Czech language edit
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This peer review discussion has been closed.
Didn't get any comments last time, so maybe I'll try again. Any are appreciated, as always.
Thanks, Tezero (talk) 22:14, 19 November 2014 (UTC)
Brianboulton comments edit
Hi, Tezero. I'm afraid that I don't have time to give this impressive article a full review, but I hope that these few comments will be of some help to you.
- The article is well written and, evidently, deeply researched using appropriate materials.
- The text is, however, quite difficult for a layperson to read and comprehend, without recourse to the large numbers of links that you provide. This tends to make reading a rather slow and perhaps tedious process for the general reader.
- For this reason it might be worth trimmimg some of the less essential detail, especially as there are many subarticles dealing with particular topics.
- I found a few confusions in the text. For example: in the "Mutual intelligibility" section, having emphasised the close similarity of Czech with Slovak, you say "One study showed that Czech and Slovak lexicons differed by 80 percent..." which sounds contradictory. This is probably just a case of choosing a slightly wording. In the History section we have what reads like the virtual destruction of Bohemian culture in the 17th century, as a result of the Thirty Years War, yet we are told in the next section that, by the 18th century, "Czech had developed a literary tradition, after which the language has not changed much". How did this development occcur, when the country's political and linguistic rights had been abolished?
- I am not one of those who believe that the word "however" should never be used in encyclopedic text, but I think it can be overused, and in this article I counted (I think) 15 usages. I believe that's too many, and I advise some textual mosifications to reduce this number.
- Another word used unnecessarily in a number of cases is "simply". I think you'll find that, except for the usage in the lead, the others can all be expunged without detriment.
- Ambiguity: "A Eurobarometer survey conducted between January and March 2012 found that 98% of Czech citizens had their nation's official language as their mother tongue – the third highest in the European Union, behind Malta and Hungary". The unwary reader might assume from this that Czech is the third most spoken language in the EU. A slight adjustment, e.g. "A Eurobarometer survey conducted between January and March 2012 found that 98% of Czech citizens had their nation's official language as their mother tongue. In the European Union, only Malta and Hungary have higher proportions of native tongue speakers.
- Lists andd tables: There are rather a lot of lists in the article, most of them necessary but a few possibly superfluous or unhelpful. For instance, the information in the short list in the Geographic distribution section could easily be absorbed into the text. The oddl-shaped "Vowels" table in the Phonolgy section has no explanatory text, so few readers will be able to interpret it.
- Ironically, the first sentence of the Grammar section is questionally grammatical; it may be OK, but to me "Typical of Indo-European languages, Czech grammar is fusional" reads awkwardly. "In common with Indo-European languages..." etc sounds more natural.
- Well, that makes it sound like the Indo-European languages are a separate set of languages with which Czech happens to share features... Curly Turkey ¡gobble! 04:16, 11 December 2014 (UTC)
I've not had time to get into the second half of the article, but the above points give the flavour of my feelings about this important article. The main point to address is, I think, that of making it a little less daunting to the average reader. Brianboulton (talk) 14:23, 7 December 2014 (UTC)
- Appreciated, everyone. Just a few minutes ago I submitted my final project of the semester, and honestly what I'd rather do now than anything is work on one of my stories a bit, play a little Pokémon Omega Ruby, and putz around with some 3D modeling, but I'll be getting to all of this at some point. Tezero (talk) 05:10, 11 December 2014 (UTC)