Talk:Mesoamerican languages

Languages Mid‑importance

	Language portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Languages, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of languages on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.LanguagesWikipedia:WikiProject LanguagesTemplate:WikiProject Languageslanguage articles
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Mexico Low‑importance

	Mexico portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Mexico, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Mexico on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.MexicoWikipedia:WikiProject MexicoTemplate:WikiProject MexicoMexico articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

El Salvador Low‑importance

	El Salvador portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject El Salvador, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of El Salvador on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.El SalvadorWikipedia:WikiProject El SalvadorTemplate:WikiProject El SalvadorEl Salvador articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Central America

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Central America, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Central America on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Central AmericaWikipedia:WikiProject Central AmericaTemplate:WikiProject Central AmericaCentral America articles

Indigenous peoples of the Americas Low‑importance

	Indigenous peoples of the Americas portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Indigenous peoples of the Americas, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Indigenous peoples of the Americas on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Indigenous peoples of the AmericasWikipedia:WikiProject Indigenous peoples of the AmericasTemplate:WikiProject Indigenous peoples of the AmericasIndigenous peoples of the Americas articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Untitled

Oto-Manguean, Mixe-Zoque speaker figures need to be updated.—The preceding

unsigned comment was added by Kwamikagami (talk • contribs

) 18 September 2005.

I edited the page to make a distinction between mesoamerican languages as a language spoken within mesoamerica and mesoamerican language as a language showing traits that makes it classifiable as a member of the mesoamerican sprachbund or linguistic area. I created a page called Mesoamerican Linguistic Area, that should be started. To those that are uncertain about the implications of linguistic area: the reasons of defining mesoamerica as a cultural area is the high level of similarities in culture, architecture etc. which are the resulst of shared developments and influences between the peoples in the mesoamerican geographical area. This interaction and shared developments also affected (some of)the lanmguages that spoke in the area an cause genetically unrelated languages to develop grammatical similarities. The languages that can be seen to show some or most of these shared traits are also called Mesoamerican Languages.--Someoneelse 20:51, 16 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

pronunciation?(the stuf in square brackets)

Could someone tell me what is the stuff in square brackets? Pronunciation? Whose pronunciation? It is definitley not the native pronunciation since most of the names are not used by the speakers of the languages themselves at all. It also doesnt seem to be the normal english or spanish pronunciation of the words. And the phonetic alphabet is very weird, isn't IPA the standard here? If nobody explains I will strike them all from the list.--Maunus 22:05, 31 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Mesoamerican Linguistic Area

Since this article notes the distinction between Mesoamerican languages (indigenous langs of the geographical area) and the mesoamerican linguistic area (ie the langs which share the characteristics defining the sprachbund), it would be useful to identify which of the mesoamerican languages listed here do not form part of the MLA. Maunus, are you able to make a start?--cjllw | TALK 23:25, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It is not so simple since most languags have some of the traits that are associated with the sprachbund and none of the languages have all of them. But I have had a mind to workon this aricle a bit, I will see what I can do.Maunus 07:42, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This paragraph that Maunus moved here is poorly written and contains some doubt information or assertions. It says:

The cultural area that encompasses Mesoamerica is home to more than one hundred different modern language groups. At the time of the conquest (1521-1697), the number of languages was close to 150. Each group of people wrote in the language they spoke. This would have created mass confusion in the understanding of the written word, even at the time of the con-quest, if it were not for certain unifying traits within the written word itself.

Throughout Mesoamerica the use of writing was utilized for a wide variety of social and societal necessities. Records were kept of business transactions, genealogies, and dynastic lists. Prose and poetry were also part of the written record. And soon after the conquest, transcription of oral histories took place when Spanish priests and monks interviewed the indigenous peoples. Entire libraries were said to exist at the time of the conquest in the capitals of the
Tayasal in 1697. (Paul Baumann)[1]

I doubt very much that people wrote in *all* of the putative 150 languages (where did that number come from?) The sentence beginning "This would have created mass confusion" makes no sense at all to me. The last sentence ("However, beginning with the Night..") is a fragment. A number of other infelicities are there. I don't know enough to fix it authoritatively, but it should be fixed. --Lavintzin 04:37, 21 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. I was storing it here untill I could do something about it. If you just remove the "infelicities" for now it would be great.(they certainly didn't write in all languages) The idea I think is to provide an historical background for the linguistic interaction in mesoamerica which i think is a good idea - but this section does need to be tweaked. ·Maunus· tlahtōlli 08:07, 21 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Prehistory?

Why is the entire history section entitled "Linguistic prehistory"? There are written records from the Classic period onwards (from a time when most European peoples were illiterate), a great part of them have been deciphered, most of them document historical events. So how is that not history?--87.162.6.147 (talk) 18:06, 27 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

There are only preclombian texts in two languages of Mesoamerica before contact with european languages. The information included in the section is mainly arrived at through linguistic reconstruction not through the use of pre-clombian histórical sources. Generally linguistics and the knowledge of the prehistory of mesoamerican languages has helped the decipherment of the precolumbian scripts more than the decipherment of the scripts has improved our knowledge about the historyu of the languages. I think those are the arguments for naming the section like that. I wouldn't revert if someone changed it to history in stead of prehistory.·Maunus·ƛ· 13:35, 8 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Purépecha Empire

Several sources name the entity an empire, still, one editor removed the claim [2]. I re-installed it. Eldizzino (talk) 23:35, 7 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Mesoamerican languages. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20120205055217/http://www.linguapax.org/congres04/pdf/4_cuevas.pdf to http://www.linguapax.org/congres04/pdf/4_cuevas.pdf

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018.

regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check

}} (last update: 18 January 2022).

If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 22:12, 8 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]