Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Linguistics/Archive 2

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Linguistic Organizations and Notable Linguists/Professors

I am currently working on a group of articles regarding linguistic organizations and notable people in the field. Since it seems to fall under this WP's perview, I am joining up and categorizing them here. Feel free to look at my work in a few days once I've gotten things rolling.  JAGUITAR  (Contact me) 14:40, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

So far I found Interagency Language Roundtable, Defense Language Proficiency Tests, and Defense Language Institute (the first one new, the other two with recent edits). Thanks for letting us know. Kingdon (talk) 15:14, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
Not a biggy. I am going to be finishing up the article on the ILR Coordinator, Dr. McGinnis, once I get his updated resume. Having graduated from the same program at DLI as he did, I have sort of a stake in the articles in the field. I have lots of notable people who I intend to bio over time, but I want to get good and polished with his first.  JAGUITAR  (Rawr) 15:14, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

invitation to collaborate

Dear colleagues—the article on systemic functional grammar is sorely in need of renovation. Two of us intend to get going on it; I wonder whether anyone else with an interest in SFG is in a position to be involved. Please drop in at the talk page. Tony (talk) 05:09, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

AFD discussion for Linguistics (poststructural)

There's an AFD regards a linguistics topic - Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Linguistics (poststructural). Probably could do with some discussion from knowledgeable contributors. WLU (talk) 13:45, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

Grammar question

Is it appropriate to preface "Bone Wars" with a definite article in this lead?

The Bone Wars is the name given to a period of intense fossil speculation and discovery during the Gilded Age of American history,...

Please discuss/answer here. ALTON .ıl 04:37, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Outside opinions required urgently

Please see Il- and Talk:Il-; outside comment is required. Knepflerle (talk) 19:39, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia 0.7 articles have been selected for Language

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Wikipedia 0.7 articles have been selected for Linguistics

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Edward Klima

I have just crated a (stub-class at best) new article about Edward Klima. I note that in the linguistics portion of the sign language article is very little information on the history of the linguistic analysis of sign languages. Perhaps someone could take the sad opportunity of the Klima's death to improve both the new biography page and the sign language article. Thanks, Bongomatic (talk) 00:47, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Need a few outiside opinions

Perhaps some of you could give an educated opinion on the dispute here. لennavecia 21:04, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Question

Could Samuel Johnson be listed under the project as a lexicographer? His dictionary was a very important dictionary, and served as the British dictionary until the OED was established. Or is this project not extended towards Lexicography? Ottava Rima (talk) 20:45, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Numbers in different languages

Hey there! I just saw on a Bulgarian chap's talk page that he had created an article on "Numbers in Bulgarian", which has subsequently been deleted. I am totally with the guy who deleted that: Who wants to count from one to ten in Bulgarian? Except for the Bulgarians, that is. ;-) But I thought it might be a cool article to have from a comparative linguistics point of view: The numbers 1-10 (or up to regular numbering beyond twelve) plus higher order numerals 100 and 1.000. The list could be drawn up in number colums, with a line per language, and could be split up into language families. Footnotes could point to notable characteristics such as French numbers between 80 and 100. I know there might be puristic objections against the inclusion of such articles into an encyclopedia, but the appeal and the interest of such a list alone should be enough to justify it. Any thoughts? Trigaranus (talk) 14:04, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

It sounds like it should be an Appendix at Wiktionary instead. —Angr 15:08, 12 December 2008 (UTC)
There already is such an article: List of numbers in various languages. kwami (talk) 20:41, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Truce terms

Is this project the right place for this? I started this article but have basically run out of sources. All help gratefull;y recieved. Fainites barleyscribs 20:42, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Content dispute at Mismatch negativity

There has been a minor content dispute at Mismatch negativity over the inclusion of two references. In the beginning, an editor was removing two references because they were formatted differently from the others; after agreeing to discuss, he said the articles in the refs are not seminal and are not relevant to the issue being discussed (specifically, whether or not the mismatch negativity is dependent on the subject's attention). Personally, I feel at least one of the two removed references is relevant (it is a report of an experiment specifically designed to test the effect of attentional resources on MMN magnitude) and that even though it's not seminal it's still good to provide converging evidence.

