Talk:Areal feature

Areal features and geography

Is it common for areal features to arise out of practical necessity? For instance, Inuktitut and Arabic distinguish fewer vowel heights than do languages that developed in more temperate climates; one hypothesis is that opening the mouth less helps reduce exposure to the elements. --Damian Yerrick 03:26, 17 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

How surprising in an article on language, to find such an egregious misuse of language with implied assumptions about self-importance of the article vs all other uses of a term. Wow. Just wow. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 150.101.157.18 (talk) 08:43, 24 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Move request

Move the page to something like Areal feature (linguistics). Please. Now. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 150.101.157.18 (talk) 08:43, 24 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Title

If areal feature redirects here, and there are no other pages with this title, why the (linguistics) tag? What are we disambiguating against? —Muke Tever talk 22:26, 5 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Nothing that I see. I requested a "db-move" from the administrators. – gpvos (talk) 13:22, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

I think the issue is the relation to cultural diffusion in general, and at a yet higher level the interrelation of linguistics and anthropology. I added a ref to the section of that article that has a tiny bit about linguistic diffusion, which should be expanded and linked to this article. Bn (talk) 15:40, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It's related to the basic understanding of the English language, that areal feature could be used in many contexts, and to suppose that you understand the entire body of human knowledge so well as to predetermine all such contextual uses, of such a term, is not a good indicator of expertise in any language or academic work whatsoever, thus undermining credibility in the article, while also causing offense and potential confusion, should anyone encounter a areal feature of a different type, defined in language, and to find out what an areal feature is, consult a text represented as an authoritative and objective expert body of knowledge such as an encyclopedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 150.101.157.18 (talk) 08:47, 24 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

front rounded vowels

"the presence of the vowels y, ø, and œ (known as front rounded vowels) in languages of northern Eurasia, most especially Scandinavia. This almost certainly originated in the Uralic or Altaic languages"

I've never heard of this theory before. I thought - at least in Scandinavian languages - these resulted from converging diphthongs. Can we get a source on this one? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.218.206.2 (talk) 18:33, 28 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There's no a priori reason both could not be true, reinterpretation of diphthongs due to areal influence. But a citation is needed. As indeed citations are needed for every example given here. Bn (talk) 18:33, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified

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Introduction

I removed the introduction on the Wikipedia admonition to "be bold." I did it in the hopes of forcing some knowledgeable person to write one which defines the meaning of "areal feature" is simple, plain, non-technical, English. This characteristic is not defined in the removed introduction, nor is it defined in the rest of the article. The interested reader will need to go to a good library, and consult a book on linguistics if they want know what it means. Please fix this. Nick Beeson (talk) 13:10, 18 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The word "areal", relating to "area", is not common in English, so I was initially boggled when I came to this page. I didn't come here from some other linguistics page. I have added a sentence at the beginning of the article that I hope will help the next person make more sense of the subsequent "Characteristics" section. The article is still somewhat confusing overall. The "Examples" should more clearly say the reason for their inclusion (i.e. proved non-genetic, difficulty or ambiguity in resolving the relation, known borrowing from a particular non-ancestor, or whatever.) Dicirnah (talk) 16:20, 11 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

isoglosses

Quercus solaris added to the list of phonetic and phonological examples

The existence of isoglosses.

with the mysterious annotation e.g. /y/. I reverted because isoglosses exist (also) in dialect continua. Did Q.s. mean isoglosses that cross language discontinuities? A couple of examples would help. Is there a pair of neighboring languages in which both have /y/ on one side of a line? —Tamfang (talk) 23:25, 11 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Yes, the isogloss of /y/ in Europe cuts across Romance and Germanic in a way that has much more to do with regional contiguity than cognation. I maintain that the WP article on areal features should not entirely fail to link to the article on isoglosses. A see-also link alone will suffice if you don't want more. PS: My edit should have said something more like, "The existence of isoglosses whose boundaries cut across language areas". Quercus solaris (talk) 00:13, 12 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Language area redirects to Sprachbund; better find another word for it! It's strange to say that something transcending the area belongs to the area. —Tamfang (talk) 23:24, 13 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]