Talk:Uralo-Siberian languages

message: This article is blatantly POV and completely misleading; some serious editing would be needed. At present, it is not stated anywhere that Uralo-Siberian is a fringe theory that is supported only by a couple of scholars in the world - even Indo-Uralic and Nostratic, both highly controversial, have more proponents. --AAikio 04:00, 20 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Uralo-Siberian and Nostratic 

message: AAikio deleted the sentence "All of these are considered evidence for Nostratic by others.", claiming it was "too vague" and didn't mention who the "others" are. That's why the link is in there: read the Nostratic languages article, and you'll see. So I put the sentence back in, with somewhat clearer wording.
Now, does anyone have access to Seefloth's work? The Linguistlist posts on it are quite impressive, but too confusing for me to make a Wikipedia article out of them. David Marjanović 12:37, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Morphology again 

message: The Uralo-Siberian hypothesis is fairly probable from the view of genetics. We know that a part of Mongoloids bearing Y-chromosomal N3-lineage expanded somewhere from Northern China after the end of the Ice Age (ca. 14 000 BP) and colonized Siberia that was then sparsely inhabited by the remnants of Paleoindians (Q). Today, the N3-lineage is the main male lineage of the Uralic and Chukotko-Kamtchatkan speakers. It is also present in the Eskimo-Aleut group that actually came into being as a mixture of North-East Siberian Paleoindians (Q) with N3-Mongoloids. However, the marked presence of the Paleoindian Q-lineage in Kets, Yukaghirs and Nivkhi reveals that their isolated languages may be descendants of the Old Siberian Paleoindian language. 82.100.61.114 12:04, 1 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: That's interesting and deserves further research, but don't confuse genes and languages. They are not always inherited in the same way. David Marjanović 21:03, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Support by genetics 