The refs in question are currently commented out (the other editor has added another ref, which he says is superior to these other ones, so at least the original statement isn't unreferenced), and you can find a summary of the discussion at Talk:Mismatch negativity. An outside opinion would be much appreciated. Politizer talk/contribs 16:47, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Linguistics, race, and "Usko-Mediterranean Languages"

I came across this (Usko-Mediterranean languages) created by User talk:Iberomesornix (his user page redirects to his other article, Iberian-Guanche inscriptions). Both are largely/entirely based on the work of one Spanish Immunologist's theories about some proto Euro-levantine language connected to Basque. This theory, published in one article in an immunology journal, tries to tie DNA, linguistics, etc to make a case for this language group. Understandably, this a big hit in Neo-nazi message boards, who use this to postulate various groups connection to some Aryan master civilization running from Summer to Egypt, to Europe, whom Africans/Asians/and later Arabs overran and destroyed. These are the only places I can find the term "Usko-Mediterranean" used. It has also appeared on wikipedia in articles on Kurdish language and culture, and Origins of the Kurds, with the single reference cited to show how Kurds are not related to Persians and Arabs. These appear sourced from User:Awat from at least 2007. Input, especially from linguistics professionals would be helpful. T L Miles (talk) 03:25, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

The usko-mediterranean theory is fringe science. As most probably the discussed articles will be deleted and the it may be useful to keep a reference, to show that it's fringe science I adapt here some of the questions I've edited in the talk:Iberian-Guanche inscriptions in the this edition and in the Talk:Iberian_language in this section:
There do are serious reviews of highly reputed experts who have stated that the books of Alonso and Arnaiz are not serious ("against the basic common sense", "verging on clumsy falsification", "imbecillities", etc) and lacking scientific value. I've showed some of these references in the talk page of [Iberian language], more briefly:
Javier De Hoz (Universidad Complutense de Madrid): "Viaje a ninguna parte a través del Mediterráneo. Las lenguas que no hablaron ni iberos, ni etruscos, ni cretenses" Revista de Libros, nº 28 · Abril, 1999. This professor concluded that the books of Arnaiz-Villena and Alonso García: " it is an unmitigated disaster which at first should not be reviewed" ("es un desastre sin paliativos que en principio no debería ser reseñado"), that "it is a Human Sciences work without the slightest value and against not only the scientific methodology but also against the basic common sense" ("un trabajo de ciencias humanas carente del más mínimo valor y a contrapelo no ya de la metodología científica más elemental sino del simple sentido común") and that the fact that some of their books has been published with public funding is a "crime" for which the responsible should account ("es algo peor que una estupidez, es un crimen del que debe existir un responsable al que se debiera pedir cuentas").
Joseba Lakarra (Universidad del País Vasco): "El vascuence en Europa" in V.M. Amado y De Pablo, S. (eds) "Los vascos y Europa", Gasteiz 2001, 75-121; and very shortened in the footnote number 29 of his paper "Protovasco, munda y otros: reconstrucción interna y tipología holística diacrónica" Ohienart 21 2006, 229-322. This professor shows that, even if we accepted the curious logic of their translations (in which lacks grammar), the Basque material they use is faulty in a 85% (massive use of Basque words that are Romance and Latin loanwords, invention of inexistent "Basque" words, change of the meaning of existent Basque to suit the evidence "verging on clumsy falsification").
Luis María Múgika Urdangarín (Universidad del País Vasco): "Egipcios, bereberes guanches y vascos": ¿está su clave en el euskara?" Boletín de la Real Sociedad Bascongada de Amigos del País, ISSN 0211-111X, Tomo 59, Nº 2, 2003 , pp. 361-399.
