User talk:A R King/Archive 1

Archive 1

Welcome to Wikipedia fellow linguist

Welcome to wikipedia. I am happy to see another linguist working with Aztecan languages joining us. We already have some good heads here (e.g. Lavintzin and Yours truly have also done some work) but we always need more to keep up. So welcome. And see my response on the Talk:Pipil page. Maunus 19:05, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

welcome from a linguist-wannabe

Hi A R King,

I skimmed your comments on Wikipedia:Requests for feedback. I'm a linguistics PhD student. If you have questions about Wikipedia etc. drop me a line. I'll either help or point you to someone who can. --Ling.Nut 03:03, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, Ling.Nut --A R King 10:47, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Central American languages

Gidday Alan. Yes, I think it would be useful to set up a category for Central American languages, per the geopolitical definition (ie ex-Mexico & the Caribbean Is). There are already categories by Cent.Am. country (eg category:Languages of El Salvador), so firstly should just be a matter of bringing these together, followed by some further refinements. I'll make a start on it in the next day or two. Like everything else around here, category schemes are constant works in progress, and there's always room for improvement and modification.

The overlapping of Mesoamerica & Central America should not be an issue, I see these as independent terms. Where geographically these coincide then a lang. can appear in both. I note that presently the term "Caribbean" as used here includes also the Atlantic coast of Cent.Am., & that languages such as Miskito Coastal Creole are in category:Languages of the Caribbean (in which case it would be in cat:langs of Central America also). Archaeologically, "Mesoamerica" is often defined as extending down into portions of Nicaragua and Costa Rica, excluding perhaps the Mosquito Coast & some other Atlantic/Caribbean regions.

Keep up the great work, and cheers.--cjllw | TALK 00:34, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Hi Alan, category:Languages of Central America is now created, presently little more than a super-category of cat:Languages of <Central American country> categories (wikipedia has a bit of a fetish about categorising things by country, which to my mind is not always the most appropriate), but can be further refined. Regards, --cjllw | TALK 23:42, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Good morning, cjllw! Good work. Would it be possible to put the languages in question in a single list, though? Is this something I could do (if you tell me how)? It's not fair to give you all the work, but I do think that would be more appropriate.

I suppose the Wikipedia "fetish" really boils down to (only) recognising official states at some level of its representation of reality. A very "mainstream" political attitude which will need to be questioned at some future time, IMHO - at least when (if ever) widespread public opinion becomes sufficiently sensitive to stateless identity issues. In the meantime, we may at least gnaw away at the mainstream view by reminding the informed public of the existence of other meaningful human groupings.

But there are also more "academic" arguments for avoiding classification by states on matters that have little or nothing to do with states (and which the states in question may have little or no interest in supporting, moreover!), if such are needed. For the Miskito language to be split into two pseudo-items (Miskito of Nicaragua, Miskito of Honduras) is silly, confusing and annoying; but it is also potentially misleading, given that we also have Lenca of Honduras and Lenca of El Salvador, which, it turns out, are actually different (though related) languages sharing a common language name.

Anyway, I've wandered slightly off topic there - sorry. Back to my original question: can we have all Central American languages in one alphabetical list? --A R King 09:05, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

I do rather agree with your insightful comments about the inappropriate and arbitrary practice of identifying entities and concepts by political divisions willy-nilly, without due regard to whether those divisions have anything to do with the item at hand- too often it is a case of jingoism or at least inattentiveness.

But that as you say is a deeper issue to resolve, for another day. Re being able to "see" all the central am. langs. in a single view, there are a couple of ways to accomplish this:

1. The Category:Languages of Central America category can be added directly to each article in question, which you would do by editing the article and adding [[Category:Languages of Central America]] to it at the bottom of the article (by convention); it will then show up in the category. Unfortunately one cannot directly edit the category itself so that articles appear in it, the software works the other way around. Be advised however, that there are a number of folks around here of the view that articles should only appear in the most "specific" categories, and not directly in a "parent" category - not a view I share in all circumstances, but others are of that opinion and may "correct" things that way if they see it. But I would say go ahead in any case, on the basis that "Central America" is not equal to only the sum of the modern political states, but has a regional reality too.
2. The other way, which could be complementary, is to develop a "List of..." article and add the languages to that. Lists on wikipedia have advantages that (unlike categories) one can add other useful information to them, and can be ordered in other meaningful ways than the alphabetical. Both categories and lists are useful navigational tools in their own way, so there's no reason why both can't be in place, as they frequently are.

Regards, --cjllw | TALK 09:33, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Basque Portal?

Kaixo, I'm contacting you because you figure in Category:User eu, meaning that you speak some Basque. You must therefore be Basque yourself or have an intense connection with the Basque Country.

I am thinking that maybe was a good idea to create a Portal (or maybe a Wikiproject? or both?) on the Basque theme but I feel such kind of project requires more than just one person.

If you are interested, please comment in my talk page.

Enjoy, --Sugaar 10:06, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Atlacatl

Note: I have moved this discussion to the Atlacatl talk page. --A R King 14:55, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Basque Polysynthetic?

Hi Alan I wanted to ask someone who knew both about basque and about Polysynthesis. In the article on Polysynthetic language Basque is given as an example of a Polysynthetic language - while there are certainly better examples of Polysynthesis than Basque I don't know if there is any support to the claim at all. Are there any reliable sources calling basque Polysynthetic? t would bee great if you would participate in thee discussion at Talk:Polysynthetic language.Maunus 08:57, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Hi Maunus. I've done so. --A R King 17:12, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Endangered South American languages

Am starting a table for list of endangered languages, based on the UNESCO Red Book. Of course many things need to be done; but would like initial comments:

Thanks, --Ling.Nut 23:52, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Hi Ling.Nut, I can't help you very much there, I'm afraid, as I don't have much knowledge of the area. I do have a suggestion, though. It would seem that nearly all native languages of South America are endangered (in other words, the number of non-endangered native languages of SA is small). Therefore a list of ALL native languages of South America would to a large extent coincide with this one. Now it seems to me that while there may be some people who are interested in having a list of endangeres langs. of SA, it would probably be more useful to others (perhaps myself) to have a list of all SA native languages, which could include an indication of which ones are particularly endangered (or not). The latter list would be easy to develop out of the structure you have already created; you'd only need to include the non-endangered ones in their corresponding cases in the country lists, and perhaps create an additional narrow column for a symbol meaning "endangered". As I say, it's just a suggestion. I have recently been thinking about doing something similar for Central American languages (but then started to think it might be too much work). See the discussion on CA languages higher up on this page. If you decide to do a list of this kind, I think it might be helpful to some people if the list also had a column in which to indicate each the genetic affiliation (i.e. language family) of each language on the list. --A R King 06:46, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! Those are good points... not sure where I'd get a list of all SA languages to populate the tables with... if you know a place, let me know. Thanks again.

I do plan to do CA endangered languages, too.. in fact, the whole world (those that I can find, anyhow) .. --Ling.Nut 07:25, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't know, unfortunately. The upshot of my discussion (above) with cjllw was that given the way articles in this field have been structured in Wikipedia, one way would be to go country by country and start from the lists of languages of each country. There I guess you will need to decide whether to take existing information (and lists) in Wikipedia as your starting point (and expand out from there by gradually adding any languages not already covered), or start from some comprehensive list in an external source and work in the other direction, so to speak. In the latter case, how about using Ethnologue as the starting point? It sounds like an awfully large amount of work though! --A R King 08:54, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Endangered languages/language revitalization

(continuation of preceding discussion)

• Funny you should mention the lack of coordination among the articles. Actually, the eventual goal is Wikipedia:WikiProject endangered languages and language revitalization; the tables are just a part of that. They are meant to be like mini-portals to help point out where effort is needed. Eventually they'll be moved into the main namespace.
• The plan/hope for the WikiProject is to be a focal point/clearinghouse for all such articles, to bring order out of chaos, and to focus effort onto a single point. A mouthful, I know. Comments and suggestions are very welcome.
• --Ling.Nut 13:17, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
• PS The skeleton of the WikiProject is here --Ling.Nut 13:42, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

My first reaction, Ling.Nut, is that it sounds like an uncomfortably broad area to be subsumed in one project (but I repeat, this is a first reaction, so don't take me too seriously yet). These are areas I am intensely interested in. (When I said at the start of the South American discussion above that "I don't have much knowledge of the area", I should clarify that I was talking about South American languages in particular.) I am very happy that there should be a WikiProject on language endangerment, and equally pleased that there should be one on language recovery (my own preferred concept) or revitalization. There is a great need for work of every kind on both of these areas. Nor can it be denied that there is an important, even essential connection between the two areas. Nevertheless, I perceive them as fundamentally different (though related) subjects, and I feel that it might be more helpful to be able to concentrate on them one at a time. That might enable us to find just the right (or best) way of developing each. There is a well-known Spanish saying: "Quien mucho abarca poco aprieta", which might be very freely translated as: If you try to push a very large cart along, you won't be able to push it very far. (It's usually translated as "Don't bite off more than you can chew", but chewing doesn't seem to have much to do with this...)

