Wikipedia:Peer review/Indo-European/archive1

Indo-European

I seem to be the only person left editing this article. While I have not removed any information, I have done some substantial rewording, including on potentially controversial topics -- I would be grateful for comments on (N)POV. Dbachmann 10:14, 24 Aug 2004 (UTC)

• If I understand rightly, this is an overview of a whole subject area, whose more detailed articles are listed in the navigation box. Could you make it more like the format recommended at Wikipedia:Guide to writing better articles#Summary style, with links to the main articles for each section? Put the important stuff first, move the section about the name to near the end. It would be nice to have a brief example to show how the comparative method works. It would also be nice to have a sentence or two about the range of languages in the family (the details and the full list can be left to other articles of course, but a summary would explain why the concept is so important). Gdr 17:56, 2004 Aug 24 (UTC)

I'm not sure it is a summary article. I'm not entirely happy with the navigation box, because it lists some loosely related concepts (Aryan invasion). As I understand it, there are articles about the Indo-European languages, the Proto-Indo-European language and Indo-European religion, but neither explains the term Indo-European itself. So the job of Indo-European is (a) to explain the term and (b) to explain what is known about the people (apart from the language). Hence the emphasis on the history of the term, but you may be right in that maybe it really should be made a summary article, with links to eg. languages, proto-language, origins, religion, history, i.e. replacing the navigation box? Originally, my concern was with politics/POV, but I think I will give this a try.

I am done with re-organizing the article into a summary and would welcome comments on any of the articles in Template:Indo-European. dab 13:58, 28 Aug 2004 (UTC)

The article is a bit weak on examples. Here's a few:

(1) almost all Indo-European languages use a variant of the word copper/kupfer to designate that metal because the main source of easily-mined copper was Cyprus.

(2) almost all Indo-Eurpean languages use the word salt/sal/saltz to designate sodium carbonate because an important source of easily-found salt was Salz (now Salzburg).

(3) almost all Indo-European languages use variations of the words papa/mama to designate mother/father

There must be dozens more examples. Ogg 12:21, 11 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Sorry, but your examples miss the mark: (1) and (2) are borrowing by some languages (not all IE, maybe?) after the divergence from Proto-IE and (3) was proposed as a universal correlation based on onomatopeia (/m/ = sucking noise and /p/ would be the first consonant babies can produce). One classical example is father/pater/pitar (English/Greek/Sanskrit). _R_ 11:02, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)