Talk:Shabo language

GA status

The discussion of grammar is VERY short, but it depends on how much info on grammar is actually available on this language. If it was readily available, this article would have to be demoted to B (or maybe even C) class status. But I don't know, so could anyone tell me? Best, G Purevdorj (talk) 19:11, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure about how readily available it is, but that combined with zero inline citations makes this not a GA, I know that much. Wizardman 18:45, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Linguistic importance

I was surprised to see this article rated "top importance". This is a poorly-known language spoken by 600 people in southern Ethiopia which was identified only within the last 25-30 years; hardly as important as Oromo or Amhara, which have more speakers & a larger cultural impact on their neighbors. Checking the criteria for assessing the importance of articles -- which I don't agree with, but they are what we have to work with -- I feel that Shabo fails the measure & is better rated as having "High" importance. -- llywrch (talk) 00:16, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

Disagree. The project's scale sees all of the 6000 languages as of top importance to the project. Only dialects or elements of a dialect continuum are rated as high. Shabo is especially important as a language isolate and as an endangered language, which will endear it to most participants of the project. Don't forget that this is the importance scale of the language project. It may be an entirely different matter for the Ethiopia project, where indeed Shabo has a lower importance rating, in line with its number of speakers and body of available knowledge. Probably we will need to go through many of the Ethiopian languages to adjust their importance to top, where this is not the case yet. Landroving Linguist (talk) 11:48, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

I have a few concerns here. One is with the WikiProject's decision to make every language "Top" importance: the intent with importance ratings is to identify the core, or most vital, articles that need attention. Ranking all of the articles on languages as "Top" importance defeats this purpose & makes it harder to determine which articles deserve more attention; but this is an issue better discussed elsewhere. A second is the way I came to this article: I had a look at the list of "Top-importance" Language articles, & of the 42 so graded at that time, I was surprised that a number of languages which, by any measure, are "Top-importance" for the study of languages -- either due to quantity (numbers of speakers) or quality (depth of analysis, influence on other languages) -- were not so graded. (I've been working on this problem by making the effort to identify & grade indisputably important languages as "Top".) Lastly, I actually was following the definition for "Top" -- "Asturian language (as the most relevant language of its linguistic group)"; this example suggests to me that some languages can be consider as not "Top" importance. And honestly, if Shabo can be shown to be the most important member of its family -- or a language isolate -- I would concur with any promotion of this article back to "Top". But the essential problem is that the guidelines for assessing WP Languages isn't adequate, & that problem needs to be addressed. -- llywrch (talk) 21:49, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

isolate?

I don't think in general it's helpful to list languages as isolates unless this is the majority view. "Unclassified" and "isolate" aren't the same thing. I'm willing to put a language in the "isolate" category if Ethnologue thinks so even if that isn't clearly majoritarian, but not just because one (even respected) linguist thinks so, except in a very small number of exceptional cases (viz. Greenberg's African language classification, which is widely cited). Benwing (talk) 23:02, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

I would question that principle, especially if applied in the case of Shabo: The classifications that put it into the Nilosaharan context were attempted by people who did not really have sufficient data, and they clearly indicated their own doubts about their classification. The call for "unclassifying" Shabo came from the only linguist who spent some time in the language area and collected enough data to come to real conclusions, and this is also a very recent development. I guess based on Schnoebelen's view Ethnologue will eventually follow suit and also call the language an isolate in its next editions. So one single linguist for me clearly outweighs a bunch of others, if he has the data, and the others don't. You may want to argue that "unclassified" is not the same as "isolate", but I would maintain that a language is called an isolate if it cannot be classified with any other language. Even in the case of well-known examples of isolates such as Basque, you will always have to allow for the (even remote) possibility that a classification with some far-off language may succeed later. Therefore, "unclassified" and "isolate" in practical terms are near synonyms. Landroving Linguist (talk) 10:06, 10 July 2011 (UTC)

I just noticed that user Kwamikagami re-classified Shabo as Nilo-Saharan, with reference to Blench (2010). Unfortunately, the article does not contain any bibliographical information on Blench (2010). Can this be included to make that claim verifyable? Landroving Linguist (talk) 18:59, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

Added. It was from a conference on African isolates, which would seem to be germane.

All of NS is somewhat questionable, which is why a "?" automatically appears at the top of the tree. Blench is of the opinion that all the branches are reasonably included, though he doubted Gumuz until Ahland did her research. Shabo is more insecure than most, given how few have looked at it.

Since Schnoebelen is using "innovative use of the phylogenetic tools that biologists have developed", and basing his classification on typological features, all of which are readily borrowed at this time depth, perhaps we should wait for reception by others? He's trying to prove a negative, which is always difficult, and also assuming that Shabo must lie in one of the existing families, which isn't necessarily true.

Also adding Schnoebelen's long paper. — kwami (talk) 00:04, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

We really need to redo the article, however, in light of Schnoebelen's fieldwork. — kwami (talk) 00:12, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

Removal of Austro-Asiatic/Sumerian claim

After a discussion on the reliable sources noticeboard, there are serious concerns about whether the Ukrainian journal Virtus is a reliable source, as its contributors pay for publishing and there appears to be no peer-review. The author is not a linguist. The claim below is extraordinary, and looks to be very much WP:FRINGE, therefore I have removed it provisionally pending better documentation or more information.

Rassokha (2020) (unlike Blench, not a reputable African linguist) attempts to establish a relationship between Shabo and the Sumerian language and that both of them belong to the Austroasiatic language family.

Boynamedsue (talk) 17:03, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

Yes. That's plain bs, linguistically. People claim all kinds of relationship between language isolates and their favorite families. In social media one would call it clickbait. --Thogo 13:17, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

References

Name/Lemma

If Chabu is the preferred term and the people themselves react with anger if called "Shabo" (cf. Kibebe Tsehay's grammar, p. 3), shouldn't the article be moved to the more preferred name instead of just saying so in the intro? --Thogo 13:17, 2 January 2023 (UTC)