Talk:Scythian languages

The Harmatta stuff is truly terrible

Guys, the stuff from Harmatta's articles is so, so unbelievably bad. It's so bad that the editors of the volume in which it's published even felt the need to include a warning(!) and apology(!!!) at the end of the (completely ridiculous) article where he claims to have deciphered the Hieroglyphic Luwian text resulting in a 'Scythian' reading... Like, let me just say that again. The editors of that 'article' (taken from a talk Harmatta gave at a conference; it's not even a published, peer-reviewed article, mind you) had to apologise to their readers in a footnote at the end of that article. I have literally never seen that before in an academic text. If that's not already laughably bad and should indicate his interpretation is utter nonsense, at least half of the signs he claims to have interpreted from Hieroglyphic Luwian are not even actual signs! If you consult the Luwian Hieroglyphic sign-lists (Marazzi 1998, Hawkins, Morpurgo-Davies, & Neumann 1973; works that were done by real scholars), you can see that more than half of the ones he uses are false readings, and others had not yet been deciphered at the time of his talk (but have been since then and absolutely reflect different values than those he presents). Also, he (on a whim, because they're logograms) translates UTA, XŠAYAI, and DAHYU. Furthermore, he splits the word 'property' between two lines when it's clearly two separate words in the original inscription. His decipherment of the Issyk kurgan bowl may be even worse, because again, most of the signs are not actual signs, and no respectable linguist who isn't just trying to pull the wool over the eyes of non-specialists would claim to have deciphered the script using Kharoshthi. This is just...the worst kind of linguistics, or science in general. This kind of stuff really shouldn't be presented as evidence for anything aside from the fact that Harmatta simply had no idea how linguistics or philology works. I really wish there were Scythian inscriptions. I really do. I think it would be the coolest thing ever. But the fact is, even if they do exist, they haven't been found or deciphered. Vindafarna (talk) 03:53, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

I tend to agree. See my comment, "More information" 2600:8800:7000:162:C587:5220:FDA:2E72 (talk) 01:13, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

I don't disagree that Harmatta's attempt at reading the Saqqez inscription is highly dubious. However I would need an academic rebuttal of Harmatta's "decipherment" to be able to remove this section from the page. Antiquistik (talk) 02:34, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

I don't think it works like that... I think we're giving the whole WP:UNDUE WEIGHT thing to this guy's alleged readings. I provided at least two sources in my original comment that disagree with his readings of the signs and can find 15 more if you need. If his reading of the signs is wrong, how can his reading of the words be correct? If someone decided to look at Egyptian Hieroglyphic inscriptions and said "oh, these are actually a form of Mandarin Chinese, here's my reading," and some idiot decided to publish it in a journal, would someone need to literally waste their breath (like I'm doing now I feel) to write a specific paper discounting that person's claims? Or would the general community just come to the decision to ignore that work as should be done instead of giving it more publicity? There's a reason there hasn't been an 'academic rebuttal' of Harmatta's work; it's not worth wasting one's breath on because nobody believed it in the first place. If you want, I can find 15 more sources indicating that the signs Harmatta is adducing as evidence don't actually have the phonetic values that he thinks they do, but the two in my original post should suffice!

Vindafarna (talk) 00:51, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

So, I'm replying to my own comment here, but Harmatta fortunately cited his source where he found the alleged inscription, and that author, in a published article "Notes Iraniennes IV. Le trésor de Sakkez, les origines de l'Art Mède et les bronzes du Luristan," by R. Ghirshman, Artibus Asiae vol XIII, no.3 (1950), includes a photo of the 'inscription' which is simply a pattern and does not, in fact, contain any Hieroglyphic Luwian whatsoever, stating "[s]on décor, finement gravé, est constitué par des rangées de sujets differents disposés en cercles concentriques, et au centre, en guise d'omphalos, figure une rosace à seize pétales en forme de. losanges allongés." It's clear that Harmatta blatantly lied/made up the description of this image as including Hieroglyphic Luwian, and the original article is linked below for everyone to see (see p. 186 for the description, fig. 9 for the image). Since there is an 'academic rebuttal' or rather, an explanation that this piece (which is a tiny shard of a larger item, mind you...so it's unclear to me how Harmatta thought this was a complete text(!)) simply contains little drawings, I have gone ahead and removed that section entirely. If anyone had actually put in the time to look up the item, they would have seen, plain as day, that it is not, in fact, a 'text' in Hieroglyphic Luwian, but rather just a bunch of little images and it is inconceivable that Harmatta did not recognise it as such, which is why I think he intentionally lied about his 'translation'.