That is just my immediate reaction, I will say for the third and last time; something to think about maybe. Even if you take my suggestion, it may not mean a no to your proposed project; instead one might consider, for instance, taking on the general project but subdividing it at a lower level into thematic areas, one of which would, I hope, be language revitalization/recovery.

Whatever. In any case, please count on me to support and contribute to work in this area if at all possible. --A R King 15:20, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

• Thanks! Chip in any time you like at WikiProject endangered languages and language revitalization. I'm making a header bar with links to the two proto-tables and redlinks to future wishes. :-)
• In my mind, the "language revitalization" bit is a "placeholder" or wish and a promise, and probably will be for months to come (perhaps several months). I just do not believe there will be a large enough core of supporters to carry/support a separate "language revitalization" project (now or ever, in fact). However, if it exists as a little corner room of a larger "endangered languages" project, maybe people will visit it and straighten the pictures once in a while. In fact, if wishes and dreams come true and it gets big, it can be spun off. (?) But honestly, I doubt that would happen. Maybe I'm wrong.
• So the goal is to work on the endangered languages, and have the other half as an empty room waiting to be filled. For a while. The long-term goal is to turn my attention to the revitalization topic as well.
• We can revisit the "revitalization" vs. "recovery" topic at a later date. :-) Everything is a work in progress.
• Cheers! --Ling.Nut 15:45, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Okay. Feel free to contact me again whenever you like! --A R King 16:01, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Quick Q: How does "WikiProject biolinguistic diversity" grab you? --Ling.Nut 18:17, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, I think that maybe what we should be discussing first is what we want the content of the project to be, and then make the name fit the content, rather than the other way around. My personal reaction to "biolinguistic diversity", though, is that it sounds very PC, but not terribly specific considering that we are talking about an encyclopedia. And aren't we getting vaguer all the time?

I would like to make a proposal in the light of the foregoing discussion: what would you say to just calling it either "Endangered languages" or "Language endangerment" for the time being, since you say that is what we will want to concentrate on for the first few months. As for the other "empty room waiting to be filled" of language vitalization, if and when we start to fill it, if we still think we want to do that as part of the same project rather than as a separate one, then we can consider changing the project name at that point to reflect the new direction taken by its content. That way we do not need to decide yet on the issues raised above about the project's (future) scope, and the present name of the project will reflect its present scope, leaving the future for the future.

As for what you say about not expecting there to be many people ready to work on the issue of language revitalization (now or in the future), all I can say is I hope you are wrong! But time will tell. Cheers, --A R King 19:10, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Basque language/Swadesh list

I think this is more of your interest than mine: I just found that Swadesh lists have been agreed to delete AND transwiki (to Wikitionary). Yet the one on Basque language (and maybe others) has been deleted without transwikiing it before. I asked for deletion review (Wikipedia:Deletion review/Content review) but I think it's more proper for a linguist like you to keep an eye on this issue and make the proper corrections. Regards, --Sugaar 17:48, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

Kaixo Sugaar. Okay, I'll look into it, but first we should give someone a chance to respond to your comment, so I'll wait. Was the Swadesh list in a separate page by itself, or part of the Basque language page, or what? --A R King 18:00, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

It seems it was correctly transwikied. Just that I could not find it and the corresponding link in the Basque people article was dead.

The page was a subpage of Basque people. No idea who created it but it's odd. It seems there were many others like that.

For more info check in my user page: User talk:Sugaar#Basque Swadesh list. --Sugaar 00:49, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't know when the first Basque Swadesh list was produced, or who did it, but I believe there was one included in: Mario Saltarelli, Basque (Croom Helm Descriptive Grammar Series), 1988. There was also an ethnolinguistic survey (a sort of language atlas) produced by Elhuyar in the 1980s which included a Swadesh list (for each village), I think. Anyway, I'm glad we found it again! --A R King 06:18, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Pleased to meet you

Replied on my user talk page. - Jmabel | Talk 05:51, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Wow, Basque and Welsh? If you add Hungarian it will be a Trifecta. - Jmabel | Talk 05:53, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, I never got my teeth into Hungarian (er, the language, I mean, not the person). So far, that is... ;-) --A R King 07:45, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Abiento

Muitas grazias! Eskerrik asko! ya he meso a etimolochía en l'articlo d'abiento d'o Biquizionario. Saludos --Willtron (?) 12:54, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

the Template:Languages of South America

What do y ou think we should do about this extremely incomplete and misleading template that someone has started putting on all pages relating to languages of south america?Maunus 10:33, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

I placed a note on Qrc2006's user talk page and a briefer one on the template's talk page. I agree with you. --A R King 12:31, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

You forgot to sign your comments ;-) --Ling.Nut 14:08, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Did I? Sorry about that. --A R King 15:51, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

• this is a CC of the message i left manusus

"I did the official langauges copying the official languges of Europe template or maybe EU, perhaps it should be official languges of the OAS instead, but both can exist no? Why 1,000 languages, since the languages with less than 1,000 speakers are soooo many, i thought maybe it should be broken it up 1000+, -1000, and extinct languages of south america, maybe even less than 100, 100-1000, 1000-10000, 100,000+ but more than 1,000 seemed to be a managable number, while including every language with 2 or 77 speakers would have overly cluttered it. Why south america, not that that its any of your business but i dont mind sharing, becauase this is wikipedia and you edit what you like, what your interested in, im not gonna run and start editing the heavy metal article or barbara streasand greatest hits templates bcuz those dont really interest me. i didnt participate in any discussion bcuz it didnt occur to me, no one asked me to, and theyre really really really (3 reallys dude) hard to find the relevant ones or even where the hell they are. if im asked id be happy to put my input in any discussion. and if anyone needs help with a template im happy to do it. its mostly just cut and paste of some other similar template really. have i answered all your questions? got any more? hit me back and one final thing, in life and especially wikipedia i find people tend to pompously critizise other peoples work but at the end of the day, they are only willying to condemn you and if you stop they wont pick it up where you left off, nor will they care, its just a bunch of loud noise and its very unhelpfulQrc2006 19:57, 1 December 2006 (UTC)"

and to answer your question, i really am frustrated, where do you get off suggesting that maybe i should be editing the articles of your preferance rather than making a template or two, that really bothered me. i edit what i please. if you want help with somthing just ask. but its rude to suggest my choices are less important. plus you went on a tangent on my talk page. later.Qrc2006 20:02, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Basque people

(cross-posted to Sugaar's talk as well) Hi,

I put a note on jmabel's talk page about this, but he may not be online. I know nothing of the Basques except that they are the descendants of people either driven from their lands or assimilated by the Indo-European speakers [so they are the Taiwanese aborigines of Europe, or more likely vice versa, since the Basques were booted out of their lands before the Taiwanese aborigines were theirs].

I don't have time to participate in the discussion. I'm sorry.

--Ling.Nut 03:46, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

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A human suggestion/request

Hi, A.R. Before you get entangled with all those SuggestBot succulent ideas, I have another one:

It would be good idea to have a documented historical map of Basque language recession. I don't really have good bibliography on that, and that's why I'm requesting your help.

I'm not sure how good you are with images, so I let you to choose: either you can do it yourself or you can just give me the data and I will take care of the image as such, giving credit to both. Of course you can choose the third option of ignoring this request (no hard feelings). But I bet you will be interested in the idea.

Enjoy, --Sugaar 12:28, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Kaixo. Actually my response is "none of the above". I'm not ignoring your request, but I do not have expert knowledge on the subject (plus I am not good with images, either). So I suggest you do the map first, and I will look at it afterwards and we can discuss it if you like. Or also, if you have specific points to discuss in the process, I'm always available. Alan --A R King 13:26, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Ok. I just hoped you had the source material handy, beaing a linguist living in EH. All I have around is quite limited (an old map from the old edition of the BI MILA dictionay, can't recall the actual name, and a map with an unclear legend from M. Sorauren's historical work) but I'll see what I can find. I'm working in other issues, so I don't know when I'll have something to start but I'll consult with you anyhow.

Maybe I'll post a request in the WikiProject, though guess it can be lying around for months.

