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Is North Slav not merely a collective name for East and West Slavs when combined and as opposed to South Slavs? Don't get me wrong, I know that the term North Slav for this concept has been used (on rare occasions) but at the moment it may seem a little confusing because when you take the following articles: East Slavs, West Slavs, South Slavs, North Slavs - in a single list then one generally expects to find a different set of nations in each group. When I noticed the article, even I thought the page might be about some extinct nations (possibly absorbed into northern Russian) - rather like East Germanic which existed with Gothic and others related. For what it's worth, South Slavs are also divided into east and west based on ancestral route into respective region. Todays's Bulgarians, Macedonians, Pomaks, Gorani and Greek Slavs make up the eastern group and the rest form the western branch, all with some overlap and ethnic revisionism along the fringes. I am just interested in whether it is best to keep this article but make it shorter to complement East Slavs and West Slavs. -- OJ ( talk) 10:06, 29 April 2017 (UTC)
Just because you "personally" prefer the meaning, does not make it fact. Bulgarian Archer ( talk) 19:51, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
I am afraid the article contains a good deal of WP:SYNTH. The general part is OK. But the sections "History" and "Religion" are suspicious. Since this is not a universally recognized classification, you must cite only sources which directly speak of North Slavs. Even the North Slavic languages is rather contested concept. Staszek Lem ( talk) 22:29, 3 May 2017 (UTC)
The term itself is used, through not common, and perhaps obsolete. But if we can define North Slaves as tribes/people in countries X, Y, and Z, then it seems fine to discuss their religion etc. even if there is no single book on North Slavic religion or history. We just have to make sure we make it clear we are talking about Polish and Russian religions or histories, for example, instead of North Slavic religion. Generally, unless there are any controversial statements etc. I don't think there is much to worry about here. Btw, what would be useful would be a discussion of the term - is it used in modern works, by whom, who invented it, etc. Of course it is possible there are no sources for that... -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 06:33, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
Staszek Lem - No such things as a "mechanical W+E". If a comprehensive term happened to exist to refer to both the Germanic people and the Baltic people to the exclusion of everybody else, then there is a reason for this. Since the arbitrary example I gave you is such that the populations are not bilaterally connected in any way, there exists no "mechanical" title for reference. Plus, if this page is SYNTH then I see no reason why any publisher would speak in such a way when he could just as easily have said "West and East Slavs" omitting "north" and avoiding parentheses for the subgroups. What this example actually proves is that the terminology may be esoteric where English speakers may be concerned which is why the constituents are provided in brackets, in other words if the reader were expected to know what was meant by North Slav then the author need not have provided the list. For instance, if we said "The United Kingdom (England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland)", then we are assuming the reader may not be fully aware of which entities compose the UK but might nevertheless be expected to know the four items. In this source, "North Slavs" stands alone. Since we know this is a people then it is natural that there should be a history and religious beliefs among the populace. -- OJ ( talk) 07:29, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
Well, my worries were due to relative obscureness of the term; I don't have any specific concerns. Now that you mentioned "Germanic + Baltic", for quite some I was mulling about a less artificial example of "Polish+Lithuanian+ Ruthenian" conglomerate. Despite religious (Catholic vs. Orthodox) and linguistic (Slavic vs.Baltic), this area has a long history of interaction and strikingly common cultures. I've been wondering if there are any scholarly comparative discussions about "Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth heritage", even forgetting about political musings, such as Międzymorze. Staszek Lem ( talk) 16:04, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
File:North Slavic languages.png: Samotní Tulák, please provide a description to this colorful map (probably as text in file description, because there many small details). Staszek Lem ( talk) 16:58, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
You cannot combine West and East Slavs into one homogeneous ethnic group. While it's true that Eastern and Western Slavs did not experience Turkish influence like the South Slavs, that does not mean one can group them as being similar due to the fact that they are still two fundamentally different branches. West Slavic languages have lexical and phonetically differences not present within the East or South Slavic languages. For example, you would not call a Slovak or a Russian today a "North Slav" because they are not part of the same culture and branch. Slovaks are clearly Western Slavic and Russians are clearly Eastern Slavic. Bulgarian Archer ( talk) 19:39, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
