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Issues like Zhou and Shang are non-starters as they're already (toneless) English words. (cf. [[WP:ENGLISH]], [[WP:COMMONNAME]], [[WP:NC-ZH#Characters]], [[WP:MOS-ZH#Tones]], &c... &c...) — [[User talk:LlywelynII|<span style="text-shadow:#BBBBBB 0.1em 0.1em 0.1em; class=texhtml">LlywelynII</span>]] 05:24, 3 October 2011 (UTC)
== Language of the Shang ==
A couple of months ago a paragraph was added about Benedict and Nishida's suggestion (revived by DeLancey) that the Shang spoke a non-Sino-Tibetan language, but their script was taken over by the ST-speaking Zhou. This isn't widely accepted, and I'm not sure it should be included, but if it is we should present it accurately, rather than trying to water it down.
Even further out of the mainstream is Beckwith's theory of an Indo-European basis for Chinese—as far as I can tell it isn't considered a possibility by anyone else (though it's widely accepted that some Old Chinese words were borrowed from IE). The reviews of Beckwith's book are particularly critical of his linguistic proposals:
* {{cite journal | first1=Karlene | last1=Jones-Bley | first2=Martin E. | last2=Huld | title=''Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present'' | journal=Journal of Indo-European Studies | year=2010 | volume=38 | issue=3&4 | pages=431–443 | url=http://www.clarkriley.com/JIES3834web/13Reviews%28431-453%29.pdf }}
* {{cite journal | title=''Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present'' | first=Doug | last=Hitch | journal=Journal of the American Oriental Society | year=2010 | volume=130 | issue=4 | pages=654–658 | url=http://www.ynlc.ca/ynlc/staff/hitch/review_of_Beckwith.pdf }}
I suggest it should be removed as fringe. Similarly, although there has been a long-standing debate about whether the Chinese invention of writing was completely independent of the much earlier Middle-Eastern development, Beckwith's suggested IE transmission of the idea of writing seems farfetched, given that the Indo-Europeans in the area had no writing at that time. [[User talk:Kanguole|Kanguole]] 01:48, 2 January 2015 (UTC)
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