Well, thanks anyhow. --Sugaar 16:00, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Well, you see, it's not the kind of thing most "linguists" are concerned about, and I am not the kind of linguist who specialises in such things (I am more interested in grammar and present-day usage). What kind of sources did you need? If there's something I can help you with let me know. For example, I have a copy of Trask's The history of Basque, a good English-language reference, in front of me; do you want me to look and see if he provides useful information? Alan --A R King 16:10, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Request for Copyedit help

Hi Alan. If you have some spare time I would apprciate it greatly if you could brush up the content and style of Mayan languages I have worked on it for some time now and I want it to become a WP:GA before long. I would appreciate additions to both content and style, unfortunately I have difficulties not being sloppy. Change anything you want. Thanks Maunus 21:35, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Hi Maunus. Okay, subject to my available time. I'll put it on my list of things to do, and I'll be glad to help. But I've just starting cleaning up the Basque people article, so it'll be after that. Cheers, Alan --A R King 22:23, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Romani spelling systems

QUESTION

Dear Desiphral, I see that you are very active on the Romani-related articles in the English Wikipedia and also in the Romani Vikipidiya, and first of all I want to congratulate you and thank you for your good work. Also, I have a few questions I think maybe you can help me with.

I would like to ask you about the background of the spelling used on the Romani Vikipidiya. I have been comparing quite a few websites in Romani and although there are several systems of spelling in use, I have not seen any that use the kind of system found on Vikipidiya. However, in the Manchester University Romani project website, there is a comparative spelling chart here which shows something close to the Vikipidiya spelling, in the column labelled "Email".

I see a few differences between this "email" spelling system and the Vikipidiya one, however, such as:

• "Email" ch = "Vikipidiya" ch or chh

I have not seen the spelling chh anywhere else at all; do others use this or is it only found on Vikipidiya?

Another important issue seems to be the question of using y where most (all, actually) the other systems use j. The advantage of this is that it allows you to use j where the other systems variously use zh, dz, dj etc. etc. But Vikipidiya is the only place where I have seen this use of y. So again I am interested in knowing if there are others following this practice, or it is only found in Vikipidiya.

I have noticed that the first versions of Vikipidiya used consonant diacritics before being changed to the present system with none.

I am curious about all this. My questions are these, more or less: (1) what was the story of the decision about spelling on Vikipidiya: who decided this and what were the reasons? (2) how widespread is use of the same system outside of Vikipidiya: how many people Romani write this way, who are they, and how do others feel about it (how much acceptance is there)? (3) does the use of this system raise any serious problems (for example, are parts of the Romani community likely to reject things written this way, is it controversial, or will people say it isn't "real Romani" if the system isn't used by enough people)?

I hope you can help satisfy my curiosity and that you don't mind my asking you these questions, which I ask because I would like to form a clearer picture of the present-day reality of Romani and the Romani language movement. Thanks, --A R King 08:37, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

ANSWER

Dear A R King, thank you for your interest in my people's language. You presented some valuable questions and let me try to answer them.

As you saw in the article of Yaron Matras about the codification, this is still an unfolding phenomenon. The comparative chart is useful and it should be stressed that there is more or less fluidity in every of the variants. As expected, the most fluid is the variant labelled as "email", the spelling that resulted in the last years from communication by Internet among Roma across the world. At the beginning of the Internet, Romani people started to use local conventions already used in handwriting and printing. Now there are many cases of people that use on Internet local convention in the formal level (because this level still involves mostly presentation of some local facts) and when informally the "email" convention (since there is communication between people from different areas). Also the personal choices at the informal level may vary rapidly in order to find a common ground between collocutors.

Personally, I varied and experimented for some time the use of spelling conventions until I chose the variant I use now at rmy.wp. When we started this project, it was obvious to me and to another user, Naayram (who contributed mostly at the beginning), that we have to think about the best choice of a spelling in order to begin a popular encyclopaedia for Romani people worldwide. We used the variant without diacritics because it makes easier the input, it is based on the English spelling (that may be considered the best common ground worlwide) and also it is used when writing other Indo-Aryan languages with Latin alphabet. At the welcoming page it is written that there is no compelling variant neither in the spelling nor in the dialectal variation, everyone may contribute as he/she considers the best choice and as the project develops, we would debate about the best choices. So, there are also articles with other conventions, like the one from former Czechoslovakia: rmy:Mošovce, rmy:Chexiko stago (fana).

And as you saw, there appeared also some evolution even at Vikipidiya, when I renounced to write /cʰ/ as "ćh" for "chh". Matras noted in the "email" variant of the chart as "ch" for both sounds, /c/ and /cʰ/, as the informal level may dispense with the sound difference. However, it should be marked at an encyclopaedic level. The spelling I use for this Indo-Aryan specific sound is the popular choice among other Indo-Aryan people writing with Latin (and I saw in the chart that it is used also in Bulgaria).

Regarding the acceptance of this spelling system, I don't think it may be considered controversial, it is the same as other spelling systems as long as it is not imposed and there is not yet a worldwide accepted convention that would be mooted by it. The controversion that you probably saw at talk page of the main entry was raised by a person (using Torino IPs) regarding the Devanagari and the Indo-Aryan neologisms, without giving any alternatives for expanding Romani to be used worldwide and at any level covered by an encyclopaedia. However, that is a debate just among two persons (it is yet to develop a real community at rmy.wp), that may not be considered representative. It is worthy to say that, regarding the relations with other Indo-Aryan people, the opinions among Roma vary from rejection without debate to acceptance without debate and anything in between. All the best, Desiphral-देसीफ्राल 15:01, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the useful answer, Desiphral. I wasn't actually referring to the discussion about Devanagari etc. (although I noticed it), I was only interested about the status of different Latin alphabet options and levels of acceptance and/or acceptability among the Rom and Romani-speaking community/ies.

My interest is partly linguistic. Regarding the question of chh, in the little survey of Romani websites I did before writing to you I noticed that (a) nobody writes "chh" in the texts I looked at, and (b) on several sites "ch" seems to be used for both ch and chh. Both these observations seem to confirm Yaron Matras' spelling table. I do understand why you think both consonants should be distinguished in spelling. Another option that had occurred to me as a possibility, but which nobody seems to have proposed or accepted, would be as follows:

• spell the ch sound as "c"
• spell the chh sound as "ch"
• this would require us to also spell the c sound as "ts"

This seems to me more internally coherent for Romani (it achieves symmetry in p - ph, t - th, k - kh, c - ch), it avoids diacritics which I think is maybe the whole point, it avoids the slightly clumsy trigraph "chh", and while it is true that it sacrifices "c" as a simple letter for the ts sound, this sound is not as basic in Romani, is it? Also, as far as compatibility with English spelling convention goes, I don't think it is any harder from this point of view to justify using "c" for ch than to use it for the ts sound.

Any thoughts about why this has not been done this way?

If you look at my user page you will see that I am a linguist and very interested in minority languages, with which I have a lot of experience. I have worked a great deal with Basque, especially. I am only now learning about Romani because in the past it was not easy to obtain much information about it, at least not on the internet! I'm glad things have changed now. Best regards, --A R King 16:09, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Yes, the way you presented the proposed correspondence letters - sounds makes it, in my opinion, the best choice. Why it was not upheld until now? Probably because most of Romani people live in South-eastern Europe, where every language, be it Slavic, Romanian or Hungarian, has a specific letter for ts. I am also from this area and this probably conditioned my view. Sometimes, an outsider's view may bring fresh ideas. Thanks for the suggestion and for the involvement in the enfranchisement of Romani. Desiphral-देसीफ्राल 18:58, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

New question

Dear Desiphral, I have another question for you. Would you mind taking a look at this document (Integràlo Plàn e Rromani Selaqo and-i Katalùnia), which has been published in Catalonia in four languages (Catalan, Spanish, Romani and English)? I have noticed that the spelling used in the Romani part of this document is the type being taught in Romania (which, interestingly, is a system that is not represented in ANY of the Romani websites I surveyed!). I am of course curious to know how much acceptance this spelling proposal is achieving outside the immediate ambit of its proponents, and what you think about it yourself. However, that is a secondary question. What I really want to ask you about this text is how you would assess it linguistically. Do you think it can be considered an example of "good Romani" (I realise it may be difficult to define that, of course!). The reason why I ask is that I would like to know whether this text can be viewed as a suitable model of present-day Romani prose, for purposes of linguistic study. That is, if I am a linguist interested in studying modern Romani through observation of a written corpus, would this text be a good candidate for use in this way? And I'd be interested in any reasons (for or against) that make you answer this question one way or another. Thanks again, Alan --A R King 10:56, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Answer

Dear A R King, the texts in Romani language from Iberian Peninsula are usually translated into this language by people using a standard Romani, since the Kale lost its use. This text has all the features of Gheorghe Sarǎu's variant, regarding the neologisms, the set of Romani original words used and the spelling. He is the person who organized the education in Romani from Romania, some of the teaching materials are here, but they require the knowledge of Romanian or sometimes Hungarian. He uses the spelling adopted by the World Romani Congress in 1990 probably because he is non-Romani who learned the language and he does not want or does not feel entitled to make decisions. Also, because of the scarcity of regulation of Romani, events like that of 1990 may get undue weight among non-speakers, who want some tangible facts facing the lack of some popular choices. Indeed, on internet, someone hardly find texts with this spelling outside the Romanian Education Ministry's site. Most probably, Carlos Nuñez Nieto learned Romani from this education system and considered this spelling as the valid one. The fact is that it is a bit finical to aspire to become a popular one. I don't know what happened at that Congress, but I presume that they wanted to have some results and lacking better alternatives, they adopted the spelling proposed by Marcel Courthiade.

