Talk:Indosphere

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)

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)

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)

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)

Subject creep

Recent edits, and the new map, although nicely done in the abstract, are once again spreading this page out beyond the narrow subject. "Indosphere" does not include India, Pakistan, etc. in any sense. As coined by Matisoff and used in linguistics, Indosphere refers to the languages of Southeast Asia that show the influence of Indic languages and scripts. All this other stuff, well done though it is, does not belong on the page, nor, really, should this page be considered part of some India-related wiki project. At the risk of being redundant, it's about the classification of Southeast Asian languages, and is not about South Asia. I don't won't to remove all the recent South Asian additions without discussion, but they need removing or serious rewriting. Rikyu (talk) 21:22, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

I haven't read Matisoff's papers/books, but from what I have understood, Indosphere refers to the region where the influence of Indic languages is prominent. I find it hard to understand how can Indosphere refer to a set of languages? Sinosphere is always used in a regional context and same applies to Indosphere, I guess. Even then, I fail to understand why would someone object to the new map given the fact that previous map showed Tibet, entire Indonesia, Philippines, and Balochistan as a part of Indosphere. If Matisoff included these regions as a part of Indosphere, then previous map is more accurate. But I'm highly skeptical as that assertion beats common-sense. --Emperor Genius (talk) 04:02, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

Indosphere is NOT about regions. It's about Tibeto-Burman languages. There are two major branches of the language group. The Indosphere branch of languages have phonetic characters that are closer to Indic languages, and the Sinosphere branch shows characters closer to Chinese languages. The map is not only redundant, it also is dangerously misleading. Aditya^{(talk • contribs)} 05:55, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

OK, Indosphere refers to a set of languages. But, I'm still not able to understand how is the previous map more relevant and less misleading than this one? --Emperor Genius (talk) 06:58, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

And this is so confusing. Firstly, the article doesn't even once mention Tibeto-Burman languages. Secondly, Tibeto-Burman languages are only spoken in parts of SE Asia but the article says Indosphere covers regions as far as Philippines. Thirdly, the article itself states Indosphere refers to areas of Indian linguistic and cultural influence in Southeast Asia. When one talks about spheres, like Anglosphere and Francophone, it refers to linguistic-cultural influence over a particular region. Not about a set of English and French languages. So, I do not know where is all this information coming from. If somebody wants to remove the map and replace it with the previous one stating that even Balochis in western Pakistan and Iran speak Tibeto-Burman languages, then what can I say? I have lost interest in this article because frankly, people here seem to be coming up with all sort of weird theories. --Emperor Genius (talk) 07:11, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

To end, common-sense says this has got more to do with Sprachraum than Sprachbund. If not, please clarify it in the article because the very title of this article is misleading. --Emperor Genius (talk) 07:15, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

The article is poorly written, as it draws more attention from Indian patriots than language scholars. I have tried to fix it some (take a look). The information is coming from scholarly books, not original original research, synthesis, inference or common sense. The image it really needs is a tree of Tibeto-Burman languages that come within the Indosphere, may be not a saffron march through the map of Asia. Aditya^{(talk • contribs)} 18:07, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but now the article makes less sense. It begins with a very basic definition that makes clear Indosphere is a linguistic concept applicable to Southeast Asia and oppossed (or complementary) to Sinosphere. Then we get a very thick paragraph (no doubt correct, but not exactly written for a general reader) on Tibeto-Burman. Why? Where is the link? Then Sinosphere is described as roughly Southeast Asia. Huh? Didn't the first sentence describe both concepts wrt Southeast Asia? There's also discussion of languages such as Javanese which are not Tibeto-Burman but most definitely considered Indosphere languages. And we still have a map, albeit very nicely drawn, that highlight non-Southeast Asia. I appreciate that everyone means well, but we need to make sure that we don't contradict ourselves, and that we don't overload the page with technical jargon (defined or not). Rikyu (talk) 02:05, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

Remove the inaccuracies, which would mean completely rewriting the lead, and, probably removing the map. I'm not a linguistic expert, but I like my encyclopedia to be accurate. Hence my efforts to get as much of it right as possible. Others can play the game as well. Aditya^{(talk • contribs)} 03:34, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

The article seems to be more accurate now. I'm removing my map. --Emperor Genius (talk) 13:06, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

Indosphere is a valid entry

Hi,

I've been talking to some anthropologists about the concept of an Indosphere at the U of Toronto and some have argued that the previous page with the map is valid, if you consider the suffix "-sphere" as pertaining to shared linguistic, religious, governmental, economic, and alphabetic heritage. This would be abstracted from the concept of the anglosphere. Just for reference, there was a previous nonsense argument that if you searched JSTOR and Google for Indosphere you could come up with nothing. First of all, Google is not a scholarly source, so I wouldn't use it. If you search for "anglosphere" in JSTOR (as of Sept 9th, 8:34 pm Eastern Time 2008) you will get only 1 hit (Past and Future Meet: Aleksandr Gorchakov and Russian Foreign PolicyPast and Future Meet: Aleksandr Gorchakov and Russian Foreign Policy), while if you search for Indosphere, you will retrieve 7 hits, some by Matisoff, but some by others (Chung, Ding) who are influenced by his work. Clearly, the JSTOR argument posed earlier is not valid. I'd also like to interject that some are apprehensive of pointing out a common link with India (particularly in Tibet, South East Asia) because of nationalism in their respective countries as well (ie. we invented everything, no outsider created our writing system, etc). I'm interested in this topic, I'll see if I can find more about it. 128.189.137.90 (talk) 03:40, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Did you read the article at all? Or did you just read the past discussions? Aditya^{(talk • contribs)} 08:43, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Relax Aditya. Yes, I read the article, which currently stands at about 500 words. One of the issues in this discussion appears to concern itself with whether or not there is a geographic dimension to the Indosphere beyond the purely linguistic definition proposed by Matisoff, and whether or not the map by Emperor Genius was valid. I'm reading a book right now called "Empires of the World" by Ostler, he makes reference to the Indosphere as a cultural and geographic entity in addition to a linguistic one. A map might be informative, as I found the map informative with the Sinosphere and Anglosphere articles, pending further research of course. You seem to be dragging in some sub-continental political biases (ie. your reference to "saffron march") into the design of this article which really have no place in this discussion. You might want to also comment on how the map is "dangerously misleading" so I understand where you're coming from. I certainly want to avoid any political biases. 128.189.137.90 (talk) 07:26, 11 September 2008 (UTC)