Wiktionary talk:About Proto-Finnic

On dialects

It would be possible to introduce further finer-grained context labels as well:

• "Eastern Proto-Finnic" for words absent from western dialects of Finnish, but otherwise found across Northern Finnic; there are quite a few of these as well, and they are supported by a number of phonetic, semantic and morphological innovations.
• "Proto-Karelian" or "Proto-Ladogan" for features found in Eastern Finnish + Ingrian + Karelian, yet absent from Veps (some of these may be present as Karelian loans in Livvi and Ludian).

— I am uncertain on if inherited Uralic words, where only attested in a narrow area, should be marked as dialectal; they after all must have been present in Proto-Finnic proper as well. A slightly tougher issue are words found in Northern Finnic + Samic, which are not necessarily inherited.

For some discussion on these matters (in Finnish) cf. Terho Itkonen (1983) : "Välikatsaus suomen kielen juuriin", in Virittäjä (part 1, part 2)

--Tropylium (talk) 01:10, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

I think this is going a bit too far. Anyone can see from the list of descendants if a term is absent from any particular language. Besides, it's difficult to prove the nonexistence of something; a term might have existed, but just not attested. —CodeCat 01:57, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

Are you talking about dialect categories, or just plain context labels? We're going to need dialect context labels anyway I think for semantic and morphological innovations (where a particular group of descendants clearly did not acquire a certain feature). --Tropylium (talk) 02:59, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

Alphabetic order

Votic should probably go before Võro; õ is considered a distinct letter from o in the southern Finnic alphabets. --Tropylium (talk) 21:34, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

But not in English, which ignores diacritics. If we're using alphabetical order, we should use English alphabetical order. Anything else would just confuse people because the ordering of the descendants will no longer match the order used in entries themselves. In this case, Votic entries come after Võro entries on a page, so it should be the same for descendants. —CodeCat 21:37, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

Good point, scratch that thought. --Tropylium (talk) 00:13, 18 March 2015 (UTC)