Regarding the value of the text, first of all its subject requires many neologisms. The neologisms of Sarǎu follow the line of other standardization groups in the world, namely to find words valid for Roma worldwide, not anchored in the local context. These neologisms are yet to be established, they are still in a experimenting phase. The rest of the vocabulary and the grammar is taken form different dialects, with emphasize on the features of the Early Romani. Here he made a antology of texts (mostly translations) covering diverse areas. On the site of Union Romani from Spain you may find texts translated into Romani, [1]. They are closer to the popular level, with some variations of pronunciation (of course, this does not mean the standardization is not necessary). Cheers, Desiphral-देसीफ्राल 16:10, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for your informative answer, Desiphral. Also I didn't know about the websites you mentioned, so that gives me more material to look at! I may be able to decipher part of the Romanian, at least I have a slight idea about the language and it is not completely incomprehensible for me. (Hungarian is another matter!) And I'm glad you told me about the Unión Romani site.

By the way, regarding these people, do you have any idea why they have decided to use the spelling "tch" (as in "tchatchipen")? It seems odd because in Spanish (or other languages in the Iberian Peninsula) there is no such letter combination (Spanish has "ch", of course). The most likely explanation I can think of is that maybe the people who proposed this spelling in Spain had learnt their Romani via France, since in French the sound is spelt "tch" (because "ch" represents the sound of sh). But Spanish is not French, and in Spanish this spelling seems quite capricious, unless there is another reason I haven't thought of.

One last question for today. Just out of curiosity. How would you describe the style of Romani that you write yourself? How does it fit into the variables you have mentioned? As I say, I ask out of pure curiosity. Cheers, Alan --A R King 18:34, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

About tch, I saw that they use it for both c and ch. The ideas that come to my mind are that maybe they had in mind they need to do something about it, and finally they used tch for both. Or, who knows, maybe the use of writing Romani arrived there through persons accustomed with French spelling. Another idea might be the desire for having a separate spelling from the Castilian mainstream. I don't know almost anything about the process of choosing the contemporary Basque spelling, but when I see the choice for tx, knowing nothing about its history, I imagine that it was chosen for creating a private space, when facing the strong Castilian pressure. And it must not be forgotten that the person(s) who made the translations there is either a person not living in Spain or a Hungaro, as they are named the newly arrived Roma from Eastern Europe who speak Romani (and who as far as I know are not yet very well integrated in the local ethos). I presumed it, because of the more natural style of Romani.

As for my writing style, it is oriented towards a standardization, enhancing every chance for wider understanding, also giving proper respect to every dialect. I gave the dialectal variants for titles of the articles that I knew. The stress is on searching for the best choices. The fact that I am still the main contribuitor there, made me sometimes to experiment features different from my dialect, like the plural for derivate nouns with "-pena" instead "-mata", or alternating the feminine singular definite article "e" or "i", to make some variation. So it is mostly the Romani used when people from different groups meet, subscribing to the hope that a new koine may be possible. The fact that the nature of the texts of Wikipedia requires a fair amount of neologisms (either derived from old vocabulary or borrowings) not yet really naturalized adds also to the experimental nature. Desiphral-देसीफ्राल 20:55, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Hi again. It is true that use of "tx" in Basque spelling is relatively new (although it's been well established for a century now, and nobody would dream of writing the sound it represents any other way today!). Indeed, in the past "ch" was used in the southern (Spanish) Basque Country and "tch" in the north (French B.C.), all quite predictably. However, motivation for the adoption of "tx" in the Basque case is not only "aesthetic", "ideological" or symbolic: it is also well motivated language-internally. Basque has a set of three distinct affricate sibillant phonemes ("tz", "ts" and "tx") as well as a parallel set of three corresponding fricatives ("z", "s" and "x"). (All six sounds are voiceless, with "z", "s" and "x" representing different points of articulation.) Moreover, the use of "x" for the palato-alveolar fricative (sh-sound) is based on a local (Castilian-centred) historical orthographic tradition: until about the sixteenth century "x" in Spanish represented such a sound and for this reason, this use of "x" became established in native American languages (such as Nahuatl) wherever the colonists were Spanish-speaking. (And compare modern Catalan spelling, which also uses "x" for sh, and even "tx" for ch in some contexts.) So, changing "ch" to "tx" in Basque involved bringing the spelling of the palatal affricate in line with the rest of the existing system and making the system symmetrical and more coherent in Basque phonological terms. On the other hand, in the case of Romanó-Caló "tch", I cannot see any internal motivation whatsoever for opting for this spelling over "ch". So yes, I think the reason(s) for the choice must have been one or more of those you mentioned.

Interesting what you say about the Romanó-Caló texts published being quite idiomatic and apparently written by a "Hungaro". I only got a quick glimpse at the on-line pages of Tchatchipen the address of which you gave me yesterday, with the Romani translations of the article summaries, but it was quite a wonderful surprise. Now I am curious to know how big this language movement is. I imagine it is focused in the south of Spain, relatively far from where I live in the Basque Country. I wish I had known a few years ago when I briefly visited the university in Granada. But of course at that time perhaps they were not yet so well organised. It was a conference on linguistic typology, and I don't remember anyone discussing Romani, while there was a lot of interest in the Berber languages of recent northern African immigrants to the area.

Thanks again for opening up to me a world I knew nothing about. We'll stay in touch, just give me time to think of my next question :-) --A R King 06:59, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the presentation of the reasons for choices of Iberian spellings, I didn't know about them. I don't know too much about the extent of the revival of Romani in Spain, but I think if there would have been some notable results, I would have found out. About the area of focus, I suppose that as long as the initiative did not switch to the popular level, then it may be also wherever the centers of decisions are. If I understood well from that address of Barcelona, used for presenting the identification of Unión Romani, probably they have also a important presence in Barcelona. Desiphral-देसीफ्राल 11:59, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

A proposal to Desiphral

I have started work on an open-ended series of grammar sketches and other associated pages. I believe I am well suited to this kind of work, because while I am quite knowledgeable about some languages and less so about many others of course, I have an extensive background, experience and (I think) practical expertise in working with descriptive/typological issues in general, and codification and synthesis of grammars of minority languages in particular.

My personal plan regarding this series of Wikipedia grammar sketches is to produce sketches both of languages I know well and of ones I do not know so well, relying on available sources (internet, books, articles...) and, of course, collaboration with other Wikipedians wherever possible. So far I have posted such grammar sketches of two native Central American languages, Pipil or Nawat and Miskito. I know a lot about Nawat because I spent over two years living in Central America working on this language with native speakers and a language recovery movement (which I helped to found). Although also spoken in Central America, I don't know much about Miskito, only what I have read in the literature available on-line (which is much less than what I have already found for Romani!), but on that basis I was able to propose a grammar sketch which hopefully has some value (and which may be corrected by more knowledgeable people in the future, as necessary). At present I am working on a Basque grammar sketch, which is about half finished, but I won't post it until it is in a more finished state. Curiously, it seems harder to produce sketches of languages I know very well (like Basque), even after I have spent about thirty years studying it during which time I have previously summarised it's grammar a number of times, so it ought to be second nature to me by now!

As you have probably guessed, having become fascinated by what I have seen of the Romani language and the growing language movement over the last few days and weeks, I am now thinking that I would like to choose Romani for my next grammar sketch project. There is already enough source material out there to provide the basic information and my contribution would principally be to offer my methodology and experience in putting together a presentation of the central facts of Romani grammar in a way that will be of practical or theoretical value (depending on each reader's interest) to a suitable audience. I think this will be very interesting for a lot of people and will help the Romani language cause by arousing more public interest and helping to make people better informed about the language, and maybe also encouraging a few more people to go on from here and learn the language. It is to be hoped that not a few of those people will be Roma, of course.