How nice of you to vandalise this talk page by removing my original response, as well as trying to blank the article itself using another IP address. Serves me right for feeding the troll by assuming that you wanted to have a genuine discussion about this; perhaps next time I should not assume good faith and just ignore dunces like you straight away. -- Samotny Wędrowiec ( talk) 00:26, 12 May 2017 (UTC)
I am Czech and I can say that we understand Slovenian and Croatian way better than Russian. David Kumprecht ( talk) 16:32, 14 August 2017 (UTC)
This sentence is a nonsense. What means Turkic influence? Byzantine and Ottoman Empires were not Turkic ones. The Byzantine Empire was a Christian empire with Greek used as an official language. The Christians in Ottoman Empire had a separate Orthodox community called Rum Millet, where Greek was used as lingua franca. The Ottomans by the way were Muslims from different origins (Greek, Slavic, Turkic, Arab, Armenian, Iranian etc.), who spoke Ottoman language, which borrowed, in all aspects, extensively from Arabic and Persian, but not Turkish one. Jingiby ( talk) 05:19, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
References
Another anonymous user recently showed up to remove content and label everything they disagree with as either not cited or using an reliable source (reminiscent very much of of the Bulgarian guy who used sock puppets a while earlier). I would really appreciate it if a Wikipedian with extra privileges or some kind of admin rights could look behind the scenes and check if this recent editor is not connected to the same vandal, or someone else entirely. I will ping OJ, Staszek, Piotrus, Iryna here as legitimate users who have helped with similar troubles in the past and contributed greatly by adding/removing/modifying content on this page in the past or participating in discussions. Thanks in advance, -- Samotny Wędrowiec ( talk) 14:52, 30 November 2017 (UTC)
To avoid WP:SYNTH (which much of this article seems based on) it should cite sources discussing "North Slavs". Many of the cited sources fail verification because they do not discuss "North Slavs" (and the authors of those sources would probably reject the concept). Synthesizing them to reach or imply a conclusion is WP:OR (i.e., facts, allegations, and ideas for which no reliable, published sources exist). Doremo ( talk) 14:50, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
Added some more sources, including one dating from 1879 (this actually surprised me - I had no idea "North Slav" was in usage so early). Anyway, sorry for pinging yous again, but it would be nice to get input from more than just the two of us on this:
OJ,
Staszek,
Piotrus,
Iryna. If any of you would like me to stop pinging you about content associated with this page then please let me know. I personally think adding the template is uncalled for, especially considering that I've already cleaned up the citations quite a lot since the flooding of tags by that IP. Also, calling a concept that has existed since 1879 at the very least existed since 1841 at the very least as original research is ridiculous. --
Samotny Wędrowiec (
talk)
15:17, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
In the section above with the same concern I was worried about sections of History and Religion. However the discussion convinced me that once it was reliably established which nations constitute NS, we can summarize their histories and religions as long as no new conclusions are drawn Because the distinctive feature of OR/SYNTH is statements, explicit or implicit, not found in the sosurces. Therefore to make this dispute focused, the originator of the dispute, please state which exactly statements are disputed. Staszek Lem ( talk) 18:27, 6 December 2017 (UTC)
Cite sources that discuss "North Slavs"
- this is a valid request. However since it is already established that Poles are North Slavs (under the point of view presented in the article, it is OK to use sources which discuss Poles as long as these sources are not used to support statements about the concept of "North Slavs" itself.
Staszek Lem (
talk)
(and the authors of those sources would probably reject the concept)
-- If there are researchers who reject it, then it would be a good idea to add section "Criticsm of the concept"}}.
Staszek Lem (
talk)
18:30, 6 December 2017 (UTC)
The Living Age, a long-running periodical ...
-- The Living Age is a publisher. We do not attribute theories to publishers, but to scholars. Please specify who exactly used this term in this way.
Staszek Lem (
talk)
18:40, 6 December 2017 (UTC)
It is currently being proposed that Category:Slavic countries and territories be deleted. This article is related to that category. The relevant discussion is located at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2020 January 8#Countries and territories by language family. The discussion would benefit from input from editors with a knowledge of and interest in North Slavs. Krakkos ( talk) 11:18, 10 January 2020 (UTC)
I open this section to discuss the merits of various sources used in this article one-by-one, starting with Serafin (2015).
