, or the Ugrian/Uralic-speaking Mansi and Hungarians, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansi_people and: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarians
(Uralic, for example, is a fairly ancient language family with a time depth comparable to that of Indo-European.)
Your comparison to describing Italians as "Indo-European" does not seem to apply here, since (as explained in the notes), though branches of Mande and IE often have a similar time depth, IE languages dominate almost all of Europe (with few exceptions), whereas West Africa alone is much more linguistically diverse, including, with Mande languages (which may or may not be a divergent branch of Niger-Congo) and many other deeply-rooted/differing branches of the Niger-Congo family spread variously all over the region, along with a few Nilo-Saharan languages (e.g. Kanuri, Songhai) and Chadic Afro-Asiatic languages (e.g. Hausa, and certain languages of the Mandara region of Cameroon). The comparison of French and Chinese with Mandinka and Kpelle also does not seem apt here. French and Chinese belong to entirely different unrelated families (separated by at least 15,000 and very possibly more than 30,000 years), with even proposed and contested superfamilies such as Nostratic - supposedly dated to about 15,000 years ago - that include IE nonetheless not proposing the inclusion of Chinese/Sino-Tibetan/Tibeto-Burman). This would not be comparable to Mandinka and Kpelle (which both belong to the Central-West branch of Mande, see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mande_languages), or even Soninke and Kpelle. The Mande family itself has been estimated by some to date to around 7,000 years ago/around 5,000 BC, based partly on estimates of the divergence times of its branches. Though if the Niger-Congo family is older than the Mesolithic and has no traceable link to Nilo-Saharan, as ethno-linguist Roger Blench seems to most recently propose (and Mande is a basal/early-splitting branch of Niger-Congo), proto-Mande's initial divergence could be older, and if, as some propose, Mande is not part of the Niger-Congo family at all, then its initial divergence could be older still, i.e. maybe significantly more than 10,000 years (but that is speculation and probably WP:OR). But nevertheless, according to Vydrin, the existing branches of/within Mande have a distance/time depth comparable to those of Indo-European, not of French and Chinese. See here, from Vydrin: https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01375776/document, and Vydrin also concludes "that speakers of Proto-Mande most probably lived around the second half of the 4th millennium BC" https://www.jolr.ru/files/(10)jlr2009-1(107-142).pdf.
One additional suggestion might be to also describe/include descriptions of the Soninke (and Bambara) as belonging to their respective specific branches of the Mande family (similar to how the Poles might be described as "Slavic"/"Slavic-speaking" or "West Slavic", the Bretons as "Celtic", the Navajo as "Athabaskan", the Hausa people as "Chadic", and the Amhara people as "Semitic" or as speaking "an "Afro-Asiatic language of the Semitic branch" - Semitic is also a quite ancient family and its parent Afro-Asiatic much more so). Thus a description something like "Northwest languages Mande-speaking" or "of the Northwestern branch of the Mande family" could be used in the case of the Soninke, and "of the "Manding branch of the Mande family" or Manding-speaking" in the case of the Bambara. Skllagyook (talk) 17:30, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: The "Mande" are not a single people. I do not think I have spoken of them as such, nor do I consider them that; the "Mande" instead are a group of related peoples sharing an ethno-linguistic common origin, and each has a distinct culture (though they may share some cultural features). If the article on them states that the Kora is a "typical Mande instrument" that would indeed be an innacuracy (and should be changed/corrected - I may change it), since, as you correctly point out, the kora is mostly used (and likely invented) by the Mandinka and seldom if at all by other groups. Skllagyook (talk) 14:09, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

text: Yes. I have just made several edits to the Mande peoples page (the page's edit history here: []). There were indeed some issues with it. There I, both clarified/specified that some (though not all) of the cultural practices the article incorrectly attributed to the "Mande" generically are in fact specifically associated with the Mandinka/Manding peoples (such as the kora and the epic of Sundaita), and also added material pertaining to other Mande peoples such as the Soninke and their close relatives (since previously, much of the article in those sections centered on Manding culture with less mention of others) - as well as adding other details. Is there anything else you suggest be reviewed? I will continue to look over the Mande peoples article. Skllagyook (talk) 19:35, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Regarding the description of the Soninke (and Bambara) as "Mande-speaking"