Talk:Northeast Caucasian languages
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[edit] Group, family, sub-family, branch
Kwami, I don't know who started using "group" intead of "family" for the branches; I suppose the idea was to reserve "family" for the top-level node (Northeast Caucasian). What about "branch" or "subfamily" instead? Jorge Stolfi 01:44, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Isolate
Kwami, is the use of "isolate" for Dargwa and Khinalugh appropriate? Presumably you mean that they are branches of Northeast Caucasian that have a single language in them. But doesn't "isolate" mean specifically a language without any known relatives? (Would replacing all "family" to "branch" solve the problem?) Jorge Stolfi 01:44, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
- Hey again,
- 'Isolate' is frequently used this way. Armenian's commonly called an Indo-European isolate, for example. It's disambiguated in the 'language isolate' article.
- Branch would be fine as a reference to a larger family, as here. But it's kind of nice to distinguish branches that are families themselves from branches that are single languages. Not important, though. Go ahead and change it if it bothers you.
- I don't like to use the word 'subfamily' unless it actually means something. For example, Würm organized his Papuan classifications around levels he called phyla, stocks, and families, each with their own super- and sub-levels (he also used the terms phylum-level isolate, stock-level isolate, and family-level isolate). There was an element of coherence to the words, so in his case it's okay. But that's rare. Usually you just end up with gibberish such as an Indo-European family, containing an Italo-Celtic subfamily, which in turn contains a Celtic family, with a P-Celtic subfamily — completely meaningless terminology. —kwami 07:38, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Shift to modern classification
Kwami, I see that you are "modernizing" the classification of Caucasian languages so that the Northeast family by default includes the North-Central (Nakh) family. That is fine with me, but (1) I hope that it is indeed an accepted view now, so that we won't get into an edit war with some "Anti-Comrie" camp; and (2) we must be sure to updade North-Central Caucasian languages/Nakh languages to say that the former is only an old name for the latter. Jorge Stolfi 17:26, 4 January 2006 (UTC) OK, I see that it has been done already. I will put up a redirect from North-Central Caucasian languages to Nakh languages. Jorge Stolfi 18:00, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Meaning of old labels
BTW, is OK to call the whole shebang (NE + Nakh) as "Caspian", "East Caucasian", or "Dagestanian"? Or should we warn the reader that those labels may mean either "NE including Nakh" or "NE excluding Nakh", depending on the context? Jorge Stolfi 17:26, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
- Most of those terms were formulated for NEC less Nakh. I can especially see the geographic label Dagestanian objected to - there is after all a Nakho-Dagestanian, but people will also object to the latter as giving unwarranted prominence to Nakh. NEC and EC should be fine. Don't know about Caspian. But there's going to be variation regardless. There are linguists who would object to the term Indo-European as we have it, since in their conception Indo-European is Indo-Hittite less Anatolian.
- Ethnologue has adopted the Comrie classification hook line & sinker. (They have a bit more detail in the Lezgian languages than we do.) There may be other classifications out there, but I doubt many people will defend the traditional one. kwami 18:36, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
