Talk:Proto-Philippine language

What a mess!

Where shall I start? This is an article on a specialized linguistic subject written by someone who obviously has no understanding of the subject about which they're writing. They've apparently added some real data from online sources to their completely wrong basic concept. The Proto-Philippine language should be the reconstructed ancestor of all the Philippine languages. It would be much older than any attested language such as Old Tagalog, and its descendants would include most of the languages of the Philippines and edges of Malaysia and Indonesia. For all of these languages to have developed from such a language, it would have to predate any form of writing known to have existed in the Philippines- but the original versions indicate that the creator didn't really understand the difference between Proto-Philippine and early Old Tagalog (I'm not sure if I should wikilink that, since it was added by the same account). Some of this was corrected by an IP to reflect real Proto-Philippine, but only enough to put a sort of veneer over the vast majority of misinformation.

Starting with the infobox:

• The language name "Sinaunang Tagalog" seems to translate to "Ancient Tagalog". "Sinaunang wikang Pilipno" seems to translate to "Ancient Filipino Language". No explanation why there should be names in Tagalog at all, given that the proto-language predates the emergence of any attested language in the Philippines, and that there are 150 other languages descended from it.
• Where they refer to the Philippine languages everywhere in the article, including here, they actually link to Filipino language, which is a creation of the last century that's basically a variety of modern Tagalog.
• They say that the language was written in Baybayin, but, judging by the articles on Baybayin and the Laguna Copperplate Inscription, there's no evidence that Baybayin even predates Old Tagalog. Besides, a proto-language is an artificial linguistic construct, and is thus almost always written in some kind of phonetic notation such as IPA, with everything preceded by asterisks to indicate that these are unattested reconstruction. I can't read the article on JSTOR, but the first page uses Latin-alphabet based phonetic notation- not Baybayin.
• The language code seems to be copied directly from Wiktionary, since it follows Wiktionary's format for creating codes for proto-languages. It's definitely not in either the ISO-639-3 or Linguist List databases. In fact, the original version of the "About the language" section was copied verbatim from Wiktionary- references to Wiktionary's internal policies and all.

• Removing everything that shouldn't be in the lead leaves "The Proto-Philippine language ... [i]s the ancestor of ... the ... Philippine Languages. ... (note that I removed the wikilinking).

• The first paragraph of the "About the language" is still a word-for-word copy from Wiktionary, but the footnote has been changed by the IP to make it look like it's from the JSTOR article.
• The other paragraph is made up of some accurate information (not all of it relevant) piled in an incoherent and ungrammatical mess.

• The Phonology section starts with "Main article: Tagalog language" and contains the "Tagalog consonant phonemes" table from Tagalog language with some reformatting of the headers. Then there's a table of vowel phonemes credited to Blust, but without an actual reference, so I'm not sure where it came from. It may or may not be Blust's reconstruction of Proto-Philippine vowels. The remainder is a list of diphthongs: completely uncredited and unreferenced, so who knows what it really is and where it came from?

• The "Example of words" section is ungrammatical throughout, and totally uncredited and unreferenced. I have no idea where they got the column in Baybayin (the original header was "Old Tagalog"), but there are places where it doesn't even match the number of syllables in the other columns. The "IPA / Pronunciation" column seems to be from real linguistic sources, but I suspect they're from multiple sources with differences in notation- it wouldn't surprise me if some are Proto-Philippine and some are Old Tagalog. My guess is the whole table is a patchwork assembled from different sources, and thus original research of the most unreliable kind.

• I really doubt anyone has reconstructed Proto-Philippines completely enough to come up with whole sentences, but the sentences look too close to modern Tagalog for that to be what these are. It's probably Old Tagalog, if it's anything.

To sum it all up: this looks like a hodgepodge of stuff that doesn't belong together assembled by someone who has no idea what they're doing, and without referencing it's impossible to sift the real stuff from the garbage. We can't get confirmation from the original editor because they've been indef-blocked for sockpuppeteering. (My mistake- blocked for two weeks, not indefinite Chuck Entz (talk) 02:02, 17 August 2014 (UTC)) It looks to me like we need to either delete the whole thing or gut it and start from scratch. Chuck Entz (talk) 06:33, 27 July 2014 (UTC)

I concur with your analysis, Chuck.

Personally I would favour deletion. BushelCandle (talk) 23:12, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Consequently, I've now WP:PRODed the article... BushelCandle (talk) 23:30, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

I totally agree. As a historical linguistic I couldn't believe my eyes seeing this hodge-podge and the outlandish "pronunciations". Yet I think that the article can be saved from scratch. I have started to do so and will eventually give an overview of the work done by Charles, Zorc, Blust, Reid and others. Most of the orignal content is useless so I just delete it. Austronesier (talk) 01:37, 1 January 2018 (UTC)