księżycowy wrote:It's a perfect example, in my opinion, as to why linguistic groupings are better than geographic ones. It makes a lot more sense for all the members of a language family to be in the same subforum, doesn't it?
I think it depends on what you're trying to achieve...and that probably doesn't work very well for Indo-European languages.
Aurinĭa wrote:But you also said, only two days ago:
vijayjohn wrote:To be fair, especially in light of the poll in this thread and some of the comments over on the general forum renaming/reworking thread, I'm starting to get the impression that people do care more about forum traffic than I might have thought. So I might have been wrong on that point at least.
I'd also like to point out that the leading option on the poll is currently still "No, don't split the forum up".
And then people immediately started saying, "You know, maybe traffic isn't so important after all."
So language families containing more languages are more worthy of their own forum than language families containing fewer languages?
Here's the thing: In North America (north of Mexico) today, there are 20 language families that each have at least two indigenous languages that are still spoken to this day. There are also seven language isolates that are still spoken (i.e. seven languages that are still spoken but have no living relatives today), eight entire language families that are extinct, 21 extinct language isolates (i.e. 21 extinct languages with no known relatives), and 45 extinct languages that are listed
here as unclassified.
As I see it, the extinct languages could all go into the Ancient, Classical, and Extinct languages subforum. However, this still leaves us with 20 families and seven isolates. So the question is: How do we organize them?
To me, it makes sense to make separate forums for the language families that have the most languages and keep the rest in the general NAIL forum. It also wasn't entirely clear to me on what basis księżycowy singled out the Algic, Iroquoian, Na-Dene, Siouan, Salishan, and Eskimo-Aleut families. The first five of these happen to be among the families that have the largest number of languages, but Eskimo-Aleut only has seven according to
this list. I finally understand now that he specifically mentioned these seven language families because they are the ones that have generated the most interest among UniLangers (there are more threads on UL about these particular language families than about any other NAILs). I think that also makes sense.
vijayjohn wrote:It's just a separate discussion
IMHO, it's not a separate discussion. These language subforum management threads are all about how to organise the different languages and subforums, and what księżycowy said is definitely a part of that discussion, as is what you said, and what I said.
Yes, but what I take issue with in what you said is not the views you expressed but rather the assumptions you made about what I was saying.