Although only in Internet you can also find Larry Trask opinion : "It's a pity we don't have an award in linguistics for the most lunatic book of the year, since Sr. Alonso's forthcoming volume looks like being a strong contender this year", " I'm afraid Alonso's book appears to be just one more comic book in the long tradition of comical works on Basque." [1].
If you still doubt whether the usko-mediterranean decipherments and theories are fringe science or not, you can evaluate the scientific quality of Arnaiz-Villena ideas in his article Lectura de la lengua ibérica. In this article you can see: how Champollion didn't deciphered ancient Egyptian and that Egyptologist didn't know how to read it, that it was deciphered by Alonso and Arnaiz and that it's a Basque language and that in the Ptolemy cartouche in the Rosetta_Stone there is not the Ptolemy name but a funerary text in Basque. The same applies to Etruscan and to Sumerian (according to Arnaiz the Gilgamesh story doesn't exists!!!).
You can ask an opinion in the pages of Ugaritic language, Sumerian language, Etruscan_language, Hittite_language, Hurrian_language, Minoan_language, Iberian_language, Ancient_Egyptian_language, Basque_language, Punic_language, Elamite language, Berber_language, Indoeuropean_languages, Afrasian_languages all of which are wrong if Arnaiz-Villena is right. Ask them to see the link to the paper on Usko-.Mediterranian languages (the same they claim as reliable source for the article on Usko-Mediterranean languages) and to review the tables on comparative vocabulary full of inexistent words and meanings.
But the problem goes beyond. There are some users that are promotional users who only edit to support the usko-mediterranean ideas and those of the other articles of Arnaiz-Villena (see their editions; one of them even adds images stating authorship Arnaiz-Villena), fulling many articles with references to those alleged descoveries (two inscription they say are Iberian appear even in garum or in Epigraphy as notable inscriptions!!!!). They are polluting the wikipedia with fully absurd and debunked ideas.
--Dumu Eduba (talk) 17:42, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
If this is getting airtime on Neo-Nazi sites, shouldn't we cover it here as well, just as we do UFOs, conspiracy theories, Holocaust denial, and the Neo-Nazis themselves? If someone comes across such an article, they might wish to verify or falsify it here, and it would be a shame if we had nothing to say. It doesn't sound like Alonso is himself a Neo-Nazi, so it may not be appropriate to merely add a section to that article. Or maybe a redirect to Antonio Arnaiz-Villena. Sure, we'd have to police the article, maybe place it under permanent protection, but we already have a problem with policing these ideas. kwami (talk) 20:37, 25 February 2009 (UTC)


Dear Kwami, Yes I am here. Please,read at least one Arnaiz-Villena et al paper in 2002 (I think) which is a summary of Mediterranean genetics. Authors dismiss the existence of Aryans in a separate and full paragraph :no objective evidence exists whatsoever. I would recommend you to police somewhere else,where it be really needed.--Virginal6 (talk) 00:52, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

Affixes on Wikipedia?

There is a discussion going on about whether prefixes and suffixes belong on WP or whether they should be moved to Wiktionary: see Talk:-logy#Isn't this just a dictionary entry?. Is anyone interested in participating? Or has this question already be answered somewhere? --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 19:24, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Not Editing Others' Comments

Sorry,I will do later my own comment.Thank you ,Angr, for removing it--Virginal6 (talk) 01:02, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Coordinators' working group

Hi! I'd like to draw your attention to the new WikiProject coordinators' working group, an effort to bring both official and unofficial WikiProject coordinators together so that the projects can more easily develop consensus and collaborate. This group has been created after discussion regarding possible changes to the A-Class review system, and that may be one of the first things discussed by interested coordinators.

