Linguistics

683 readers

1 users here now

Welcome to the community about the science of human Language!

Everyone is welcome here: from laypeople to professionals, Historical linguists to discourse analysts, structuralists to generativists.

Rules:

Instance rules apply.
Be reasonable, constructive, and conductive to discussion.
Stay on-topic, specially for more divisive subjects. And avoid unnecessary mentioning topics and individuals prone to derail the discussion.
Post sources when reasonable to do so. And when sharing links to paywalled content, provide either a short summary of the content or a freely accessible archive link.
Avoid crack theories and pseudoscientific claims.
Have fun!

Related communities:

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

[Meta] Requesting community feedback on potential rule changes (mander.xyz)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

13 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Changes highlighted in italics:

Instance rules apply.
[New] Be reasonable, constructive, and conductive to discussion.
[Updated] Stay on-topic, specially for more divisive subjects. Avoid unnecessarily mentioning topics and individuals prone to derail the discussion.
[Updated] Post sources whenever reasonable to do so. And when sharing links to paywalled content, provide either a short summary of the content or a freely accessible archive link.
Avoid crack theories and pseudoscientific claims.
Have fun!

What I'm looking for is constructive criticism for those rules. In special for the updated rule #3.

Thank you!

EDIT: feedback seems overwhelmingly positive, so I'm implementing the changes now. Feel free to use this thread for any sort of metadiscussion you want. Thank you all for the feedback!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Okay Starostin, now you're going too far. :)

I'm joking. Seriously, it depends a lot on how you approach it. Macro-Altaic is heavily controversial, not supported by linguistic and/or genetic evidence, but it is not blatantly false. So it should be fine to talk about it, or even propose that it might be true, as long as there's no attempt to disguise it as incontestable truth or scientific consensus.

Here's some examples of things I'd consider crack theories, and remove accordingly:

Obnoxious and insistent claims that English is Romance, Romanian is Slavic, Japanese is Sinitic etc., even in the light of evidence contrariwise
Claims that all languages are a degenerated version of Hebrew, Sanskrit or ULTRAFRENCH
Crappy Proto-World reconstructions that make no attempt whatsoever to use the comparative method correctly

The problem of those isn't just that they're discredited; they're blatantly false and/or grossly disregard proper scientific methodology.