I would like to ask you, Desiphral, what you think of this idea, and if you support it, whether you would be willing to work with me on this project, enriching it with your knowledge of Romani and your perspective as a Romani speaker and writer, a Rom, and an active member of the language movement. At this point I am still piecing together the basic elements of the overall system and thinking about how best to present them in a coherent and not-too-complicated way, in other words these are early days, but I know I won't have enough spare time to do this very quickly, so it will have to be a process over some weeks, a couple of months at least. Maybe by Easter we might be ready... If you're interested, a look at my other grammar sketches noted above will give you an idea of the level of detail, rigour and the general scope of the sketch I have in mind for this series. Of course there are many, many specifics to discuss about such a project and we can start discussing them little by little if you think you are ready to support me in this project. First you must tell me what you think, though. Perhaps you don't even think it's a good idea. If you discourage me, I will probably think about forgetting the project for now (there are other languages on my list too!). So I will wait for your reply. All the best, Alan --A R King 10:04, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

I consider it a good idea. Probably you saw already the grammar sketches of Yaron Matras and the other one from Unión Romani site, they have some of the material needed to present the grammar features, the same as you did for the other languages. And I want to contribute too for making a useful and user friendly article. Also let's see how much available time I will have, as you may see, I could not contribute so much in the last months neither on Romani nor on English wiki. Desiphral-देसीफ्राल 18:47, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

For most of the internet sites listed in the Romani language page (I added some of the links myself) either I have already read/studied them or I am in the process of doing so. This applies in particular to the writings of Yaron Matras and some of the other grammar sketches too. Furthermore I have downloaded or taken note of other websites that you drew my attention to in our correspondence. I plan to come back and study all these materials more carefully in a second reading, or else to study some important materials that I haven't had time to look at properly yet, including the dialect database presented on the Manchester University Romani project website. Altogether this is quite a large amount of material and yes, I feel there is ample information there to provide the knowledge needed for a grammar sketch. And I agree with you that the model of grammar sketch provided by Matras comes fairly close to what we are thinking of doing. Considering all the materials we have to work with, plus your and my participation, I feel confident that we are in a position to produce a high-quality, very useful and quite accurate Romani grammar sketch. Don't worry about having time available, neither of us needs to commit to a specific timetable for this but I'm sure we'll both just give it as much time as we can and it is not a critical issue when we finish, so we can just work on it until it is ready. We'll talk more later, okay? Alan --A R King 19:03, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Endangered languages

Hello A R King,

Well the Holidays are winding down. I'm cutting back/quitting my participation in other projects in order to concentrate on Wikipedia:WikiProject Endangered languages (temporarily User:Ling.Nut/ELLR). I'm going to move the main page out of my userspace and into Wikipedia space very soon; probably within the next day or so.

The project is looking pretty bare-bones at present, but I think that it's best to launch it "warts and all" rather than to wait for it to be perfect (since nothing can ever be perfect).

Any and all help, comments, thoughts, etc. would be appreciated. As a WikiProject in Wikispace, it belongs to Wikipedia. I strongly invite and encourage any and all improvements that you see that you could offer.

Most of all, let's get the WikiProject trappings squared away so we can focus on the articles!

Best Regards, --Ling.Nut 21:38, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Hi, Ling.Nut,

Sorry I've been slightly out of it so far, but please don't take that as rejection, I would like to support the project however I can, and if you see specific ways you think I might be able to do that (but haven't thought of), please don't hesitate to let me know. So I encourage you to make the move into Wikipedia, and consider me "in".

Happy holidays and good luck, Alan --A R King 22:21, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

resource sharing idea on my talk page

Hi AR,

Perhaps I put my idea in the wrong place. At the bottom of my talk page there's an idea about resource sharing. --Ling.Nut 13:54, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Hi Ling.Nut,

Sorry for not answering promptly. I did see your idea, but haven't answered because I'm distracted by other work and also because I didn't quite fully understand the technicalities of what you're suggesting there, so I thought I'd let someone else answer first (but no one has) thinking maybe then I'd understand better what we're talking about and I could chip in if necessary. But if I've got the right end of the stick, what this is about is your fears about working something preliminary out between those in our little group without laying ourselves open to vandalism and other destructive interference in the process. I can understand those worries and in principle welcome whatever it is you're proposing if it is aimed in that direction. By the way you're also welcome to contact me by email if you like via my user's page, and I will respond by email if you prefer (just another option, if it would help). Cheers, Alan --A R King 14:20, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

• by the way thanks for your comments at WP:ENLANG!
• think of a high school locker (you're from Australia, right? Do Aussie high schools have students' lockers lining the hallways? I assume it's the same). Now imagine that only the people in our little group know the combination to the locker. Then imagine a request page, where if you wanted to work on, say, Pipil grammar, and you wanted some more article as resources, you could post a request. Then I would go to that locker, open it, and drop in whatever documents I could find. (There would be a separate folder for Pipil grammar — probably you would create that folder at the same time you make the request). A day or two later you look in the locker, and there are a few new articles for you.

• the concern is the combination to the locker. Stuff stored on the Internet wouldn't have a "history" like Wikipedia does. If someone deletes it, it's gone. [Actually, I would probably make daily backups of everything we have, in order to prevent this]. So we would only give that "combination" (actually, a password) to people we know.

• sound useful? --Ling.Nut 15:07, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Yes, it sounds useful. Only I'm not from Australia, that's cjllw. I'm from England. :-) Cheers, --A R King 18:00, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

I used to hang out with several British co-workers when I was in Taipei. They laughed at me for saying "dude." :-) But the best beer in the world is Boddington's. :-) --Ling.Nut 18:19, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Yes, it is nice, isn't it. --A R King 18:42, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Nawat & Kintu

Hi :)

I really can't say that I see an awful lot of (interesting) similarities between Nawat and the Kintu (Bantu) languages.

The most conspicuous aspect of the Kintu languages is the noun and concord system.

Comparing Nawat to Sesotho, however, I did find the methods of using verb affixes rather similar (I should be adding these as part of a general survey of the parts of speech and "little words" soon).

I'm curious to know what similarities you could see? I feel like I might've missed something... Zyxoas (talk to me - I'll listen) 08:15, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Zyxoas - I've never sat down and made a list of them, they're just sort of floating around in my head, so I probably won't remember them all on a first attempt (and I haven't got much time right now), but since you ask, I'll try and give you a few hints.

I think the most central point is that both have head-marking clause syntax (this contrasts e.g. to European languages which are mostly/mainly dependent-marking languages). This is seen in a number of more specific points, particularly:

• verbs incorporate "agreement" indices referring to subjects and objects (an instance of head marking)
• grammatical (subject, object) arguments do not take any case markers or prepositions (absence of dependent marking)
• the prominent grammatical function of lexical modifications to verb stems to indicate various valency/transitivity patterns, such as transitive-to-instransitive, intransitive-to-transitive, causative, APPLICATIVE etc. (associated with head-marking systems, and tends to have as its correlate a somewhat less preposition-centred syntax than European languages)

Clause-level word-order patterns are probably roughly comparable (and this is again perhaps correlated with the preference for head marking): a sort of loose, very flexible SVO-tending system in which constituents are optionally fronted for various types of emphasis (focusing, topicalisation...) (helped by the fact that the "agreement" indices on the verb contribute to disambiguation of syntactic functions). On the other hand, a lot of languages widely employ syntactically more complex information-structure-marking mechanisms (sometimes historically related to clefting constructions - a clear example is found in Somali, for instance), whereas Nahuan and Kintu languages are among those which prefer to keep things simple on that level, just resorting to freedom of word order if necessary.

Another shared feature is the existence of a class of ideophones (while this class in Nawat and Nahuatl is noted in the literature, I actually got the term "ideophone" and inspiration for my analysis of the Nawat phenomenon from descriptions of Zulu!).

I realise of course that there are also some standard Kintu features that are quite lacking in Nawat (such as the noun concord system, obviously) and vice-versa (e.g. the Nawat treatment of possession).

Although there actually is, I think, some typological overlapping where possession is concerned, in that both differentiate more than one class of possession, with "alienability" having something to do with this. In Swahili, for example, a small subset of nouns take suffixed personal possessive indices (e.g. mwenzangu 'my companion'), this occurring with "names of near relatives and certain other words" (Ashton, Swahili grammar, p. 56). In Nawat, expression of possession with "names of near relatives and certain other words" is also different, although the manifestations of the difference are different: the grammatical impossibility of dissociating such Nawat words from a possessor, and (only with some such words) a distinct plural suffix, -wan. Cheers, Alan --A R King 10:34, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, those are quite a few similarities!

When I read the Nawat article I also found the existence of concords striking.

Regarding your Kiswahili "mwenzangu" example; a similar construct exists in Sesotho but it's actually a popular contraction of (noun + possesive concord + possesive "me") to (noun + possesive "me") (sorry about the "possesive 'me'" -- I can't seem to recall what the correct term is). So in Sesotho "ngwanaka" is more popular (at least in speech, though it seems a bit weird and deeply idiomatic when written) than "ngwana wa ka" ("mwana wa ngu" in Kiswahili).

There are even other popular possesive contractions of kinship, such as "wa heso/heno/habo" ("of the place/family of me/you/him..."; this is specifically for singular persons, "habo (absolute pronoun)" is used for the plural persons and the classes) to simply "-so/no/bo". Eg "ngwaneso" ("my sibling") from "ngwana wa heso" ("child of my family", also "ngwaneno", "ngwanabo"). However, as with the "-ka" contraction, this is idiomatic and not valid for most nouns.

This is not to say, however, that the nouns cannot be used without the possesive part, rather that the contraction is much more popular than the full form.