All designated project coordinators are invited to join this working group. If your project hasn't formally designated any editors as coordinators, but you are someone who regularly deals with coordination tasks in the project, please feel free to join as well. — Delievered by §hepBot (Disable) on behalf of the WikiProject coordinators' working group at 05:51, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Prescription / description

I noticed that the articles on prescriptivism (linguistic prescription) and descriptivism (descriptive linguistics) are named inconsistently. Maybe one could be renamed to match the other: linguistic fooscription or fooscriptive linguistics. The lead section to the one that is renamed would also need slight tweaking. — Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 06:17, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Pseudoscience: Reified linguistic constructs

This has bothered me about several articles I've seen on Wikipedia: Non-linguistic topics about peoples invented by linguists. When we discuss Indo-European people, we're basing the article on linguistic reconstructions of what the ancestral people may have been like. But even that level of largely hypothetical reconstruction is not available for many language families, and we end up with crud like Altaic_peoples and Finno-Ugric peoples. I mean, do the Finns and Ugrians have anything in common biologically or culturally, such as shamanism, that they don't share with Turks, Yeniseians, Mongols, etc? (It would be different if the article discussed what historical reconstruction tells us about the presumed ancestral people. It does not.) Or the stub at Sino-Tibetan peoples: If the subject is ethnicity or culture, why should these particular peoples be classified together? Shouldn't we also include the Hmong, Zhuang, and Hlai, since the Chinese would include them? There's no justification for the vast majority of these constructs within the fields (comparative mythology, etc.) that they are supposedly part of.

I've heard comparative and historical linguists complain about this, and have tried correcting, merging, or deleting some of this stuff, but I've been getting pushback, and I don't have the sources to justify my criticism. If we could reconstruct Uralic mythology on linguistic data, that would be fantastic, but it seems that what happens is that when linguists postulate a language family, historians invent a people to go along with it, mythologists invent a religion, etc. This generally has next to nothing to do with the putative ancestors of the language family according to any linguistic evidence, but rather is just a lumping together of a bunch of ethnicities or mythologies, assuming that they must have some ethnic or religious commonality that corresponds to their linguistic relationship. And then there's the problem of changing linguistic subclassifications. I've recently seen claims that Samoyed within Uralic is actually no more linguistically divergent that Finnic and Ugric, for example. I have no idea if this idea has any chance of ever being accepted, but let's suppose it does get accepted. Would that mean that the Finno-Ugric people no longer exist? That their ethnic connection suddenly evaporates?

One challenge put to me is that my claims are unsourced, which is true. The writer of the article can find some pseudo-academic speaking of Finno-Ugric peoples (why not Turco-Ugric peoples? they actually have more in common ethnically and culturally) to reference a claim, but where do I find someone to say this is just a reified linguistic concept and has no known corresponding ethnic or cultural basis? Can we come up with some consensus that linguistic constructions should not be used to justify topics that the evidence does not actually support? kwami (talk) 08:22, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

I am afraid that the problem has not an easy solution. That would implie a critical view on the publications, and unfortunately Humanities themes use to be seen (very wrongly IMHO) as a matter of oppinion.
The only way is to search for reviews or critical published.
But be realistic. Ruhlen books has been severely critizised as had showed many of their shortcomings, but they are still quoted and used. At least from the Basque language point of view, mass comparision ideas linking Basque with many other languages, as made by Ruhlen, or by Bengtson have been clearly refuted by the Basque language experts who show those proposals are not compatible with the Basque data. Critical reviews has been published, and even the late Larry Trask complained that even when he sent notes showing serious error in the alleged Basque etymologies, the mistaken etymologies keep being published.
So may be there should be a clearer diferentiation beetween mainstream ideas, secondary ideas, dubious alternatives and ideas that many specialist consider to be unacceptable. I am afraid that this will make wording much more difficult but, what else?. In some other cases wording should be more precise. Maybe as "X has collected some religious and mythological data, that he claims to be related to the ancestral culture of the people who spoke the proto-language Y, and hence he calls Y".
But, as I have said this seems very complicated. --Dumu Eduba (talk) 11:58, 5 March 2009 (UTC)
Yes, but in the case of Basque, we at least say that no reputable linguists accept the links, clearly marking them as fringe. But these articles are different. They seldom make any direct claim; rather, it is their very existence which is fringe. They don't say "X has collected some religious and mythological data, that he claims to be related to the ancestral culture of the people who spoke the proto-language Y, and hence he calls Y". That could be accepted or rejected based on the relevant academic publications. Rather, they just say, "these are the mythologies of the X peoples", or "the X peoples are people who speak X languages". There is no actual claim that the mythologies or peoples actually have anything to do with each other, or that the title of the article refers to anything substantial; rather, it is just laid out as if it were, leaving the reader to draw the natural conclusion that it means something.
If I were to create an article on Vasco-Iroquoian peoples, defined simply as "peoples who speak Basque or Iroquoian languages", or Vasco-Iroquoian mythology, defined as "the mythologies of the Vasco-Iroquoian peoples", I have not made a claim that can be falsified. How do you demonstrate that the article itself is nonsense, when it contains no factual errors, and expresses no opinion? kwami (talk) 20:04, 5 March 2009 (UTC)
Claims have to be made on the basis of published (but not self-published!), reliable sources. If nothing in the article can be supported by sources, it should be deleted. —Angr 20:20, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

