Talk:Stratum (linguistics)

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Contents 1 Altaic superstrata 2 Merge with Language contact 3 Creole references 4 Name change 5 fact check?

[edit] Altaic superstrata

I removed two paragraphs in their entirety, because they do not seem to benefit this article:

• "For instance, some linguists contend that Japanese consists of a Altaic superstratum projected onto an Austronesian substratum, or that the Insular Celtic languages resulted from a Celtic superstratum over an Afroasiatic substratum." -- Both of these hypotheses are highly speculative, and only supported by a handful of fringe scholars; it does not seem like a good idea to illustrate a common and general term with speculative examples when numerous well-established cases are known.
• "When the influence of another language is too remote in the past for its influence on the surviving language to be adequately characterized, 'substrate' is used by default, though the situation might have really been that of an adstratum or even a superstratum. With Japanese, even 'adstrate' is probably too narrow a term to adequately describe the situation." -- This is just incorrect; in reality there is no practice of using 'substrate' as some kind of "default" term.

--AAikio 06:57, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

Sorry to disagree, but I know this practice from Indo-Europeanist usage in particular and can even point to an example: Indo-Iranian substratum, right on page 1, on the bottom. The problem seems to be that there is no neutral term which does not imply a sociolinguistic dominance relation, which, for prehistoric times, is often difficult to reconstruct. Florian Blaschke 19:45, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

I strongly disagree withAltaic superstrata denials and I will restore and source the relevant information. Best, Eklir (talk) 02:25, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Merge with Language contact

Merged discussion: I am opposing the merge with language contact, because this article presents the model of Substratum-Superstratum-Adstratum specifically and not any language contact in general, although any language contact may be classified by this model. But it is worth to keep seperate articles. If you do not want to have seperate articles for each term (sub- super- adstratum) than why not make a general lemma for all the three of them? --El bes (talk) 15:21, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

There is obviously a lot of overlap but not all scholars support this hypothesis therefore its best kept separate. However the discussion is more than just on "substrate" so the title needs changing or a general lemma used. Adresia (talk) 12:49, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Creole references

I deleted "The boundary case where neither language quite succeeds in displacing the other results in a Creole." There are many competing theories as toward creolgenesis and this describes none of them, at least not at all accurately enough. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.195.120.197 (talk) 05:14, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Name change

Substratum → Stratum (linguistics)

The page is not only about substrata - it also deals with superstrata and adstrata too. However, the current name of the page seems to suggest that this takes preference over the others. Mingeyqla (talk) 16:00, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] fact check?

Re: When one language succeeds another, the former is termed the superstratum and the latter the substratum. In the case of French, for example, Vulgar Latin is the superstrate and Gaulic is the substrate.

is it saying that vulgar latin succeeded French? I am not sure I am reading it correctly. Is the meaning that vulgar latin is the superstrate of French? 58.247.206.141 (talk) 22:57, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

It means that Vulgar Latin is the superstrate of French. On the other hand, Gaulish has very little influence on French. Frankish is the substrate. Munci (talk) 08:14, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

This article needs to differentiate between the superstrate and the resulting language. For example, we should say that French contains a Vulgar Latin superstrate and a Gaulish/Frankish substrate. This matters not only because French is different from Vulgar Latin, but also because the resulting language does not have to descend from the superstrate; the result can also be a creole, or a descendant of the substrate (tho I've rarely seen the term "substrate" used in that case). --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 09:46, 29 October 2009 (UTC)