Talk:Pama-Nyungan languages

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Contents 1 Rewrite required 2 Articles and groups? 3 Specifics of Classification 4 Spelling issues 5 more article links 6 How Well Established is Pama-Nyungan 7 Redirects

[edit] Rewrite required

This article needs to be rewritten and expanded, but meanwhile I removed mentions of an Australian language family. Few Australian linguists subscribe to that idea anymore, and indeed R. M. W. Dixon no longer believes even Pama-Nyungan is valid. Although most Australianists hold to Pama-Nyungan, and many are looking for external links to other Australian families, traditional "Australian" should be relegated to macro-family hypotheses such as Nostratic.

Historically, Australian languages were first suggested to form a single family when only Pama-Nyungan were well enough described to provide much data. --kwami 02:24, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Articles and groups?

How far do we go with creating new articles for groups, sub-groups, etc. Is there a Wikipedia standard for this? Eg: Pintupi is in the Western Desert sub-sub-group, which is in the Western Desert-Warnman sub-group, which is in the South-west group, which is part of the Pama-Nyungan family. Do we have to have an article for every group? Dougg 05:45, 19 September 2005 (UTC)

I don't see why we couldn't do more subgroups and have articles on them. I guess it is just who wants to write them. Since some subgroups are different according to the linguist, I have kept it rather neutral and just listed the major groupings and the languages. I still have more languages to add. Imperial78

[edit] Specifics of Classification

• I think it's pretty much agreed these days that Tangkic is non-Pama-Nyungan. Claire 02:56, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
• Re Pama-Nyungan, Barry Alpher has a wonderful article on the evidence for Pama-Nyungan as a cohesive subgroup. It's in an incredibly expensive book but if any of the editors of this section would like a copy send me an email and I'll send you a pdf - I'm one of the editors of the volume so I'm depriving noone except myself and my coauthor of royalties :) It's in Bowern and Koch (2004) Australian languages: Classification and the Comparative Method. John Benjamins. Claire 02:56, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Spelling issues

To what extent do you want to use established community orthographies? Yuulngu as you have it has had community literacy for about 50 years now, and it's Yolŋu in the estiablished orthography. I'd be in favour of giving priority to established community spellings as well as giving variants, if that's ok? Claire 02:57, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] more article links

There are a fair number of language stubs we don't have links to, which can be found at Category:Australian_Aboriginal_languages and Category:Indigenous_Australian_language_stubs. Some of those articles should be moved to "X language". Arrernte has a fair amount of language data too. Sorry, but I'm operating on only 64MB of memory at the moment (an archaic computer that's the only one functioning), which is way too slow to go through all these myself. kwami 10:37, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] How Well Established is Pama-Nyungan

Is this language super-group a hunch based on some shared characteristics and a driving desire to find order in randomness... or is there a fully reconstructed proto-language with specific sets of transformations leading to each of the present day language groups?

Could you present a little bit of the phonology, lexicology, and grammar that lets you describe Pama-Nyungan as fact and not (vague?) theory in this article?

They are all based on the pro-nouns that are similar to some extent (Blake 1992), this is the proto-form of the overall language family.

The table below is a reconstruction of the original language that is proto-Pama-Nyungan. 1st person is 1, 2nd person is you and 3rd person is they.

	Singular	Dual	Plural
First person	ngay	ngai	ngana
Second person	ndin	nyunbala	nyurra
Third person	nyu(east), ngu(west)	bula	dyana

(Dixon 1980 cited in Blake 1992)

nyan (she) I cant place. Enlil Ninlil 05:13, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Redirects

Should Non-Pama-Nyungan really redirect here? I suggest it should be a separate article outlining why it's even used as a psuedo-natural class, and use it basically as a linking page to all the non-Pama-Nyungan families as well as Pama-Nyungan proper.
Aidhoss 04:01, 6 November 2007 (UTC)