How is this a WP:RS? It's an essay and doesn't appear to be a peer-reviewed publication, which is a must to pass WP:SCHOLARSHIP (with the exception of WP:SPS by established subject-matter experts). – Austronesier ( talk) 17:07, 16 June 2022 (UTC)
This is a collection of six papers, and it would be great to have a more specific reference. I have a copy and can only see one passing mention of North Slavs in the chapter by I. Cvijanović. – Austronesier ( talk) 17:11, 16 June 2022 (UTC)
This source literally made me go "
bugger me backwards!" Note that it is used to support the statement "Although the use of the East and West Slavonic categories is the standard model, some theorists claim that these two groups share enough of the same or similar linguistic and cultural characteristics to be classed together as one North Slavic branch."
Here's the "relevant" quote with its entire context:
According to Symonds, who declares the South Italian to be "racially homosexual," all the soldiers in the Italian army have to sleep in their drawers, even in the hottest weather, because of the indecent attacks which the Sicilians and Neapolitans habitually make on them. The North Italians, in this respect, regard their southern countrymen as a quite different people. The same is true of the South Slavs of the Balkan Peninsuala, in comparison with the North Slavs of Bohemia, Poland and Russia.
— Bloch (1933, reprinted 2001), Anthropological Studies on the Strange Sexual Practices of All Races and All Ages.
That's some theorist, indeed. What are the "cultural characteristics", when Bloch only cites the meanest stereotypes about the supposed innate proneness of certain peoples towards anal rape? – Austronesier ( talk) 19:18, 17 June 2022 (UTC)
Oh damn, this is some bizarre stuff indeed! If it was me who added this source originally (I don't recall if it was or not) then I apologise, clearly it must've been done in some kind of rushed quantity over quality drive to establish notability or something. Had I known this was exactly what was written there then I wouldn't have used this source. -- Samotny Wędrowiec ( talk) 14:31, 22 June 2022 (UTC)
For a change, this is a real gem of source. Published by Mouton de Gruyter, written by a Harvard professor, having an entire chapter of 70+ pages devoted to historical-comparative linguistics, with 11 mentions of "North Slavs (1)"/"North Slavic (10)" in said chapter, what else do we want? Yet, a few caveats for uncritically using it here to support the notion of "North Slavs":
Bottom line: good source, better used in the language article, but not cited as directly supporting the primary North-South split. – Austronesier ( talk) 09:08, 18 June 2022 (UTC)
Samotny added pages 21 to 24 of Dingsdale to the article recently, although it's difficult to verify due to limited previews.
Page 21 mentions "northern and southern Slav nationalities" in passing; the context (including the very title of the book) makes clear that this is a purely geographical observation, not a linguistic classification of Slavic into subgroups. I don't know what pages 22 and 23 say. Page 24 contains a map, titled 'Figure 2.3 The broad patterns of ethnic nationalities in the Marchlands', but Google Books blocks it as a 'copyrighted image', so that can't be verified either. I'll try to get to it now. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw ( talk) 12:51, 19 June 2022 (UTC)
This source is clearly one from an expert linguist, Laura A. Janda, but it has the same problem as Živković ("belgrade"), the two Kortlandt papers, Grimm, Rappaport etc.: it doesn't define 'North Slavic' nor treat it as a topic, which is needed here to actually verify the definition. Janda uses 'East Slavic' and 'West Slavic' about equally frequently as 'North Slavic', so she doesn't seem to oppose the East-West subdivision in any way. Only if one reads the text really closely could one find out what she means by 'North Slavic' (she only makes clear that Czech is in that group on p. 215, and implies Polish, Slovak, Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian are as well, but drawing that conclusion seems OR), and it seems to me that, to Janda, it is nothing more than an ad hoc grouping of East+West Slavic whenever that is convenient as shorthand for writing out 'East and West Slavic' in its entirety. She does not discuss the use of the phrase 'North Slavic' over the course of history, and so it doesn't serve a proper purpose here anyway, because as such it is a primary source rather than a secondary one. I'm going to remove it, because unfortunately we can't use it here. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw ( talk) 14:28, 21 June 2022 (UTC)
This source from linguist Zbigniew Gołąb has exactly the same problem. It never defines 'North Slavic' (16 occurrences), but also uses - much more frequently - 'West Slavic' (40 times) and 'East Slavic' (48 times). Never is 'North Slavic' argued to be a better grouping than 'West and East Slavic', but always an ad hoc grouping of West and West for brevity's sake. The phrase 'North Slavs' never occurs, the phrase 'Northern Slavs' only once, and it seems again an ad hoc grouping. In fact, Gołąb clearly states his support for the consensus on p. 12 and 13, adding that it is not 'within the scope of our considerations' to further explore this division: 'The present-day Slavic peoples are usually divided into the three following groups: West Slavic, East Slavic, and South Slavic. This division has both linguistic and historico-geographical justification, in the sense that on the one hand the respective Slavic languages show some old features which unite them into the above three groups, and on the other hand the pre- and early historical migrations of the respective Slavic peoples distributed them geographically in just this way. Of course, the later political and cultural history of the Slavs very often strengthened the primary division. But this problem does not lie within the scope of our considerations.' This is one of the worst sources to rely on to argue that the East-West-South division is incorrect, and that a North-South division makes more sense, because Gołąb rather clearly argues that the East-West-South division is correct and he's not interested in exploring it further, because it's not relevant to his book. He doesn't even mention the North Slavic hypothesis as an alternative. I'm going to remove this source as well. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw ( talk) 14:48, 21 June 2022 (UTC)