What are you currently working on? Be aware that much of your Wikipedia contributions might fail WP:NOR, but I personally don't see anything wrong with them and I also believe in exposing ones own syntheses if "reliable" sources on the subject are lacking (or, as is often the case with eg Kintu languages, most sources are full of nonsense written by people not adequately familiar with the subject matter).

Zyxoas (talk to me - I'll listen) 12:33, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Quite. I am slightly worried about the NOR issue you mention but I justify my work to myself along the lines you mention.

Right now I'm on a temporary break from heavyweight work on Wikipedia while I both catch up with some other commitments and obligations and entertain myself with some other challenges (which we can probably discuss together in due course). I'm not sure if it's a good or a bad thing, but I've got two rather hefty Wikipedia article projects underway and parked while I sort things out. Both are grammar sketches along the general lines of the Nawat and Miskito ones: Basque and Romani. Both are quite ambitious jobs.

The Sesotho possessive pattern you mentioned ("ngwaneso" etc.) sounds interesting. It looks like an incipient "possessive classifier" system such as you find in some Oceanic languages, e.g. Fijian, which has special possessive patterns for things that are considered food, and yet another for those that can be drunk, in addition to two more: inalienables and a "general" category. Presumably such systems originate in a way roughly analogous to what you have mentioned. For example, the pattern used to say "my taro" must have started out meaning "taro my-food", then "my-food" was grammaticalised into a first-person-singular possessive marker used with food items. The next stage through which this evolves is then that the semantic field covered by the "food-possessives" comes to be extended through what looks like metaphorical extension until it can be applied to a larger range of possessives, but still contrasts with the remainder of possessives where another of the four available possession types is used. And hey presto! you've got "possessive classifiers" (analogous to the way numeral classifiers come into being in some languages, of course).

On the other hand, there seems to be a universal tendency towards some sort of formal differentiation of kinship or inalienable possession vis-à-vis all others which typically involves a greater degree of syntheticity or contraction for the inalienable type. A European example is seen in Galician (Gallego), where the definite article is required with most pronominal possessives but is optionally omitted with inalienables, thus e.g.

o meu libro "my book" (NOT *meu libro)
versus:
meu irmán (OR o meu irmán) "my brother"
where o is the definite article

Cheers, Alan --A R King 15:13, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

WP:ENLANG

Thanks for removing the link. I shoulda done it myself, but was embarrassed after saying I would *never* log in. :-) Obviously that was an overstatement. But with each successive recent assertion of non-participation, my Wikipedia contributions have gone down & my study time has gone up... a very positive trend. But thanks, and do whatever you think is best with the project. --Ling.Nut 14:59, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

Will do. And don't hesitate to "use" me again when there's something else you want doing without having to "officially" log in yourself. And work hard!! Alan --A R King 15:04, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

Requesting help for Mayan languages

Hi Alan. We are currently nominating Mayan languages for featured article status and we can use help both to suggest improvements and to actually introduce them in the article. If you have some time maybe you would be so kind as to read the article and maybe change the things that you find criticizable or alternatively just express your support at the Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Mayan languages if you find the article to be passable as a FA already.·Maunus· ·ƛ· 12:14, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

Okay, I'll have a look, Maunus. What roughly is the time frame for this - how long do I have to do what you ask in? Regards, Alan --A R King 16:13, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

I don't know when it'll be closed. It would be great if you would just look at it within the next couple of days and decide to support or oppose its nomination. You don't have to do any editing if you don't have the time.·Maunus· ·ƛ· 17:45, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

Okay, I've started looking at it. --A R King 19:19, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

I've now skimmed through the FA discussion to get an idea of what issues are being raised, after which I have started to "gently" retouch the prose style of the article where I think I can polish it a bit without disturbing the content too much. Since I haven't participated in writing the article and am not a Mayanist, I wouldn't dare to question facts, but as a linguist I think I can usually say whether statements make sense or not. I am aware that even a small change may inadvertently constitute an undesired alteration at this stage, and I am only superficially familiar with what points have been debated (sometimes hotly, I know). Therefore, I think it would be advisable for you to watch my tracks as I progress through the article, look at what I am changing and if you think any changes problematic, go ahead and either revert them (I won't mind!), try something else, or discuss it with me if you think it necessary. If I know you're going to do that it will probably make me feel slightly bolder about editing. I must say I don't know how much time I can dedicate to this, but I'll try to go in an orderly fashion starting from the beginning. I've just done the first paragraph of the first section (History), so you might like to start by checking on that. As for putting in a supporting comment on the FA page, I'll probably do that tomorrow, after I'm a bit more familiar with the article and can say something sensible. If time is running out and you see I haven't done that yet, feel free to remind me. Oh, and good luck! Alan --A R King 19:58, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

You can rest assured that I will be checking up on every edit you make to the article. Be bold. Also don't feel obligated to spend more time than you can afford - every minute of your time counts in our favour so all you can get is gratitude. ·Maunus· ·ƛ· 20:35, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

Okay. I've gone through the History section. I won't do any more today. More tomorrow! Alan --A R King 20:56, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! It looks brilliant this far.·Maunus· ·ƛ· 21:22, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

Question: "Another related language, now endangered, is Ch'orti', which is spoken by 30,000 in Guatemala.[4] It was previously also spoken in Honduras and El Salvador but these variants are considered moribund." I believe Ch'orti' has been extinct for a long time in El Salvador. I don't know what its present status is in Honduras. Should we reword this? --A R King 10:05, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Yes, it is moribund in Honduras and extinct in El Salvador. Thanks for your vote of support btw.·Maunus· ·ƛ· 10:12, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Your welcome! A suggestion: "They may have served as prestige languages, coexisting with other dialects in some areas, much as Church Latin coexisted with other Romance languages in medieval Europe." Except that Church Latin was not a vernacular and is not spoken by anyone today. So it is not such a good analogy after all, and I have my doubt about how useful it will be: it may confuse less knowledgeable readers, whereas readers with some knowledge of linguistics do not need the analogy. Can we omit it? --A R King 10:16, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

I've been thinking the same about that phrase but was reluctant to cut it because I didn't write it myself. Now i say go ahead. ·Maunus· ·ƛ· 10:28, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Okay. It looks like we're both trying to edit the article at the same time. I think I just had an edit conflict with you. The effect was that it appeared that someone had just reverted several edits I had just done on the Ch'olan-Tzeltalan subsection. Can you confirm that this was an edit conflict and not someone actually disagreeing with my edits and reverting them? If the former, I'll put them back in; if the latter, perhaps I should refrain. In any case, we can't both be editing at the same time as it's counterproductive, so I'll give it a rest and come back later. --A R King 10:33, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

It was me who was working on providing some references in another section. I have to go to work now so the article is all yours.·Maunus· ·ƛ· 10:43, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

More questions

Western branch: I have a few suggestions for improving this subsection. First of all, the section structure is a bit odd at present:

===Western branch===
====Ch'olan====
(text1)
=====Tzeltalan=====
(text2)

Secondly, I think the Q'anjobalan branch needs to be included - at present it isn't mentioned in the survey. What do you think of the following section structure?

===Western branch===
====Ch'ol====
(text1)
====Tzeltalan====
(text2)
====Q'anjobalan===
(text to be added)

Tell me what you think, and if you agree either of us can do the structural change, but can you write up something on Q'anjobalan? --A R King 11:17, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

ADDED NOTE: I now see that Madman has inserted the Q'anjobal section in its proper place, noting that someone had deleted it (presumably accidentally). That someone may have been me - oops! Anyway, ignore my comment about this section being missing, but the rest of my comments still hold. --A R King 12:23, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Eastern branch: I have a few general suggestions here too. Once again, the present section structure is a bit unaesthetic:

===Eastern branch===
(text3)
====Mamean====
(text4)
====Core K'ichean====
(text5)
=====Poqom=====
(text6)

I don't think there is any need for heading levels to mirror levels of genetic branching in this introductory survey (as it won't in the western branch either, if you accept my suggestion above); it is only important that the organisation of the exposition should look coherent and the content be easy to understand. So this would be my suggested amendment:

===Eastern branch===
====K'ichean-Mamean====
(text3)
====Mamean====
(text4)
====Core K'ichean====
(text5)
====Poqom====
(text6)

(Alternatively, the Poqom subsection might be merged into the preceding section, as follows.)

===Eastern branch===
====K'ichean-Mamean====
(text3)
====Mamean====
(text4)
====Core K'ichean====
(text5)
(text6)

Apart from that, are you happy with the way the information is ordered in this section? Can you think of reordering anything that would result in an improvement? Just wondering. In particular, I'm wondering whether what is said in text3 belongs best where it is, or distributed between text4 and text5 (in which case it might be possible to eliminate the separate K'ichean-Mamean subsection).

