Talk:Pontic languages

Coctacts/Haplogroups

Is there a theory that says that IE speaking people (Corded Ware, Haplogroup I) came into contact with Kurgan people (Haplogroup R1a) and their language became satemized? Are there elements of satemization in NorthCaucasian? Is this why people think they are related, because of contact. J2/R1a contact in Ukraine. The same way people used to think that Uralic (Hap N) was related to Altaic (Hap C3) but it is accepted that it was due to contact in Eurasia. --Kupirijo 06:45, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Patrick C Ryan's 'Proto-Pontic'

Material posted by a person on his own website, but nowhere else referenced, does not constitute notable evidence. Mr. Ryan's claims for his own version of Proto-Pontic would be notable were those claims cited by any single scholar other than Mr. Ryan himself. A search of google scholar fails to result in any such related third-party citations. (P C Ryan is noted as cited in exactly one article on Nilo-Saharan, hardly clear or relevant) Unless third party documentation of Mr. Ryan's claims exists, it must be regarded as original research. Please provide both relevant and independent documentation before restoring any of this material. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kjaer (talk • contribs) 06:12, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Poor article quality and wrong information

Proto-language is not postulated. It is 'reconstructed'.

There's no need to repeat the information already given in the disambiguation article, we should give the readers the link to it.

Since this article is mostly on John Colarusso's proposal, the only published and cited one that I'm aware of, it should most probably be renamed to something like "The Pontic hypothesis", where all the relevant information can be presented. Once a subsection on the proto-language has been created and when it has become too long for a subsection, we can create another article devoted to it only, but it is not necessary to have it now, nor is it correct to call this article Proto-Pontic when we actually need to include information that is more wide than that. Comments?--Pet'usek ^{[petrdothrubisatgmaildotcom]} 07:11, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

My dictionary gives the popular sense of "postulate" as being equivalent to "maintain, assert", and in an encyclopaedia that's the sense that would be understood by most, since we're talking to a general audience here rather than one who would know the strict definition of "postulate" as it's used in mathematics and formal logic. Colarusso has indeed asserted the existence of the (Proto-)Pontic protolanguage, hence he has postulated it (in the popular sense). Change it to "reconstructed" if you like, but I don't think the sentence as written is inaccurate. As for renaming to "The Pontic hypothesis", other hypothetical language families without consensus acceptance also use the form "X languages" - such as Dené-Caucasian languages and Nostratic languages. IMO the title of this one should be kept as it is to retain uniformity with the others. As for the content - sure, it's short, but there are plenty of stubs around, and all there is to do is be bold and add the missing info. Thefamouseccles (talk) 17:05, 13 November 2009 (UTC)