Talk:Paul Wexler (linguist)

Direct quotes

@Nishidani, please refrain from altering or removing cited direct quotes.--Galassi (talk) 20:02, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Seems to be that dreaded WP:IDONTLIKEIT, again.--Lute88 (talk) 20:06, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

What is the source of "pseudonymously"?--Lute88 (talk) 20:08, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

I don't think Nishidani is a native speaker, so he misunderstood the Forward article.--Lute88 (talk) 20:18, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Dunno...--Galassi (talk) 20:34, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Arminden

Israeli Public Health scholar Eran Elhaik (see his professional CV

•Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2009-2011) Maryland, Johns Hopkins University, School of Medicine •Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2011-2013) Maryland, Johns Hopkins University, School of Public Health •Research Associate (2013-2013) Maryland, Johns Hopkins University, School of Public Health •Lecturer (2014-present) University of Sheffield

Elhaik is a geneticist, who happens to be Israeli, and to have studies in Schools of Public Health (which accepts all sorts of specialisms, from virology, to molecular genetics, to students of public administration specializing in the best delivery of care in the area of public health)

This is fucking obvious, so drop the attempt to put Elhaik down' as a 'public health scholar'. Nishidani (talk) 11:47, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

Basis for Wexler's arguments

I see a lot about what Wexler is proposing and about how it is widely rejected by Yiddish linguists, but I see very little about the theoretical basis for his arguments or the reason why this theoretical basis is rejected by others. Could this be expanded upon by someone who is familiar with him? Thanks. Ligata (talk) 12:55, 7 June 2017 (UTC)

The main problem with his relexification hypotheses is that there is either no compelling evidence for them, or they are unfalsifiable in principle, or the evidence even contradicts them. For example, Yiddish grammar is so thoroughly Germanic that there is no likelihood that Yiddish is not a Germanic language, i. e., that it does not descend directly from Proto-Germanic through an unbroken chain of transmission from parents to children. There is, in fact, no evidence for such a break at all in the texts attested from the late medieval period on (initially, contemporary with Middle High German).

Wexler basically implies that the Germanic elements of Yiddish, including all the Germanic elements of the grammar, arose through an extreme case of borrowing (which is what relexification boils down to), namely of Germanic linguistic material into a non-Germanic language, and there is no known case where it can be shown (through attested texts) that borrowing led to such a result where even highly irregular or suppletive paradigms with bound morphology (especially in complex verbal morphology, such as the inflection of the verb zayn) were imported from a different language.

Looking at actual known cases of relexification (such as Michif, Media Lengua, Erromintxela or even the strikingly extreme case of Cappadocian Greek, probably due to language attrition in a heavily bilingual environment – at least temporarily during the 19th and early 20th centuries, speakers of Cappadocian Greek may have used Turkish more than Greek – and may moreover have used only Turkish as a written language, if any –, the dominance of Turkish in daily use leading to Greek becoming effectively a second language of lesser importance, leading to the observed strong interference), we see that is not actually what happens: the core of the grammar remains recognisably that of the original language despite all the borrowing.

While there is Slavic morphology in Yiddish, it is limited to noun derivation and may have been reanalysed from Slavic borrowings, much like the German verbal suffix -ieren from Old French -er, the most common and productive infinitive ending of verbs. As another example, the Old High German derivational suffix (for agent nouns) -āri, tightly integrated into the language and eventually felt as fully native (Modern German -er), which has cognates in other Germanic languages (including Old English -ere, which became Modern English -er), is accepted to be an early borrowing from Latin -ārius into Germanic, showing how even bound morphology can be borrowed; similarly, plural forms have been borrowed along with the singular forms into various languages from others, sometimes with further generalisation even to native vocabulary, and agglutinative Turkic case endings have been borrowed into non-Turkic languages as well, in intense language contact situations; however, limits to borrowing can still be shown in even the most extreme contact situations, as shown by Thomason and Kaufman in Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics (1988). --Florian Blaschke (talk) 10:08, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

ddmmyy or mmddyy?

Should dates in this article be rendered in ddmmyy (Israeli format) or mmddyy (American format)? Heepman1997 (talk) 02:38, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

Rewrite

I've completed stage one, uniform template citational forms etc.

This is still badly organized, with a lot of repetition. His changing views should be set forth chronologically (optimally with footnotes to reviews of each work). Dovid Katz, whose wiki bio is a form of self-publishing by Katz that violates every principle we have about WP:Promo, has overplayed his hand in editing in his own work as if it were the major source of Wexler critiques, and, as a party in conflict with Wexler, should not have tampered with the latter's bio. Etc. All advice welcome. Nishidani (talk) 17:53, 11 December 2022 (UTC)