Minhast/Dialectology: Difference between revisions

=== The Tashunka Model ===

In his seminal work, ''Minhast: A Diachronic and Theoretical Study of a North Pacific Paleosiberian Language'', Dr. Tashunka remarked, "The traditional division of the Minhast dialects depicts a simple phylogeny.  With the exception of the Salmonic dialects, which diverged from a common dialect after the Salmon Speaker-Horse Speaker War of 1472, no additional forks extend beyond each of the two main branches: each dialect within each branch is a sibling of each other.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The current classification scheme does not account for the the discrepancies of the Gull Speaker data from that of the of the other Lower Minhast dialects with which it is grouped.  The Horse Speaker data show that the dialect is much more conservative than has been previously thought, in some ways more so than the Salmonic dialects.  Justification for placing the Elk and Seal Speaker dialects under the Upper Minhast branch lacks supporting data; although the Elk and Seal Speaker dialects are said to be more conservative than the dialects grouped under the traditional Lower Minhast dialects, the data indicate if anything that this characterization is at best overstated.  Moreover, the evidence indicates that Classical Minhast, as it shares more in common with the dialects that have been traditionally classified as Upper Minhast, is not the ancestor of the Minhast dialects, but instead is an archaic dialect that diverged from one of the sub-branches of the northern dialects.  Specifically, Classical Minhast shares more features with the Salmonic and Plateau dialects than with the other dialects; extreme conservatism by the Salmonic and Horse Speaker dialects cannot explain why they share these features with the classical language while all the other dialects do not exhibit at any point in time in their written history that they ever had these features.  Only a close relationship, within a shared dialectal grouping, could account for these discrepencies. Rather than attempting to account for both the extinct and new dialects, the traditional classification scheme conveniently ignores them.  Clearly, the evidence indicates a more complex picture of the Minhast dialects, but the current system is based on biased sources ultimately derived from both Minhast literary tradition and historical regional politics: twelve pre-eminent Speakers, thus twelve dialects." ¹ To address these issues, Dr. Tashunka has proposed a new phylogenetic tree ''(dashes indicate conjectural relationships)'':

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