What is this probability distribution?

I've recently graphed the following probability distribution, the mutual information of word-pairs occurring in the same sentence:

What is it? It is not any of the standard probability distributions, as far as I can tell. But surely, I am not the first to observe this. It seems to have a fat tail, but that doesn't concern me much; its the oddly mis-shapen nose at the top, and the log-linear sides that have my interest. linas (talk) 14:45, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps someone at Wikipedia:WikiProject Statistics has seen such a distribution. --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 15:31, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Article alerts

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Thanks. — Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 09:20, 15 March, 2009 (UTC)

Classical Chinese grammar

Created new article. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email guestbook complaints 06:44, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

AfD for Universalism and relativism of color terminology

This Whorfian-related AfD could use expert input. Looie496 (talk) 02:30, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

And whilst you're at it, drop by at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Alethic mood to assuage Bearian's concerns, too. ☺ Uncle G (talk) 03:07, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

Please list language- and linguistics-related AFD discussions at WP:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Language too. —Angr 08:00, 10 April 2009 (UTC)
Thanks for the pointer, next time I'll just go there. Looie496 (talk) 16:43, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

Interactional linguistics

I have created an article which may belong under the broad scope of this project: Interactional linguistics. Cnilep (talk) 15:34, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

OK. Just add {{WikiProject Linguistics}} to the talk page. —Angr 18:42, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

Code-switching

I have added the WikiProject Linguistics tag to the page Talk:Code-switching. Code-switching has seen a spate of well-meant copy edits that have resulted in factual errors. Cnilep (talk) 16:50, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Amo, amas, amat and Silesian alphabet

The page Amo, amas, amat is a redirect to Latin conjugation. The page Silesian alphabet is a redirect to Silesian language. Given these facts, I'm not sure why the two pages are within the scope of WikiProject Linguistics. I also note that neither Latin conjugation nor Silesian language are. Should the WP:LING tags be removed from the former two talk pages? Should tags be added to the latter two? Cnilep (talk) 22:43, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

I'd definitely remove them from the talk pages of the redirects. Both Latin conjugation and Silesian language should be tagged for WikiProject Languages, which is a subproject of WikiProject Linguistics, so they don't need to be separately tagged for WikiProject Linguistics. +Angr 22:49, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Missing topics

I recently updated and expanded my missing topics page related to languages (linguistics included) and I wonder if anyone of you could have a look at it - whether some of the topics just deserve a redirect and things like that. Thank you. - Skysmith (talk) 12:31, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll go through it as my time allows (but I cannot promise anything...). --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 13:59, 8 May 2009 (UTC)
I redirected about half a dozen 14. I suspect that there are many more that could be redirects. Cnilep (talk) 19:20, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Deletion proposal of Indogermanisches Wörterbuch

See Talk:Indogermanisches Wörterbuch. Input would be appreciated. --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 13:53, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Differential object marking in German?

