Talk:Indosphere

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Articles for deletion This article was nominated for deletion on 8 March 2008. The result of the discussion was keep.

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[edit] Merger discussion

This should be merged with the article "Greater India".

What does Tibet, especially Yunnan region in China has anything to do with Indosphere? Is this another pathetic attempt to promote the India as a super power propaganda?

Tibet is so clearly heavily influence by Indian culture. Tibet's writing system, its architecture, religion, although its clothing and certain aspects like the roof of building came from China. Yunnan is even easier to explain. The Yunnanese compose of many tribes, many of which are practitioners of theravada buddhism. Their architecture and dress are nearly identical to those of Thailand and Laos. CanCanDuo 18:18, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
Strong support. The Indosphere is a very weak concept, almost devoid of scholarship, and barely used in popular culture. Highly suspect. Should we have an "Americanisphere" as well? That would be huge. But why not also an "ElSalvadorisphere?" El Salvador influences its neighbors and even the USA. How do you define what's in and what's out? You can't. It has no scientific basis. I vote to merge it. There's a nasty tendency (though well intentioned I'm sure) to promote big countries like India, CHina, and the USA and speak of their influence on others, but not the other way around. It's an inadvertent form of cultural imperialism. --Smilo Don 03:26, 12 September 2007 (UTC)
The American sphere?, America's influence is often called westernization and/ or modernization, and most countries are globally linked and interdependent today. The Indosphere is a term used to denote countries with cultural ties to India, and the inclusion of many of those countries are based on historical cultural connections. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 4.239.33.145 (talk) 04:47, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

If the term "Indosphere" exists as it's self a concept, then it belongs on Wikipedia. You are an Ignoramous. 67.190.27.113 19:43, 10 October 2007 (UTC) Josh Van Maren

Please note that Indosphere and Greater India and entirely different concepts, and therefore a merge will not be appropriate. `deeptrivia (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 03:05, 29 November 2007 (UTC)
I already had them merged once, but I agree that Greater India, Indianized kingdom, Indosphere, Undivided India and Indies are not the same concept. All the five articles are variations of the core concept of India beyond India. While it's nice to see new articles added to Wikipedia, it may be possible to keep the scene a bit more coherent and in-context (may be merging all five into a mother article?). Besides, is the concept of "Indosphere" an accepted concept, or an arbitrary term used by a couple of writers (writers on history, politics and such stuff are not entirely unknown for inventing terms that die quickly). Aditya(talk • contribs) 15:49, 8 January 2008 (UTC)
Strong Support for Merge, but would prefer Delete. There is precious little use of the term in an academic or formal sense. Where it does, it appears in the context of linguistics, and you are stretching a very long bow to equate language similarities to the manifestation of a cultural legacy or political power. I cannot see any references, so I am strongly tempted to nominate the article for deletion due to original research. Kransky (talk) 12:15, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
Strong Support for Merge, but would prefer Delete also. I have been protecting the Indosphere template from vandals for a long time, but I do concede that it is fair to say that we are stretching the use of Indosphere a bit. Thegreyanomaly (talk) 02:18, 24 January 2008 (UTC)
Well, there's a few comments explaining Indosphere is this and Indosphere is that. But, does the term really exist in a non-trivial way? Aditya(talk • contribs) 09:13, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] note

debate over the position of Afghanistan, Balochistan, and Tibet is taking place here Template talk:Countries of the Indosphere Thegreyanomaly (talk) 19:37, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] This entry should be corrected or deleted

The entry on Indosphere is highly misleading. A quick check on JSTOR for academic articles mentioning the term turns up only 5 hits, all either by James Matisoff or making reference to his work, and in fact one of his articles is in the list because it references another of his own articles. He uses the term strictly to refer to areas of Southeast Asia with strong linguistic resemblances of one sort or another to Indic languages, and opposes it to the Southeast Asian areas with strong linguistic resemblances to Sinitic langages. He explicitly indicate that resemblance does not mean a genetic relationship--Vietnamese, he says, resembles Chinese in certain key ways, and so is placed in the Sinosphere, but it belongs to a completely unrelated linguistic family. Nowhere is this term or "Sinosphere" used to refer to political entities, or indeed to anything outside Southeast Asia.

There is no indication that the term "Indosphere" has any academic currency beyond Matisoff. A quick Google search provides links that mostly come right back here. Furthermore, all of the external links in the entry are either broken or bogus, leading to obviously chauvinistic diatribes (such as the webpage claiming Indian origin for Filipino culture).

This entry should either be drastically shortened to limit its scope to the linguistic term as used by Matisoff, or it should be deleted.Rikyu (talk) 04:43, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Is anybody going to argue for the article? Otherwise lets kill it. Kransky (talk) 10:49, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] References

Some possible refs that can be used to expand the article:

Articles by Matisoff (who introduced the term)
  • Sino-Tibetan Linguistics: Present State and Future Prospects, James A. Matisoff , Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 20. (1991), pp. 469-504.
  • On Megalocomparison, James A. Matisoff, Language, Vol. 66, No. 1. (Mar., 1990), pp. 106-120.
  • Protean Prosodies: Alfons Weidert's Tibeto-Burman Tonology, Review author[s]: James A. Matisoff , Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 114, No. 2. (Apr. - Jun., 1994), pp. 254-258.
  • Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman: system and philosophy of Sino-Tibetan reconstruction. Matisoff J A (2003), University of California Press.
Other authors
  • Areal Linguistics and Mainland Southeast Asia, N.J. Enfield, Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2005. 34:181–206
  • Adjective Classes: A Cross-Linguistic Typology, Robert M. W. Dixon, Oxford University Press.
  • The Sino-Tibetan Languages. Bauer R.S. and Matthews S.J., Cantonese, In: G. Thurgood & R.J. LaPolla (eds) London, UK, Routledge, 2003, 146-55.
  • Language variations: Papers on variation and change in the Sinosphere and in the Indosphere in honour of James A. Matisof. Bradley D., R. J. LaPolla, Boyd MICHAILOVSKY & G. Thurgood (eds), 2003, Canberra, Australian National University (Pacific Linguistics)
  • Areal Diffusion and Genetic Inheritance, Aleksandra Aĭkhenvalʹd, Robert M. W. Dixon, Oxford University Press.

Abecedare (talk) 18:10, 15 March 2008 (UTC)