Talk:Eigə-Isthmus languages

What if we reclassified Meshi as a branch co-equal to Miwan and Ngauro, rather than a scion of the Miw? They don't really have much to do with the Miw, live far away from them, and nothing in particular rests on the fact that they be considered Miwan. Just food for thought! --Dunomapuka 05:01, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Heh, fine by me. The original reason for the previously defined situation was good enough for the "filler" material that Meshi and Miw etc. were initially conceived as, but too silly to bother keeping in a real conworld if any issues arise. Namely, the main three filler groups - Miwan, Hitatc, Ferogh - were intended as linguistic groupings, for which I figured I would be systematic and name the two most prominent tribes from each. So that gave us Miw+Meshi, Wan+Mlir, and Faraghin+Ferajin. From there, parallelism led me to stick in a sister group for the Ndak as well. Thus were the Tlaliolz born. Only the Gezoro and the Ngauro didn't fit the two-tribes-per-grouping pattern, as they were conceived first by Dew and Zomp respectively - I just stuck them on the map in the right places - although by coincidence Dew later gave the Gezoro a sister group as well, the Tjakori. Radius 07:31, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Reminds me of a professor at my university who used to divide everything in groups of three... :)

On topic: Placing Meshi as co-equal would make the reconstruction of PEV/PEI a bit easier I guess, since we'd have more freedom in adding a few EV/Isthmus cognates. AFAIK nobody has borrowed any Meshi word yet (Ndok Aisô should have some, and so should the Adāta daughterlang from the Xoron which I'm working on), nor even described a phonology (which might be influenced by Habeo? Or form a substrate for the Mavakhalan sound changes?) -- Cedh 10:14, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

I was thinking that the deepest divisions among the Miwan langs would be in the east, with the Meshi (having spread upriver sometime between -2400 and -1900) most closely related to the western Forest Miwan varieties. Having more layers of classification seems realistic to me. But I don't think the precise relationships matter much at this stage, especially since all we know for sure about the Meshi language so far is the name. I'd say whoever designs Meshi can probably decide. -- Corumayas 01:01, 8 October 2008 (UTC)