No one's answered my comments about objects of German prepositions at Talk:Differential object marking, and now I've added some comments about objects of German verbs. I hesitate to add those to the article as examples since I'm not very familiar with the linguistics terminology. Can someone contribute something? Michael Hardy (talk) 19:32, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

GA Sweeps invitation

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If any members are interested, please visit the GA sweeps page for further details and instructions in initiating a review. If you'd like to join the process, please add your name to the running total page. In addition, for every member that reviews 100 articles from the worklist or has a significant impact on the process, s/he will get an award when they reach that threshold. With ~1,300 articles left to review, we would appreciate any editors that could contribute in helping to uphold the quality of GAs. If you have any questions about the process, reviewing, or need help with a particular article, please contact me or OhanaUnited and we'll be happy to help. --Happy editing! Nehrams2020 (talk • contrib) 05:38, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

AFD for Spell-checking other languages

Please review/comment at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Spell-checking other languages. NVO (talk) 06:28, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Portmanteaus

There is a wording disagreement about using the word Portmanteau. See recent edits to Buckminster Fuller, the ledes of Biostatistics, Backronym, Channel Tunnel, and the ordering of entries in Portmanteau (disambiguation).

So far Drinkybird, who replaces the word with other phrases, is discussing it at User talk:Drinkybird#Issue with portmanteau. I hope this is an appropriate place to ask for additional opinions. Thanks, —EncMstr (talk) 18:20, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps some words are appropriate, but Buckminster Fuller? Cholesterol? This word needs to be removed from many articles. It is also questionable whether it means what it is implied to mean in most of the articles it's used in. In an English dictionary, the first definition is going to be a type of suitcase. Shouldn't Wikipedia at least follow that guideline? Wiktionary lists it first. Drinkybird (talk) 19:01, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
Merriam-Webster orders definitions from oldest to newest historical meanings,[2] whereas Wikipedia style is ordering from most common to least common usage—if not alphabetically or by subject.
And that is partly the point. The only reason it's at the top is because it's all over Wikipedia. If it was removed from the articles it has no place, it would not be nearly at prevalent. Drinkybird (talk) 19:22, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

I'm with Drinkingbird on this one. The word is ubiquitous on Wikipedia. It's used in introductory paragraphs in which the lexical category of a word does not need to be mentioned. In the intro to the "desk" article, there isn't a sentence that reads "desk is a noun. Perhaps this discussion should be continued on the portmanteau talk page. Mvblair (talk) 20:10, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

The problem is this: portmanteau is not a common word. It's technical jargon (I took an intro to linguistics class and a class on Celce-Murcia's book, but the word never appeared in either of those classes). I think we can all agree on that. Because of a few dedicated people, the word has now become completely ubiquitous on Wikipedia. The use in articles here is very pedantic. It causes articles to read poorly. I realize that people who understand the word like to use it, but I really think Wikipedia articles should read well and not require the average citizen to understand technical jargon. Just me. Mvblair (talk) 20:18, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
portmanteau is no more technical jargon or any less common than ubiquitous or pedantic. Just me too! —G716 <T·C> 01:35, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
Special:WhatLinksHere/Portmanteau There are around 1500 words that link to portmanteau. I don't see any reason for most of them to be there. One could simply change the phrase to "combination/blend of the words" and no linking would be required, because no explanation of what the phrase would be necessary. Less clicking, more reading the article you want to read. Drinkybird (talk) 03:35, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
There are probably thousands of pages that link to just about any date you'd care to pick. That's not because the date needs explanation; some editors simply like links. Cnilep (talk) 18:42, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
This isn't a date though, it's a word. An uncommon word at that that can be easily replaced with any number of terms/phrases. You don't need to know everything that happened on the same date as another event in order to understand the article of the event you are looking at. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Drinkybird (talk • contribs) 04:19, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

What a bizarre thing to war about. And it does look like a war: one user has removed the term from more than a dozen pages, sometimes more than once, and those changes have been promptly reverted by a couple of other users.

