User talk:Angelapaoletta/sandbox

Comments (Fiona)

Lead

• I don’t think this should be a separate section (i.e. you don’t need a section called “Bangime” since your page itself is called Bangime), it should be above the contents
• I would rearrange your lead a little bit. Definitely mention that it’s a language isolate first, as this is really important information (e.g. “Bangime is a language isolate spoken in eastern Mali. It has a mere 3,500 speakers and is thus classified as an endangered language.”). You probably don’t need to mention that it’s classified as 6a - vigorous, as most people won’t know what this means and the number of speakers conveys more that it’s endangered
• In terms of links, I would try to find as many Wikipedia pages for the specific languages/areas you mention. For example, I found that there is a page for Fulfulde. Definitely add this, and if something similar exists for the Bangande valley, or any of the villages, add those as well.
• Because this is Wikipedia, if you’re going to mention “this may be because of the cliffs…” I would take a direct quote from your grammar. The way it’s written now, it seems like you’re hypothesizing about why it could be a language isolate, and we’re not supposed to be making arguments/interpreting the material (although I assume this isn’t what you’re doing, I’m just saying it comes across that way, thus using a direct quote would clear up the confusion).
• Given that you mention children acquire Fulfulde I’m not sure if you have any additional information about other languages spoken in the area or whatnot? Could be interesting to add. In general, if you have any other facts/information/history about the language, you should probably have a second lead paragraph that gets a bit more specific, but if you don’t then that’s okay.
• Try adding a language infobox, helps make things clear

Phonology

• Nitpick: saying “Consonant Phonemes of Bangime” is kind of unnecessary given your page is on Bangime. I’d just say “Consonant Phonemes.” This applies to all future charts as well

Consonants

• I think you should link to relevant pages in consonant chart (e.g. nasal, labial, etc.)
• Explanatory paragraph following the consonant table should be moved before it. That way readers can understand the table the first time (as opposed to having to look back after they read about the notation)
• If you want to separate voiced/voiceless there is a way to do that in the table so you won’t have to use a comma and then explain you’re using a comma
• Nitpick: you could probably be a lot more concise in your explanations (e.g. “Phonemes separated by a comma are voiceless and voiced, respectively”, just say “IPA” with a link instead of spelling out “International Phonetic Alphabet” - if people are confused they’ll hover over the link)
• Assuming the allophones/onomatopoeia/etc phonemes are the same as they are in the IPA, I would just link to the pages for those phonemes instead of explaining them in text (e.g. get rid of “a labial, voiceless fricative” and just link to /f/). Especially if we know the phonemes already, explaining them in text makes it seem like they must have some difference from their normal use, and is just kind of hard to read

Vowels

• I’d move the total number of phoneme to the beginning of the phonology section, as it’s important information that doesn’t really belong in the vowel section
• Is it possible to put the vowel phonemes in a table where the columns are front, central, back and the rows are high, mid, low? The way your table exists right now, no one can tell what the vowels you list actually are (in terms of backness and height) unless they have the symbols memorized
• Same as with consonants, explanatory paragraph should be moved before the table (and so “all these vowel types” => “all vowel types below”)
• Nitpick: can be more concise and say “...short nasalized vowels are sometimes allophones of oral vowels when they are adjacent to nasalized semivowels or…”
• You say “long nasalized vowels are more common” but more common than what? I’m assuming short nasalized vowels, but do you mean as an allophone or as a phoneme?

Syllables

• I’d replace the first two sentences with just “Bangime allows for the syllable structures CCV, CVC, and CV.” You really don’t need to mention what onset and coda clusters are, or what C and V represent, as someone at the level of our class (the target level for the page) already knows all that information.
• As in previous sections, move your explanatory line above the table
• I’d split your CCV example into syllables just to make things clearer. You do this by putting periods between syllables (e.g. “banana” would be ba.na.na)

Tones

• Is it possible to add links for what contoured and non-level tones are?
• I really don’t think you need links to the noun and verb pages, but definitely add a link to “ablaut”
• I would definitely give some examples of the tone shift you discuss with nouns/determiners; even though I’m like 80% sure I understand what you’re describing, an example or two would really help clarify things.
• My language had no tones, so this stuff is all new to me, but I think I was able to understand pretty well, so good job overall!

Morphology

• Nitpick: mention compounding in the beginning of the section (you mentioned all other process but left compounding out)

Affixation

• No need to explain 3 line gloss
• Do you know if Bangime is agglutinating, polysynthetic, etc? Does it have more prefixes or suffixes? Mostly derivational or mostly inflectional (given your examples, seems mostly derivational)? I’d try to find and list all this information in the beginning of the affixation section, since it’s pretty important in terms of understanding the language’s morphology
• Personal opinion: I wouldn’t use the 3 line gloss here since your examples are so short and you only have one suffix. Instead, I'd use a table where each row is an example and columns are for the suffix being used, whether it’s derivational/inflection, its function, and then one column for each line in the gloss (there are examples of this format on my page). Personally, this would be much easier to read/follow, and would also be more concise

Compounding

• I think you should write /m/, /n/, and /ŋ/ instead of putting the dashes, as without the backslashes they're not phonemes (plus it's clear that they're being inserted based on your description)
• As previously mentioned, no need to explain 3 line gloss
• Do you know exactly what word classes can be compounded (e.g. verb, noun, etc)? I would explicitly state this information since the only examples you gave have nouns/adjectives, so it is unclear whether verbs can be compounded.

Reduplication

• No need to explain full/partial reduplication
• As with compounds, specifically mention what types of word classes can be reduplicated
• As previously mentioned, put explanation before table
• Nice table! I would just separate the “Reduplication type” column into two columns: “Structure” (where you give the structure) and “Type” (where you list whether it’s partial or full)
• I’d describe a little more what reduplication does. From your chart, I understand some of the structures, but I’m not exactly sure what its purpose is. Maybe give the meaning of the root that is being reduplicated?

