Talk:Evolution of languages

No political bias

The complete missing of Sumerian indicates, there is absolutely no political bias in the article.

Sinitic

There's a glaring hole of the Chinese languages in all time periods of Asia, as used in primarily Chinese speaking states. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2603:300A:1AD:1400:B480:ADA6:F064:2E55 (talk) 12:49, 9 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Rename

Great start, but I suggest renaming this article as "History of languages". Evolution of languages gets confused with Origin of language and Evolutionary linguistics. Weidorje (talk) 09:56, 20 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The actual topic covered by this article is "Emergence of historical languages". "History of languages" is too vast to cover in a single wikipedia article. This is a useful page, but "evolution" is misleading. Category:Evolution is wrong for this article. However Category:Language histories exists and should be used. Vagabond nanoda (talk) 07:05, 27 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Vagabond nanoda, how about "Language emergence"? Weidorje (talk) 07:18, 27 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

On second thoughts, I suppose evolution is a useful concept. The problem is that the word was used long before Darwin, but now the Darwinists claim it as theirs. So, there's a lot of philosophy written about the correct meaning of evolution. The evolution of languages cannot be "correct" in such terms. Saussure's solution was to gradually replace evolution with diachrony to avoid confusion. He also separated diachrony from history in a wider sense. I suggest the article is renamed as language diachrony, or it is explained that the concept of evolution is different from evolutionary biology. Weidorje (talk) 08:16, 31 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Instead of "the Darwinists", try saying "scientists" or a specific branch of science. Darwin was unaware of Mendelian genetics and did not understand how dominant and recessive traits were inherited from parents to offspring, so it isn't appropriate to refer to modern evolutionary theory in those terms because there are no "Darwinists" in science today. Additionally, in the US at least, "Darwinist" is used as a pejorative term by creationists for anypony who does not believe that humans were literally made out of dirt, so it's wise to stay clear of it. (Creationists also use "evolution" very broadly to refer dismissively to any historical event for which they disbelieve science, such as the formation of Earth, abiogenesis, the history of the cosmos, etc., even though none of those have anything to do with the theory of evolution (of species).) TricksterWolf (talk) 16:46, 6 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]