A thought that came to me which can be applied to all sources really: there are peer-reviewed journals out there, some more recent than others (though this applies especially to older academics from the 20th century), that read like Mein Kampf... So I think it best to study sources on a case-by-case basis rather than judging them solely by their supposed academic credentials. -- Samotny Wędrowiec ( talk) 17:30, 16 June 2022 (UTC)
Thanks to both of you for your continued input here. I don't think some of the proper academic sources needed removing just because they didn't challenge the West/East split, iirc I even included a sentence or two about scholars who use the North Slavic grouping alongside West and East. Ad hoc or not, I think the fact that some authors felt the need to group these two families together as North Slavs/North Slavic is telling in itself and I don't see why these sources shouldn't be used in the article. -- Samotny Wędrowiec ( talk) 13:15, 22 June 2022 (UTC)
This article was nominated for deletion on 16 June 2022. The result of the discussion was merge. |
This redirect does not require a rating on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||
|
Is North Slav not merely a collective name for East and West Slavs when combined and as opposed to South Slavs? Don't get me wrong, I know that the term North Slav for this concept has been used (on rare occasions) but at the moment it may seem a little confusing because when you take the following articles: East Slavs, West Slavs, South Slavs, North Slavs - in a single list then one generally expects to find a different set of nations in each group. When I noticed the article, even I thought the page might be about some extinct nations (possibly absorbed into northern Russian) - rather like East Germanic which existed with Gothic and others related. For what it's worth, South Slavs are also divided into east and west based on ancestral route into respective region. Todays's Bulgarians, Macedonians, Pomaks, Gorani and Greek Slavs make up the eastern group and the rest form the western branch, all with some overlap and ethnic revisionism along the fringes. I am just interested in whether it is best to keep this article but make it shorter to complement East Slavs and West Slavs. -- OJ ( talk) 10:06, 29 April 2017 (UTC)
Just because you "personally" prefer the meaning, does not make it fact. Bulgarian Archer ( talk) 19:51, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
I am afraid the article contains a good deal of WP:SYNTH. The general part is OK. But the sections "History" and "Religion" are suspicious. Since this is not a universally recognized classification, you must cite only sources which directly speak of North Slavs. Even the North Slavic languages is rather contested concept. Staszek Lem ( talk) 22:29, 3 May 2017 (UTC)
The term itself is used, through not common, and perhaps obsolete. But if we can define North Slaves as tribes/people in countries X, Y, and Z, then it seems fine to discuss their religion etc. even if there is no single book on North Slavic religion or history. We just have to make sure we make it clear we are talking about Polish and Russian religions or histories, for example, instead of North Slavic religion. Generally, unless there are any controversial statements etc. I don't think there is much to worry about here. Btw, what would be useful would be a discussion of the term - is it used in modern works, by whom, who invented it, etc. Of course it is possible there are no sources for that... -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 06:33, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
Staszek Lem - No such things as a "mechanical W+E". If a comprehensive term happened to exist to refer to both the Germanic people and the Baltic people to the exclusion of everybody else, then there is a reason for this. Since the arbitrary example I gave you is such that the populations are not bilaterally connected in any way, there exists no "mechanical" title for reference. Plus, if this page is SYNTH then I see no reason why any publisher would speak in such a way when he could just as easily have said "West and East Slavs" omitting "north" and avoiding parentheses for the subgroups. What this example actually proves is that the terminology may be esoteric where English speakers may be concerned which is why the constituents are provided in brackets, in other words if the reader were expected to know what was meant by North Slav then the author need not have provided the list. For instance, if we said "The United Kingdom (England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland)", then we are assuming the reader may not be fully aware of which entities compose the UK but might nevertheless be expected to know the four items. In this source, "North Slavs" stands alone. Since we know this is a people then it is natural that there should be a history and religious beliefs among the populace. -- OJ ( talk) 07:29, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