message: Some of the links seem to be dead. I'm placing the  tag after the broken links until anyone finds working ones.Pet'usek [petrdothrubisatgmaildotcom] 15:51, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dead links 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just added archive links to  on Uralo-Siberian languages. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add  after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add  to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/20071025101035/http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0105&L=nostratic&D=1&F=&S=&P=725 to http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0105&L=nostratic&D=1&F=&S=&P=725
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/20071029075108/http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0106&L=nostratic&D=1&F=&S=&P=193 to http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0106&L=nostratic&D=1&F=&S=&P=193
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/20120218124335/http://www.nostratic.ru/books/(82)Nivkh.pdf to http://www.nostratic.ru/books/(82)Nivkh.pdf
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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: (This could add more to my previous topic. I forgot I even talked about it.)
Several months ago while looking at a video of its uploader creating a fleshed-out version of Vostyach similar to DJP's fleshing out of the Game of Thrones and Dune languages, I said this: "I heard that Uralo-Siberian is controversial, but I never looked into why. Could it be like Proto-World and Altaic? Is Michael Fortescue(and maybe Diego Marani) anything like G.J. Ramstedt, Nicholas Poppe, Joseph Greenberg, Merritt Ruhlen, Oleg Mudrak, Sergei Starostin, and even Anna Dybo? Is Fortescue a long-ranger fishing for resemblances between words of different languages/protolangs where properly-sharpened minds see differences in complex histories?"
A few weeks ago, someone named Sophia Schlier-Hanson replied: "Some long rangers are fringier than others. Ruhlen and Bengtson do nothing BUT their thing— collecting dictionary words that kind of look similar and arbitrarily making up a word that kind of sounds like all of them, a far MORE primitive and amateurish than the approaches 18th century philologists who first noticed pan-IE cognates were using. Greenberg is a decently well respected Africanist who HAS successfully identified some large, very old families on JUST the right side of max time depth for the comparative method, but in his old age he got cocky and got in with Ruhlen and Bengtson for some reason. Starostin overextended the comparative method a few millennia past its usual limit, did all his work with midcentury through ‘80s reconstructions which are now badly dated, and doesn’t do well at filtering out loanwords, but he WAS the first to attempt comparative method reconstructions of several Siberian indigenous language groups and his work is close enough to methodological respectability to be okay for plausible, consistent diachronic conlanging if not actual academic work building on it. Fortescue, about whom you are asking, is an actual Siberianist who from everything I’ve seen uses perfectly solid methodology, iirc has published a couple etymological dictionaries that were first of their kind, and is one of the foremost experts on some of the languages he’s studied."
I thanked her, and she responded: "You're welcome! I actually quite like Fortescue (and Vajda, the other big name in Pacific Rim historical linguistics, a rather niche special interest of mine). Happy researching/ conlanging! :D"
I would look up the Uralo-Siberian article on Wikipedia, and the preface says it is "considered a fringe theory by linguists" and "utilizes mass comparison", though those pieces of information lack citations. Whoever decided to put those in the article... where did they even get those ideas? As in, where is the evidence to prove it? Which well-ranked linguistics(Campbell, Nichols, Georg, the late Vovin, etc.) are against the hypothesis?
I would ask people on Reddit, and they told me about Georg writing a review a few decades ago for "Language Relations Across the Bearing Strait". https://www.jstor.org/stable/30028571 This information could help out, though it might be outdated. Kaden Bayne Vanciel (talk) 02:39, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: There was a large discussion about this on both the linguistics wikiproject and the fringe theory noticeboard, but the truth is they are fringe in nature at present. Several of the linguists you mentioned, while broadly considered competent and credible linguists, are nonetheless pretty far off of the deep end in terms of doing some research that the wider linguistics community simply rejects. It's possible more nuance is needed in differentiating some of the people working on it since there's a spectrum of serious linguists to fringe theorists, but at the end of the day it's not really in dispute that Uralo-Siberian is pretty widely rejected and that most of the work on it does utilize mass comparison. If more evidence from more mainstream techniques come out, then we can update it as needed. Warrenmck (talk) 20:08, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: If what you say is true (and I have no reason to think otherwise), is it possible to add citations to the "fringe theory" and "mass comparison" statements in the lead section? Rexodus (talk) 17:11, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Would be interesting if some source can be dug up for the accusation of "mass comparison", but this seems clearly false: he works mainly with well-established Uralic etymologies from earlier literature, has done himself the groundwork in getting Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Eskimo lexical reconstruction to good shape, and clearly asserts sound correspondences between them. To the extent his etymologies are poor, they're poor for entirely usual reasons like details of phonology and issues with semantics. E.g. the worst systematic problems noted in a review Holopainen (2022) of his and Vajda's recent book are probably neglecting the Proto-Uralic contrast *ï : *a and the inclusion of some words only reconstructed as far as Proto-Samoyedic. This is by no means mass comparison in the usual sense of adducing disparate modern words, that may not be even themselves related, as representing some member family. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 19:46, 10 December 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Since no sources have been presented so far for the labels "fringe", "widely rejected" and "mass comparison", I have removed these statements. I have added a citation to the latest review and adjusted the citation of Georg's article to the page that actually deals with Fortescue. –Austronesier (talk) 18:35, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Validity for Uralo-Siberian? 

message: Should we merge this article with Eskimo-Uralic? Uralo-Siberian still is a one-scholar hypothesis that builds on the much wider studied Eskimo-Uralic proposal. In its latest version, it only differs from the latter in the inclusion of Yukaghir.
So we could well turn this article with borderline WP:SIGCOV into a short section in Eskimo-Uralic, describing its more extensive scope and whatever is written about it in secondary sources. I haven't seen a secondary source yet that goes into such detail about Fortescue's evidence as the current version of the article does, even after the moderate trimming by User:Warrenmck. Which of course means that we should cut down the presentation of his evidence to a minimum to maintain due weight. Austronesier (talk) 18:31, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge with [[Eskimo-Uralic]]?