The JSTOR link for the Ghirshman article that Harmatta references on p. 123 of his ridiculous paper is below:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3248503?origin=crossref

Hopefully people will be able to see through any of the ridiculous nonsense Harmatta has written on the subject. The next thing to deal with is the Issyk inscription, which in 2023 was (probably) deciphered and is an Iranian language, which may even be a descendant of Scythian, but Harmatta's 'interpretation' is completely and utterly incorrect.

Vindafarna (talk) 05:11, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

Language family vs individual languages

This page currently does not distinguish between:

1. the Scythian language, which was the language spoken by the actual Pontic Scythians proper (and possibly by the historical Cimmerians)
2. the probably misplacedly named "Scythian languages family," which is a language family including several closely related but distinct Eastern Iranic languages, including the Scythian language proper, as well as Sarmatian (from which Alanic, and thus Ossetian, descend) and the Sakan languages.

This amounts to being the language equivalent of the lack of distinction between the narrow use of the name "Scythians" for the people of the Pontic Steppe and the broader use of the same name for all ancient nomadic peoples of the Eurasian Steppe.

As it stands now, this page is a mess and would likely need to be rewritten from scratch, and it might possibly also require splitting and moving content for it to finally be coherent, but I don't know where to start. Antiquistik (talk) 02:50, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

I have proposed a split of Alanian and Pontic Scythian in the article, which should lower ambiguity. 🪐Kepler-1229b | talk | contribs🪐 20:37, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

Split proposal?

@Kepler-1229b: can you clarify which content from this article you feel should be split to Pontic Scythian language (currently a redirect with trivial revision history and no talkpage)? Can you elaborate on your reasoning?

Usually split proposals are discussed, so I was surprised to find {{split}} on this article with no discussion. Is there one at a WikiProject talkpage that I'm missing? (I've checked 0/5 applicable WikiProjects). Folly Mox (talk) 17:20, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Specifically the parts about phonology, and any other applicable parts which are about, but not explicitly indicated as, Pontic Scythian. A section above discusses this topic as well. 🪐Kepler-1229b | talk | contribs🪐 17:46, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Well, that will (not) teach me to uncollapse and peruse previous talkpage threads before asking for help 🫠 Fixed discuss link in split template and combined subheadings here. Seriously, someday I should really learn how to read. Folly Mox (talk) 17:56, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Thetas

@Antiquistik: Greetings! This article and Scythian religion are showing up on an automated report because they use both the regular and cursive theta forms. If these two forms represent the same letter and the same sound, it seems unnecessarily confusing to readers if the same article alternates between them randomly. I generally recommend using the regular form (θ) because that's what everyone learns in trigonometry, so it's identifiable as a theta, which some people might already associate with a "th" sound. It also seems to be what IPA prefers for phonology. Despite taking advanced math and linguistic courses at MIT, I'd never noticed the cursive form until I started cleaning up Wikipedia typography. So even though it's commonly used in certain subfields, it feels a bit obscure to me. I'd settle for using either one or the other consistently, though. Did you have any particular reason why we should pick one or the other if we did that? Thanks, Beland (talk) 06:42, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

@Beland:. Hello. The non-cursive θ is used to represent the Ancient Greek aspirated voiceless dental plosive (/tʰ/), while the cursive ϑ is used for the Old Iranic voiceless dental fricative (/θ/). Therefore it would be preferable if both signs were used. Antiquistik (talk) 11:52, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

@Antiquistik: Ah, that's extremely helpful to know! I've added a note to the article so other readers won't be as confused as I was. -- Beland (talk) 01:07, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

Template errors

{{Transl}} is emitting a bunch of errors in § Personal names (possibly elsewhere in the article). Can someone have a look and attempt a repair? I'm not sure what the intended formatting should look like. Pinging Antiquistik based entirely on assumptions gleaned from xtools. Folly Mox (talk) 16:05, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Brief discussion at Template talk:Transliteration § Underdocumented error type. Folly Mox (talk) 17:50, 30 November 2024 (UTC)