• Another point: there seem to be spelling inconsistencies in the term Quichean, which appears with an accent in the compound expression Quichéan-Mamean (3 times in text3), but without the accent elsewhere and also in the expression Quichean-Mamean in text6. Then we have the spelling K'ichean in text5... Would you like to try and put this in order? For now I'll just leave it as it is pending a decision. --A R King 11:46, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

I have my doubts about the assertion that Q'eqchi' is spoken in ES. If this is the case, I seem to remember reading that it is so as a result of nearly-contemporary (late twentieth century) population displacements in the midst of the military conflicts and accompanying humanitarian disasters of the period, and may have been temporary, with the implication that if something like that is the case, then the presence of Q'eqchi' speakers on El Salvadorean territory may have been relevant to relief organisations (for example) working on the ground at the time, but less so in a context like ours. At the very least, a source reference would be desirable here. As it stands, it sounds as if Q'eqchi' were one of the historical indigenous languages of El Salvador, and I don't think it is (unlike Chorti and Poqomam). I insist I am no specialist on this subject, though. --A R King 11:58, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Poqomam has also long been extinct in El Salvador, so the sentence referring to that will need to be reworded. --A R King 12:04, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Another spelling issue: is it going to be Q'anjobal or Q'anjob'al? And Q'anjobalan or Q'anjob'alan? All occur in the present text. --A R King 16:51, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Ditto for Cholan versus Ch'olan (and probably Chol versus Ch'ol). --A R King 16:58, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

This is a question that should be discussed on the talk page. My suggestion is to use diacriticfree traditional spellings for the branches and ALMG only for single languages. That woule mean Q'anjob'al language but Qanjobalan branch, K'iche' language but Core Quichean etc. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Maunus (talk • contribs) 21:45, 19 March 2007 (UTC).

Questions about the grammar section

Hello again. I see you still haven't had time to answer my last spate of questions in the preceding subsection, but I will continue listing further questions here as I progress through the article. I am now into the grammar section. When I started writing these questions I didn't know there would be so many, and maybe they shouldn't be asked (and answered) here but on the article's discussion page. If you think that is the case, we can move them over to there, whatever you prefer, but for now I'll just continue where we have started. My questions about grammar will probably get a bit more technical and detailed than those above.

First of all, in the section on word classes, I have the following questions/suggestions. You say Mayan has four word classes: verbs, statives, adjectives, and nouns. Fine. You have a paragraph about statives in general, where you describe them as predicative words that are distinct from verbs (fine), and at the end of the paragraph you say that statives subdivide into adjectives, positionals and numerals (also fine). In the next paragraph, devoted to positionals, you describe these as "predicative words". Since you have already stated that statives are predicative words and that positionals are statives, wouldn't it be better here just to say that positionals are a sub-class of statives? The rest of that sentence, "...with meanings related to the position or shape of an object or person", tells us what makes these statives different from the other statives (i.e. adjectives and numerals). Thus we wouldn't refer directly to the "predicative" idea in this paragraph. My defence of this choice would be that for unsophisticated readers "predicative" is not an easy concept to understand or decipher, in fact probably harder if anything than "stative", so we're not helping much by repeating "predicative", while for sophisticated readers it is clear enough, and tidier, to do it the way I suggest. Do you agree?

I agree.·Maunus· ·ƛ· 21:40, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Another question concerns the next sentence: "Mayan languages have between 250 and 500 distinct roots describing position:..." Maybe I'm being too nit-picking, but you have just said that positionals may describe a position or a shape. Taken literally, you're now saying that 250-500 roots describe position (not shape), implying that this is not referring to the whole set of positionals. If you meant 250-500 positionals, I think it's easier on the reader and less ambiguous just to say: "Mayan languages have between 250 and 500 distinct positional roots:...". Is that right? --A R King 18:27, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

your formulation is right.·Maunus· ·ƛ· 21:40, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Adverbial affixes: Morphology now. You say: "Mayan languages have few affixes with adverbial meanings...". Again this is probably nit-picking, but would it be more exact to say "affixes producing adverbial meanings" (or even "affixes producing adverbs") rather than "affixes WITH adverbial meanings"? In other words, are you not talking, not about affixes whose own meaning is adverbial (today, well, quickly, here...) but about affixes whereby words with adverbial meaning are formed? --A R King 18:38, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

It is a quote from Suárez 1983 who is talking about the kind of verbal affixes found in other mesoamerican languages which incorporate and adverbial meaning into the verb - eg. yec- or cual- in nahuatl. Such affixes are not found in Mayan languages. If you can form a better formulation I say go ahead.·Maunus· ·ƛ· 21:40, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Modal meanings. You continue: "nor do they have affixes with the kind of meanings expressed by English modal auxiliary verbs." I would have said simply something like: "nor do they have affixes with modal meanings." I don't see the point of bringing English modal verbs into the statement - it just makes it more confusing. Again I would apply my axiom: a sophisticated reader will find it clear, while an unsophisticated one will probably not understand one way or the other. If you agree here, I would suggest collapsing both parts of this sentence into something succinct like: "Mayan languages have few adverb-forming or modal affixes" or "Adverb-forming and modal affixes are rare in Mayan languages". What do you say? --A R King 18:44, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

I give you free hands here.·Maunus· ·ƛ· 21:40, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Morphosyntactic alignment. I've just read the section on morphosyntactic alignment and I think this could be tightened up. Do you think it necessary to go into so much detail about Lenkersdorf's theory. Personally I don't find it all that helpful or meaningful. I have plenty of experience working on ergative systems (such as Basque) and am familiar in a general way with the Mayan system too, so I have no trouble with the concepts involved, but I don't think Lenkersdorf is very scientific and I don't find it necessary or especially useful for the present exposition of Mayan ergativity. How would you feel about making a passing reference to Lenkersdorf in a footnote and simplifying the main text of this section by removing further references? --A R King 19:18, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Lenkersdorf is a pet inclusion of another good editor of the article USer:Homunq - I do not myself find it useful, scientific or interesting - but again I think that may only be because I have a linguistic background. Homunq who is not a linguist feels it helps laypeople to understand the principles of ergativity as they work in Maya - I cannot really diusagree since I cannot see it from a laymans point of view. I have tolerated it, but I won't lament its passing. ·Maunus· ·ƛ· 21:40, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Still on morphosyntactic alignment: I've decided to go ahead and reform this section as suggested. Please take a look. If you are horrified with what I've done to it feel free to revert or partially revert it, but this way you can see my proposal. I'm doing the "reform" in two steps: I've already shortened (rather drastically, I'm afraid) the text, and now I will condense the accompanying table to match, by omitting the Lenkersdorf part. In my opinion this makes it more intelligible and helps the reader to focus on the essential point, but again, if you disagree, switch it back again. --A R King 19:38, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

One more on morphosyntactic alignment: I'm also removing the phonetic representations of the examples; they are unnecessary to make the point. Same thing as before: if you disagree, revert. --A R King 19:49, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Two more questions

Good morning, Maunus. I went over the grammar section yesterday, but I have a couple of further suggestions there:

• The tables illustrating the two sets of person affixes would make their point better, I think, if it were possible for the same person (e.g. first person singular) to be shown in both, rather than different ones. That way it would be more obvious to the reader who knows no Mayan that a single person has two DIFFERENT markers employed in different contexts.

You are right I will start looking nfor a good set of example phrases.·Maunus· ·ƛ· 08:08, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

• I think we could improve on the section on nouns and noun phrases by explaining more explicitly (a) how possessive markers are used to express PRONOMINAL possession, and (b) how NOUN POSSESSORS are constructed. As it stands, this is only half-explained, and more is said near the end when discussing relational nouns than when presenting possessive structures per se. That is both unclear to the uninitiated, and also fails to convey fully the point about relationals, which can only be appreciated if one already knows how possession works in Mayan languages. I might be able to fix this up myself using the data already in the article. I'll give it a try if you like and you can go over it afterwards and see if you agree.