Well, my worries were due to relative obscureness of the term; I don't have any specific concerns. Now that you mentioned "Germanic + Baltic", for quite some I was mulling about a less artificial example of "Polish+Lithuanian+ Ruthenian" conglomerate. Despite religious (Catholic vs. Orthodox) and linguistic (Slavic vs.Baltic), this area has a long history of interaction and strikingly common cultures. I've been wondering if there are any scholarly comparative discussions about "Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth heritage", even forgetting about political musings, such as Międzymorze. Staszek Lem ( talk) 16:04, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
File:North Slavic languages.png: Samotní Tulák, please provide a description to this colorful map (probably as text in file description, because there many small details). Staszek Lem ( talk) 16:58, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
You cannot combine West and East Slavs into one homogeneous ethnic group. While it's true that Eastern and Western Slavs did not experience Turkish influence like the South Slavs, that does not mean one can group them as being similar due to the fact that they are still two fundamentally different branches. West Slavic languages have lexical and phonetically differences not present within the East or South Slavic languages. For example, you would not call a Slovak or a Russian today a "North Slav" because they are not part of the same culture and branch. Slovaks are clearly Western Slavic and Russians are clearly Eastern Slavic. Bulgarian Archer ( talk) 19:39, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
How nice of you to vandalise this talk page by removing my original response, as well as trying to blank the article itself using another IP address. Serves me right for feeding the troll by assuming that you wanted to have a genuine discussion about this; perhaps next time I should not assume good faith and just ignore dunces like you straight away. -- Samotny Wędrowiec ( talk) 00:26, 12 May 2017 (UTC)
I am Czech and I can say that we understand Slovenian and Croatian way better than Russian. David Kumprecht ( talk) 16:32, 14 August 2017 (UTC)
This sentence is a nonsense. What means Turkic influence? Byzantine and Ottoman Empires were not Turkic ones. The Byzantine Empire was a Christian empire with Greek used as an official language. The Christians in Ottoman Empire had a separate Orthodox community called Rum Millet, where Greek was used as lingua franca. The Ottomans by the way were Muslims from different origins (Greek, Slavic, Turkic, Arab, Armenian, Iranian etc.), who spoke Ottoman language, which borrowed, in all aspects, extensively from Arabic and Persian, but not Turkish one. Jingiby ( talk) 05:19, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
References
Another anonymous user recently showed up to remove content and label everything they disagree with as either not cited or using an reliable source (reminiscent very much of of the Bulgarian guy who used sock puppets a while earlier). I would really appreciate it if a Wikipedian with extra privileges or some kind of admin rights could look behind the scenes and check if this recent editor is not connected to the same vandal, or someone else entirely. I will ping OJ, Staszek, Piotrus, Iryna here as legitimate users who have helped with similar troubles in the past and contributed greatly by adding/removing/modifying content on this page in the past or participating in discussions. Thanks in advance, -- Samotny Wędrowiec ( talk) 14:52, 30 November 2017 (UTC)
To avoid WP:SYNTH (which much of this article seems based on) it should cite sources discussing "North Slavs". Many of the cited sources fail verification because they do not discuss "North Slavs" (and the authors of those sources would probably reject the concept). Synthesizing them to reach or imply a conclusion is WP:OR (i.e., facts, allegations, and ideas for which no reliable, published sources exist). Doremo ( talk) 14:50, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
Added some more sources, including one dating from 1879 (this actually surprised me - I had no idea "North Slav" was in usage so early). Anyway, sorry for pinging yous again, but it would be nice to get input from more than just the two of us on this:
OJ,
Staszek,
Piotrus,
Iryna. If any of you would like me to stop pinging you about content associated with this page then please let me know. I personally think adding the template is uncalled for, especially considering that I've already cleaned up the citations quite a lot since the flooding of tags by that IP. Also, calling a concept that has existed since 1879 at the very least existed since 1841 at the very least as original research is ridiculous. --
Samotny Wędrowiec (
talk)
15:17, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
In the section above with the same concern I was worried about sections of History and Religion. However the discussion convinced me that once it was reliably established which nations constitute NS, we can summarize their histories and religions as long as no new conclusions are drawn Because the distinctive feature of OR/SYNTH is statements, explicit or implicit, not found in the sosurces. Therefore to make this dispute focused, the originator of the dispute, please state which exactly statements are disputed. Staszek Lem ( talk) 18:27, 6 December 2017 (UTC)
Cite sources that discuss "North Slavs"
- this is a valid request. However since it is already established that Poles are North Slavs (under the point of view presented in the article, it is OK to use sources which discuss Poles as long as these sources are not used to support statements about the concept of "North Slavs" itself.
