Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Northwestern Proto-Indo-European language

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete‎. ^Complex/_Rational 23:06, 16 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Northwestern Proto-Indo-European language

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To quote User:Austronesier, who is a professional linguist: 90% of the article is SYNTH, OR, Y-haplo-cruft. Obviously in good faith, but mostly amateurish. The very title "Northwestern Proto-Indo-European language" is a giveaway for the amateurishness of the whole thing: if NW IE is a thing, the common ancestor of the subgroup should be "Proto-Northwestern Indo-European". When stripped of OR and SYNTH, it doesn't pass GNG. While the idea of some kind of NW IE has been occasionally brought up by scholars, its scope varies from author to author, so there is hardly SIGCOV for a coherent topic. [1] I concur with his assessment that this grouping is rarely discussed in the academic literature on PIE (thus making it unworthy of a standalone article), and that this article suffers from unfixable SYNTH issues. Hemiauchenia (talk) 15:11, 9 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Language, History, Science, Archaeology, and Europe. Hemiauchenia (talk) 15:11, 9 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
delete per nom. until this is a concept accepted by at least some scholars with a clear scope, there's not really any way to write an article on the topic without OR/SYNTH. ... sawyer * he/they * talk 16:29, 9 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per nom. No citations are given for the "reconstructions", and no explanation of how the posited proto-NWIE forms are derived from proto-Indo-European. I do not have access to the one source included which uses the term North-West Indo-European (or the German term for that), Oettinger's "Grundsätzliche Überlegungen zum Nordwest-Indogermanischen". I note in Google Scholar that it has only 15 citations. I note that one of those (A Storm of Words: A Song of Sheep and Horses Book 3) is not included as a reference in this article, although a source by the same author, Carlos Quiles, on population genomics, archaeology, and ethnolinguistics, is included. A Storm of Words does actually name a North-West Indo-European proto-language, but says it is the ancestor of Italic, Celtic, Germanic, and Balto-Slavic (my emphasis) - which is not mentioned at all in this article, and should be if it's a serious article about proposed daughter proto-languages between PIE and subgroups like Italic, Celtic, Germanic, etc. It should also refer to other hypotheses for similarities between Italic, Celtic and Germanic subgroups, such as contact between them, which are considered in articles by Lutz [2] and van Sluis [3] among others. So, no WP:SIGCOV of this proto-language, and the issues of possible contact or common development between these Indo-European subgroups is already (and more appropriately) covered to some extent in their existing WP articles. (Also, language does not follow genetics, as in fact the map of Distribution of the Y-chromosome haplogroup R1b clearly shows!) RebeccaGreen (talk) 11:21, 10 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. I agree partly with Sawyer777, in that without at least a few scholars accepting the model, it's basically synthesis. I also partly agree with RebeccaGreen, insofar as the largest sections of a unified morphology and lexical system are completely unsourced. I also agree that there is much more scholarly support that Germanic, Baltic, and Slavic languages are a clade. I'm not going to quibble about my disagreements otherwise, because they don't matter here. Bearian (talk) 03:51, 11 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Weak delete. I'm not quite as sure as the others that there isn't a notable topic here, since proposals of this sort have been made in the literature. However, I made an attempt to fix the article and (partly proving Austronesier's point) wasn't able to find sources that would allow this to be treated as a unified topic without SYNTH. Botterweg (talk) 22:15, 12 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. The OP @Hemiauchenia already has quoted my initial thoughts about this article, and further inquiry has confirmed my spontaneous assessment. On the suface, 56 hits in Google Scholar for "Northwestern Indo-European" and 169 for "Northwest Indo-European" (four of them even with the search term in the title!) might indicate GNG here. But under close inspection, these terms refer to a bunch of different groupings that have been proposed over the last 100 years or so that only have in common the fact that they comprise Indo-European (IE) languages spoken in the northwest part of the IE speech area. Both the scope and nature of these groupings strongly vary. Nature: some have been proposed as areal groupings, others as an innovation-defined subgroup that originated from a intermediate common ancetor "Proto Northwest(ern) Indo-European". In some cases, the sources actually speak of northwestern IE in a pure geographical sense, i.e. IE languages spoken in the northwest, and just that. Also the scope varies greatly, even in proposals by them same author: e.g., J. Koch presents two versions[4] of Northwest IE as proposed by Eric Hamp in 1989 (comprising practically all IE languages except for Greek, Armenian, Indo-Aryan and Anatolic) and 2012 (comprising only Phrygian and Italo-Celtic). This terminological fluidity in the work of just one author is representative for the extreme bandwidth that comes with the term in the 225 search hits.

The question remains whether among this array of proposals, is there one that stands out as the one that experts generally associate with the title, with all others being marginal? I have not gone through all 225 hits, so I might be proven wrong about generally dismissing GNG. However, my personal expectation (NB I'm a historical linguist, but not an expert in IE linguistics) upon encoutering the term "Northwest(ern) Indo-European" in the literature is that the author at some point will have to explain what this actually means. Does it include Balto-Slavic or not? Is it a subgroup in the proper sense or not? And so on.

Two final, preemptive notes on the alternative possibility of Redirect (though not proposed yet): a) The title is inherently flawed (see the quote in the deletion proposal above), so it is unusable b) There is no potential target article: there is almost zero mention of "Northwest(ern) Indo-European" in any article about IE languages. It is mentioned in Anatolian hypothesis in relation to a version of "Northwestern Indo-European" as proposed by Colin Renfrew, but this is just one of many proposals as the Google Scholar search shows. –Austronesier (talk) 20:24, 13 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Delete – Per nom. Seems to contain OR/Synth Vedicant (talk) 11:10, 14 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Delete essentially per WP:TNT. The content is insufficiently supported by the sources and needs to be entirely rewritten, probably at a different title. While the idea that Germanic groups with Italo-Celtic as a branch of Indo-European is occasionally found, it is not widely discussed in the literature which tends to posit other causes (e.g. borrowing) for the similarities that do exist. Eluchil404 (talk) 04:16, 16 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.