Talk:Otto von Sadovszky

Not a linguist

Otto von Szadovsky has no command in the comparative method of linguistics. Here are examples of his comparisons: http://www.magtudin.org/otto_sadovszky.htm He compares the words not, nol 'arrow' in Khanty dialects to the word not 'arrow' in Wintu language, even though the Khanty word goes back to Proto-Uralic *nyëxli (*nyïxli) 'arrow', and the change *l > t has occurred only in one dialect group in Khanty. It is impossible that the similarity between one Khanty dialect and one Amer-Indian language could be anything but chance. He ignores everything we know about Proto-Uralic and the etymologies of the words. --Jaakko Häkkinen (talk) 12:58, 26 October 2010 (UTC) (Edited by Mathglot (talk) 01:08, 2 December 2014 (UTC) in order to provide a linkable section header.)

Point taken, he's an anthropologist and not a linguist, and so apparently he's taken a surface similarity here as having significance, when actually it's due to pure chance. If one looks hard enough, I'm sure one could find word-pairs with surface similarities in just about any pair of languages. So it appears with regard to this example at least, he goofed big time, in a way a linguist never would have. But is one counter-example the end of the story? I'm not a linguist either, but I am concerned with data and probability, and what concerns me here, is whereas a sprinkling of fortuitous similarity seems highly likely, what is the likelihood of similarity of this sort occurring in a high proportion of words in a sample of 10,000 words not of his choosing. That seems very unlikely to me, but I'd like to hear more about this and as you're a proto-Uralic scholar it seems like you're ideally placed to do so. (I'd also like to see his full word list, and how it was assembled.)

P.S. On an unrelated note, I was amused by your "Hungarian not Uralic?" article and the "syndrome" you identified in Hungary. It figures that Jobbik would be involved in that somehow. Reminds me of our American political parties getting involved in whether Darwin was right, or whether global warming is happening or not. You probably already know about the 19th century law in Indiana fixing the value of pi at 3.2. Mathglot (talk) 11:18, 28 November 2014 (UTC)

Requested permission for Sadovszky image

I contacted the CSUF media contact for permission to use this image of Sadovszky appearing on the CSUF obit page. Mathglot (talk) 00:51, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

Permission received. I'm starting the follow-up steps now. Mathglot (talk) 00:21, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

Created File:Otto_Sadovszky_1979_small.jpg and emailed permissions-commons at wikimedia dot org with grant of permission from CSUF. Mathglot (talk) 01:58, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

The OTRS page says there's about a 12-day backlog on these things, and I imagine it slows around Xmas, so we'll see. Mathglot (talk) 11:16, 13 December 2014 (UTC)

Received permission in early January, and added a Template:Infobox person to the article with the photo embedded. Mathglot (talk) 09:58, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

Collegium Aloysianum

The article makes a claim about Sadovszky getting a Ph.L. at "Collegium Aloysianum" in Italy. A web search turns up a High School in Linz, Austria by that name, a 19th century seminary in Ljubljana, and a Catholic boarding school for children in Werl, Germany, but so far I haven't seen anything about a university in Italy. Mathglot (talk) 01:13, 1 June 2017 (UTC)

I found one Hungarian source which remarks that instead of Italy it has been possibly Austria, so we better remove teh country until it is not certain.(KIENGIR (talk) 04:21, 2 June 2020 (UTC))