Staszek Lem (
talk)
(and the authors of those sources would probably reject the concept)
-- If there are researchers who reject it, then it would be a good idea to add section "Criticsm of the concept"}}.
Staszek Lem (
talk)
18:30, 6 December 2017 (UTC)
The Living Age, a long-running periodical ...
-- The Living Age is a publisher. We do not attribute theories to publishers, but to scholars. Please specify who exactly used this term in this way.
Staszek Lem (
talk)
18:40, 6 December 2017 (UTC)
It is currently being proposed that Category:Slavic countries and territories be deleted. This article is related to that category. The relevant discussion is located at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2020 January 8#Countries and territories by language family. The discussion would benefit from input from editors with a knowledge of and interest in North Slavs. Krakkos ( talk) 11:18, 10 January 2020 (UTC)
I open this section to discuss the merits of various sources used in this article one-by-one, starting with Serafin (2015).
How is this a WP:RS? It's an essay and doesn't appear to be a peer-reviewed publication, which is a must to pass WP:SCHOLARSHIP (with the exception of WP:SPS by established subject-matter experts). – Austronesier ( talk) 17:07, 16 June 2022 (UTC)
This is a collection of six papers, and it would be great to have a more specific reference. I have a copy and can only see one passing mention of North Slavs in the chapter by I. Cvijanović. – Austronesier ( talk) 17:11, 16 June 2022 (UTC)
This source literally made me go "
bugger me backwards!" Note that it is used to support the statement "Although the use of the East and West Slavonic categories is the standard model, some theorists claim that these two groups share enough of the same or similar linguistic and cultural characteristics to be classed together as one North Slavic branch."
Here's the "relevant" quote with its entire context:
According to Symonds, who declares the South Italian to be "racially homosexual," all the soldiers in the Italian army have to sleep in their drawers, even in the hottest weather, because of the indecent attacks which the Sicilians and Neapolitans habitually make on them. The North Italians, in this respect, regard their southern countrymen as a quite different people. The same is true of the South Slavs of the Balkan Peninsuala, in comparison with the North Slavs of Bohemia, Poland and Russia.
— Bloch (1933, reprinted 2001), Anthropological Studies on the Strange Sexual Practices of All Races and All Ages.
That's some theorist, indeed. What are the "cultural characteristics", when Bloch only cites the meanest stereotypes about the supposed innate proneness of certain peoples towards anal rape? – Austronesier ( talk) 19:18, 17 June 2022 (UTC)
Oh damn, this is some bizarre stuff indeed! If it was me who added this source originally (I don't recall if it was or not) then I apologise, clearly it must've been done in some kind of rushed quantity over quality drive to establish notability or something. Had I known this was exactly what was written there then I wouldn't have used this source. -- Samotny Wędrowiec ( talk) 14:31, 22 June 2022 (UTC)
For a change, this is a real gem of source. Published by Mouton de Gruyter, written by a Harvard professor, having an entire chapter of 70+ pages devoted to historical-comparative linguistics, with 11 mentions of "North Slavs (1)"/"North Slavic (10)" in said chapter, what else do we want? Yet, a few caveats for uncritically using it here to support the notion of "North Slavs":
Bottom line: good source, better used in the language article, but not cited as directly supporting the primary North-South split. – Austronesier ( talk) 09:08, 18 June 2022 (UTC)
Samotny added pages 21 to 24 of Dingsdale to the article recently, although it's difficult to verify due to limited previews.
