Talk:Eskimo/Eskimo in the Platonic realm

My ignorance

Also I have not-enough knowledge on Eskimos, I am astonished by the amount of Eskimo linguistical and ethnographical sources and my ignorance.

I do not have fixed plans in my mind about the arrangement of Eskimo-related articles, I was just thinking aloud.

I promise I will think many on Your proposal. I have not thought through it yet enough.

Maybe we can investigate how similar problems are solved, e.g. articles on concepts for which we think of mainly through its instances or subgruops. E.g. Indo-European languages or Slavic languages, Or, from an other area, Amniote (a philogenetic unit comprising reptiles, mammals, birds). Especially Gun and Pragmatism has a structure You proposed: it consists of a summary, some other summaries and many links.

Current image

As far as I can see it, the task is to arrange information pieces in a tree-like structure in a way that information loss be minimized (e.g. the arrangement itself can convey important information about the distibution of customs).

My conjecture is that the concept itself (“Eskimo”) has a force in itself which shall lead in future to a very significant article.

An analogy

Now, an analogy I have in my mind is: if I write an article on a mathematical concept (e.g. ordering), then it will not be a superpage above the concrete examples or instances of the concept. I would build the complete theory of the concept on the abstraction level that is provided in itself. Instances, examples would be added to it, but not “generating” it.

Also, the page would be more than summary: it would be a theory on its own,becoming alive. Returning to the example of writing an article on ordering: such an article would be more than examples on various concrete orderings, because probably it develop into a huge material, a consistent treatment of order theory on its own in its whole power and abstractness.

E.g. as Alfred Tarski wrote on the concept of “consequence”, he did not primarily write on various concrete ways to define deduction mechanisms (although there are many variants), but rather concentrated on a standalone algebraic theory, using an approach based on orderings etc., which abstracted many insights on the intuitive notion of “consequence” to the realm of universal algebra . The main point: he grasped concepts which are inherently characteristic of (almost) all consequence concepts.

Relatedness to Eskimo topic

Of course, transferring this analogy to Eskimo topic could seem to be madness. But if I think how the very name “Eskimo” should be defined (maybe not in the leader text), I get to something like: “that branch of the Eskimo-Aleut language family which can be distinguished from the other (minor) Aleut branch by so important features like the typology of their language”. We are already at mentioning notions like incorporation (linguistics) or ergative-absolutive languages. Also common characteristics (e.g. “lack of totemism”; environment; material culture) come to foreground in a natural way.

I think pushing also common information to appropriate groups would lead us that we abdict from a possibility: the appropriate arrangement (of information among the Eskimo-related articles) can convey a surplus information.

Because of the debates on the name of Eskimos, I suppose we cannot change Inuit-related articles significantly (at most, we can mention there the existence of Eskimo articles containing common or defining characteristic features). As You wrote, all this will probably lead to a huge redundance, but now (of course my mind can change) I could accept it. In fact, I do not know how Inuit and Yupik peoples are similar and differ ech other, thus, I cannot tell what the exact outcome will be, what will develop from the Eskimo article, what redundances will arise. Now (that can change, I am only thinking aloud, I have no fixed plans) I see “Eskimo” as a standalone entity in the Platonic realm.