Tone Shift

• I would move your explanatory paragraph before the examples and try to integrate it with your existing paragraph, since there is some redundant information (i.e. the use of high tones and low tones).
• Is tone shift only for tense? Does it occur in any other situations? Mention this explicitly either way
• Are there only two tense in Bangime? Definitely state this explicitly
• I would put the examples on one line, with an arrow between them to show there’s a connection between the two. Otherwise, they look like two unrelated examples at first glance.

Syntax

• I would give your explanation of “x” and “Y” before the template, and also go a little bit more into detail about the template. What does the [ ] stand for? What is a fronted? What are the dashes for? I didn’t really understand the notation.

Examples

• As mentioned previously, no need to explain 3 line gloss
• You can add your own abbreviations to interlinear gloss template so you don’t have to explain them in the article itself. Also, abbreviations in the gloss should be in all caps to make reading it easier
• What do words bracketed together mean? Do you have notation for clitics vs. affixes?
• There isn’t really a need to explain what the subject/object/verb are given that you have the English translation (i.e. it’s clear already). I think it’s fine to just list the examples

Headedness

• You can format head-complement pairs better (e.g. mark the complement and head) in the interlinear gloss template
• I would give a one line explanation before each example of what is being observed (e.g. “The head-complement pair determiner+noun phrase is head-initial”) rather than splitting it so there’s a label before (e.g. “Determiner+noun phrase”) and an explanation after (e.g. “The head (the determiner)...”). Having it all on one line before will make it easier to read and less redundant.

Holistic Evaluation

Overall I think you’ve got a lot of good content here, so nice job on that! The general structure is good and the article flows well when looked at holistically. This, I would say, is your article’s greatest strength.

Its greatest weaknesses are really clarity and conciseness. You have small issues that are pervasiveness across the whole article and make many of the individual sections not as clear or easy to read as they could otherwise be. Almost all of these issue go into one of the following categories:

1. Explaining things that don't need to be explained, sometimes multiple times (e.g. saying "of Bangime" on every table, explaining 3 line gloss and syllable structure, links to noun and verb pages).
   • Keep in mind that the target audience for this page is someone at the level of our class.
2. Formatting (e.g. putting explanatory sections after tables, alignment of head+complement examples).
   • I think indenting your 3 line gloss examples would help a lot
3. Missing details/explicitness (e.g. what word classes can be used in reduplication/compounding, the distribution of affixes in terms of prefixes/suffixes or derivational/inflectional, notation for syntax examples).
4. Conciseness (e.g. explaining things multiple times, explaining things across multiple sentences/lines that could reduced to a single sentence).

I wasn’t sure where to put this comment so I’m putting it here: you should have a section titled “References” at the end, which your footnotes will go under.--Fgmacintosh (talk) 17:23, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

Irina's Peer Review

My overall impressions from the first read-through is that your Wikipedia page does a good job of highlighting the most important parts of your language. You provide many detailed examples to explain what you mean and do a good job of showing different cases and details that make them different. Below, I've included my thoughts on the individual sections, starting with a few sentences about the section overall and then a list of specific edits to consider.

Lead

Your lead does a good job of concisely stating the most important background information on your language. You include information about endangerment, speakers, the places its spoken, and the language family, which is captures the core details you need in the lead. However, I would consider fleshing it out a little more so it feels more like a descriptive paragraph about the language, because right now it comes off a little like a list of facts. You could:

• Try expanding a little more about the story behind your language (which you start to do in the last couple of sentences, but I think it'd be interesting if you did a little more)
• Maybe include some more "fun fact" type information on what makes the language unique

Phonology

Overall, your phonology section is very fleshed out! You did a great job of covering pretty much everything that you have to cover, as well as linking to other Wikipedia pages to explain any specific terms. Your tables were explained well, and I like how you broke down what it means when two phonemes are in the same box, separated by a comma, etc. Some small fixes you could make:

• There are some small typos "If two phonemes appears in the same box"
• Consider adding a link to explain "ablaut"

Morphology

You did a good job providing many different examples of affixation, but the organization could have been done more clearly so the different groupings were emphasized. This is mainly a problem with the way Wikipedia is formatted, but the headers and examples are all lined up so the formatting doesn't make it clear which section is under which other section. Also, there's a lot of empty space on the right because the examples are stacked on top of each other. As a whole, your compounding and reduplication sections do a pretty good job of explaining how they are used in your language.

• Consider reorganizing your examples of different types of affixation into a table
• You should try to line everything up in your 3-line glosses (you can use the interlinear template, tables, or even just spaces)
• Under compounding: "matches the following consent's place of articulation" I'm not sure if this is supposed to say consonant, or if it's a new term (in which case you should link to the wiki page for it)
• For reduplication, it was a little confusing initially that C and N were capitalized for consonant and nasal, but v was lowercase for vowels. Maybe go all capitalized or all lowercase?

Syntax

Your examples are helpful in showing how word order is realized in your language. However, it might also help to include more written information and explanations instead of just providing the examples and letting the readers see for themselves.

• I'm not completely sure how to read the template for word order under "Basic Word Order" so it might help to explain that a little more.
• Try keeping only the most important examples to avoid cluttering up the page. A couple examples of each word order should be enough. Otherwise, if you think each example is important individually, maybe include a few sentences on what makes them unique.
• For headedness, maybe go a little more in depth on when each is applicable or something like that (if your grammar provides it)
• Don't forget case and agreement!

Irinal360 (talk) 21:02, 13 April 2019 (UTC)Irinal360