Page 21 mentions "northern and southern Slav nationalities" in passing; the context (including the very title of the book) makes clear that this is a purely geographical observation, not a linguistic classification of Slavic into subgroups. I don't know what pages 22 and 23 say. Page 24 contains a map, titled 'Figure 2.3 The broad patterns of ethnic nationalities in the Marchlands', but Google Books blocks it as a 'copyrighted image', so that can't be verified either. I'll try to get to it now. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw ( talk) 12:51, 19 June 2022 (UTC)
This source is clearly one from an expert linguist, Laura A. Janda, but it has the same problem as Živković ("belgrade"), the two Kortlandt papers, Grimm, Rappaport etc.: it doesn't define 'North Slavic' nor treat it as a topic, which is needed here to actually verify the definition. Janda uses 'East Slavic' and 'West Slavic' about equally frequently as 'North Slavic', so she doesn't seem to oppose the East-West subdivision in any way. Only if one reads the text really closely could one find out what she means by 'North Slavic' (she only makes clear that Czech is in that group on p. 215, and implies Polish, Slovak, Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian are as well, but drawing that conclusion seems OR), and it seems to me that, to Janda, it is nothing more than an ad hoc grouping of East+West Slavic whenever that is convenient as shorthand for writing out 'East and West Slavic' in its entirety. She does not discuss the use of the phrase 'North Slavic' over the course of history, and so it doesn't serve a proper purpose here anyway, because as such it is a primary source rather than a secondary one. I'm going to remove it, because unfortunately we can't use it here. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw ( talk) 14:28, 21 June 2022 (UTC)
This source from linguist Zbigniew Gołąb has exactly the same problem. It never defines 'North Slavic' (16 occurrences), but also uses - much more frequently - 'West Slavic' (40 times) and 'East Slavic' (48 times). Never is 'North Slavic' argued to be a better grouping than 'West and East Slavic', but always an ad hoc grouping of West and West for brevity's sake. The phrase 'North Slavs' never occurs, the phrase 'Northern Slavs' only once, and it seems again an ad hoc grouping. In fact, Gołąb clearly states his support for the consensus on p. 12 and 13, adding that it is not 'within the scope of our considerations' to further explore this division: 'The present-day Slavic peoples are usually divided into the three following groups: West Slavic, East Slavic, and South Slavic. This division has both linguistic and historico-geographical justification, in the sense that on the one hand the respective Slavic languages show some old features which unite them into the above three groups, and on the other hand the pre- and early historical migrations of the respective Slavic peoples distributed them geographically in just this way. Of course, the later political and cultural history of the Slavs very often strengthened the primary division. But this problem does not lie within the scope of our considerations.' This is one of the worst sources to rely on to argue that the East-West-South division is incorrect, and that a North-South division makes more sense, because Gołąb rather clearly argues that the East-West-South division is correct and he's not interested in exploring it further, because it's not relevant to his book. He doesn't even mention the North Slavic hypothesis as an alternative. I'm going to remove this source as well. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw ( talk) 14:48, 21 June 2022 (UTC)
A thought that came to me which can be applied to all sources really: there are peer-reviewed journals out there, some more recent than others (though this applies especially to older academics from the 20th century), that read like Mein Kampf... So I think it best to study sources on a case-by-case basis rather than judging them solely by their supposed academic credentials. -- Samotny Wędrowiec ( talk) 17:30, 16 June 2022 (UTC)
Thanks to both of you for your continued input here. I don't think some of the proper academic sources needed removing just because they didn't challenge the West/East split, iirc I even included a sentence or two about scholars who use the North Slavic grouping alongside West and East. Ad hoc or not, I think the fact that some authors felt the need to group these two families together as North Slavs/North Slavic is telling in itself and I don't see why these sources shouldn't be used in the article. -- Samotny Wędrowiec ( talk) 13:15, 22 June 2022 (UTC)