Go ahead here as well.·Maunus· ·ƛ· 08:08, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Also on the subject of this section, I notice that it covers two points basically: (1) numeral classifiers, and (2) possessive and relational constructions. Since it is longer than the previous sections, I would like to suggest splitting it into two subsections, which might help balance the sections in terms of size and facilitate reading by separating out two self-contained points, even though both have to do with noun phrases. Again, I can try that and you can see what you think of the result.

try it. I am almost sure I'll like it.·Maunus· ·ƛ· 08:08, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

One other thing: I really think we need to be more consistent on the spelling of language names and/or language group names, so what shall we do: open a debate on the article's discussion page (as you seemed to suggest yesterday), or go through the article ourselves applying your criteria, and leave any discussion to later? Cheers, Alan --A R King 07:51, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

For the sake of the FA nomination I think we should set consistence over consensus. We can always have the discussion afterwards. We have had some discussion though and have dcided to use the LAMG spellings on the Guatemalan languages (and Wastek) and the spelling Yucatec for that language. However Jakaltek/Poptí is unclear at present - I advocate Jakaltek because its page is at Jakaltek language and Poptí is an exonym posing as endonym.·Maunus· ·ƛ· 08:08, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Okay. I'll leave the application of the spelling policy to you since you're much more familiar with the issues and the policy. I agree about imposing consistency first and discussing afterwards (if it comes to that). As long as the policy is good, which I'm sure yours is, I trust common sense will prevail. I'll do something about the other points some time today. Have a good day! --A R King 08:30, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Maunus: I disagree on several counts with this edit by "200.6.251.198". In particular:

• "for example the "ergative" grammatical treatment of verbs and direct objects" is clumsy phrasing which, for all its redundancy, is none the clearer for the lay reader, I'm sure, than was the phrase it replaces ("for example the grammatical treatment of verbs and direct objects"): either you say this, or you say "for example, ergative structure" or something like that. "Ergative grammatical treatment of ... direct objects" is very messy! (Ergativity is actually more about the treatment of SUBJECTS than anything else.)
• "a special word class of "positionals", typical of all Mayan languages, which fulfill a role that in English is somewhere between adjectives and verbs", which has been put in place of "a special word class of "positionals" which is typical of all Mayan languages" at the end of the same paragraph, is wrong: the description "somewhere between adjectives and verbs" applies to statives, not positionals, but statives are not as unique to Mayan languages as positionals are. In my opinion, here again it was better the way it was.

But I don't want to get into a fist fight with whoever 200.6.251.198 is. What do you think? If you agree with me, would you like to step in, so that I don't have to? Alan --A R King 08:47, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

the sentence has to be altered since it is nonsensical (mayan languages do not fulfill a role similar to verbs and adjectives in English such as the phrase says now.) I wouldn't hesitate to revert it since it is in no way an improvement.·Maunus· ·ƛ· 09:04, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. That's much better. --A R King 09:26, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Another question: Are the multi-coloured backgrounds in the tables illustrating sound changes really necessary? Not only do I find them stylistically and aesthetically unsightly, but on my monitor they actually make some of the information illegible because the background colour shows too dark. Besides which, I just think it's superfluous. The colour-coding idea works very well on the map and chart, which are very nicely done, but here, I would like to scrap it. The column headings are enough. That's my opinion; what is yours? --A R King 09:33, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

I am quite fond of the colour coding myself. I think it serves both as a didactic tool and has aesthetic value.·Maunus· ·ƛ· 09:39, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Edit conflict?

On saving a fairly large-scale edit of the whole grammar section I just had an edit conflict with you. As my changes were rather important I decided to override you in order not to lose my work, so you may wish to go over it again. I have now finished (more or less) a rearrangement of the whole grammar part; not much change in content, other than the expansions we talked about, but a fair amount of reordering. I had to do this in several steps so you may have been confused by some of the intermediate saves, but it's now ready to be looked at. Please look through it and see what you think of the result. --A R King 11:28, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Okay, I think I sorted that out; I've put your chi ru-pam edit back it. --A R King 11:40, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

For the long hours spent copy-editing Mayan languages and (hopefully) speeding it on its way to Featured Article status, I hereby award you the WikiMedal for Janitorial Services.

I think I'm done!

I've gone through the article. How did I do? --A R King 18:31, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

You did great!!

Thank you for all the work you've done on Mayan languages. Great job! Madman 12:28, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

You did perfect! I think that even Circeus will like the article now. Maybe we should renominate it?·Maunus· ·ƛ· 20:53, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks to both of you! (Rama next?) --A R King 21:25, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Rama it is.·Maunus· ·ƛ· 21:28, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Hi

Sorry that I seemed to ignore you after our chat a few weeks ago, but I've been working for the last month on expanding Sesotho language (I made one big edit today -- you can see the changes in the history). Tell me what you think.

If you think "OMFG!!! It sucks!!! LOL" then just remember that I began working on it after being inspired by your Nawat grammar :p

Aparantly all that bold text on your Nawat page is against the WP:MOS, so I used italics instead.

Now I need to divide it into separate articles. Please see the talk page and see if you might be able to do something about some of the point/issues I raised as I usually don't have access to a proper internet connection and therefore can't edit entire articles.

Thanks once again!!!

Zyxoas (talk to me - I'll listen) 12:05, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

No problem Zyxoas, I have also been busy with other things. Well done - I can see you've indeed been working hard. I am rather tied up at the moment so could only spare a few minutes to look at the article. I do see some important differences between it and my Nawat page though.

As regards outward form, I created a separate Pipil Grammar article, and I think that is the best idea when such a wealth of grammatical information can be provided, rather than including it all in the language page. (As a matter of fact the Pipil Language page is not "mine" at all, I have contributed little to it; most of my work has been concentrated on the associated grammar and typological pages.) Would you not consider doing the same in your case?

As for the internal structuring of the grammatical information, I perceive a different approach between your sketch and mine, which does not necessarily mean one is "right" and one is "wrong", but they are different approaches. Yours is primarily oriented to linguistic form, mine to function. In yours morphology is more central than syntax. Just now I'm unable to write more, so perhaps you can take this brief note as something to think about and see if you understand what I'm saying, and reflect on this; then we can come back to it and continue talking if you like. Sorry to have to rush! See you later, Alan --A R King 12:56, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I'll begin on a way to divide it up as soon as I reach home.
Also, it doesn't have enough on the language itself (just a complete description of the grammar). I should research more of the history etc.
I think this will be incredible. Cheers. Zyxoas (talk to me - I'll listen) 13:52, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Mayan languages FA nomination restarted

The FA nomination of Mayan languages where you had expressed your opinion has been restarted because of substantial changes having been made to the article. You might wish to restate your opinion at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Mayan languages.·Maunus· ·ƛ· 11:23, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Sorry I missed your message earlier, I'm a bit busy with other things. I'll gladly repeat my support opinion, but the link you provide appears as red. Can you tell me the right place to put my restated opinion? Cheers, Alan --A R King 09:04, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

The link was missing the final s, now fixed. Cheers, --cjllw | TALK 09:49, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

It looks like I got there too late, I was away over the weekend and I see the article has already been promoted - even without my supporting recommendation! So much the better. Congratulations and best wishes, Alan --A R King 08:04, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject El Salvador

Please visit Wikipedia:WikiProject El Salvador. Chris 22:36, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

Hello Chris. I have answered on the project page. Alan --A R King 08:34, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Gidday Alan! Your posting re this has found me just on clocking off time, so I won't be able to get around to looking into the details and your comments until tomorrow. I had a quick look, and am entirely sympathetic with your observations re the short shrift given to indigenous peoples and their concerns in the general sense. IMO, clearly any wikiproject taking in a country or region ought to be considering the (lack of) substantive coverage on indigenous topics relevant to the geog. scope, and work out what to do about it. It looks like the project is just in the definition phase, and so maybe whoever's originated it hasn't yet given the scope much detailed description or concrete shape. I'd hope a project like this one can and should incorporate indigenous topics alongside other relevant ones, maybe a list of indigenous articles relating to El Salvador, existing and potential, could be drawn up as a guide. Any project's participants in theory at least should be able to have some say in the direction the project needs to go.

I recognised the name User:Juan Miguel, who I've seen around on some Salvadoran topics. I gather JM's proficiency at written english is a fair way from native comprehension, I don't know if this is any contributing factor to what's been documented thus far. There are some interpretative concerns on some articles associated with JM's contributions that I've expressed elsewhere (cf talk:The Maya Lenca Principality), and I recall that you and I discussed another one (Atlacatl, see its talk pg) some time ago. Dunno if this will be problematic, will have to see. Anyways, will look into it more tomorrow when I get a chance to. All the best, and cheers --cjllw | TALK 09:36, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

.. a favor?

Hi AR,

Can I ask you for a favor? I know the Formosan languages are not your forte, but this is a general question. I would like a second opinion 'cause I may be perceived as being too close to the topic... the issue is info (now hidden, I think.. you'll have to look at the history) on Sakizaya people about a Sakizaya language. I did an LLBA search and came out 100% empty-handed on this concept. The source for the info is .... well I think it a popular magazine article that mentions a study by ethnologists... if you aren't too busy, could I trouble you to look at the evidence and leave a note on the relevant thread at User talk:23prootie? Thanks a million.. Ling.Nut 17:50, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

Hi Ling.Nut, good to hear from you. I am a bit busy, but I'll do what you ask when I have a chance. Cheers, Alan --A R King 14:54, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your help! :-) Ling.Nut 00:29, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

Curso de gallego :)

I would like to ask you for some more lessons of galician :) It's such a beautiful language, which I want to learn :D Timpul 18:58, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the encouragement. Limited time and a multitude of projects are the problem, but I'll see what I can do. :) --A R King 10:01, 18 June 2007 (UTC)