I can only second the advice of User:Sladen on Talk:Portmanteau word: "The secret is to discuss a wish for a wide-ranging change like this beforehand. Form a consensus, and then link to that agreed consensus from the summary of each change, so there is no doubt that what is being done is being done with wide-ranging and well-intended support." If this is to be that discussion, count me as neutral. Cnilep (talk) 02:20, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

I have to admit to being new to the process, but it could be seen as being a 'war' I suppose. I was simply trying to make articles easier to read, and I didn't think it would be a big deal. But, every single edit I made was removed rather quickly. So either someone doesn't like readability, or someone really likes the word portmanteau. Drinkybird (talk) 03:35, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
I certainly agree with Drinkybird that the word "portmanteau" is greatly overused at Wikipedia. Not every compound word is a portmanteau, but you'd never know that from looking at some of the ways it's used here. That said, edit warring is bad; if the removal of a misuse of "portmanteau" is reverted, perhaps a {{fact}} tag is in order: the claim that a certain word is a portmanteau will then have to be backed up by a reliable source in order to be kept. +Angr 21:23, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

So, for all the talk of people having a discussion, I guess it's not going to happen. G716, I understand your point about using big words. There are a lot of words that people don't understand, but those are just big words where a better synonym could probably be used. For me, portmanteau is technical jargon. It's only used in linguistics and doesn't contribute anything to my understanding of a topic like biology. Mvblair (talk) 15:52, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

All right, but what do we need to do to get this issue to be acted upon? Should we "be bold" and edit away, is there a procedure to take this to voting, what is it? I don't know how this could be decided "in voting", though, since there isn't really a position to be for or against -- it's not a matter of banning the word, of course, but to make its prominence more in line with its common usage everywhere else. I wonder: is there any other work in the world where you have over 1500 mentions of the word "portmanteau"? At least if we could get it to be agreed in some way that this is an issue, then we'd have something to link to when justifying our edits removing this word from unneeded places. I'm a newbie in Wikipedia politics, so any insight is welcome. --LodeRunner (talk) 22:29, 22 July 2009 (UTC)
It is likely that some Wikipedians would tell you that WP:Voting is evil. Boldness is valued, but so is WP:consensus. Rather than worrying whether "this is an issue" in general (a question that doesn't seem to have gained much traction), I would recommend dealing with individual problematic usages by
  1. making the change to language you find more appropriate,
  2. noting why you think your language is more appropriate on the article's talk page, and
  3. being prepared to discuss this if someone disagrees and reverts the language.
YMMV. Good luck. Cnilep (talk) 18:26, 23 July 2009 (UTC)
Good advice, Cnilep. I think a few small edits to change the wording might be in order. If there are no objections, perhaps a few more could be made over time. Mvblair (talk) 22:58, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

need an expert (or somewhat-knowledgeable-person) -- folk etymology vs. false etymology

We could use some help determining 1) how to characterize the distinction (widely respected? controversial? not considered important?) and 2) how to disambiguate (one article or two? -- and how should we title the articles?). There are about a dozen hyperlinks to Google Books and other sources scattered throughout the article and the discussion page, so this won't entail a large time commitment for you in terms of research. Thanks.
PS please make your comments at Talk:False_etymology#de-merge, for the benefit of the persons who are contributing to that conversation. Agradman (talk) 01:44, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Linguistic barnstar

Now available at Template:The Linguistic Barnstar; usage is

{{subst:The Linguistic Barnstar|message ~~~~}}

Tell your friends! rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 21:43, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

moon bats in flight

Could y'all keep an eye on Antonio Arnaiz-Villena? I started reading some of his pubs, but don't have the stomach for them. Apparently Phoenician is not a Semitic language, but Usko-Mediterranean, along with Basque and Hittite. (Another editor says he uses Basque to decipher the Rosetta stone, but I haven't read that far.) There's a lot of drama involved, with criminal charges made and withdrawn, and a couple Wikipedia editors sometimes strongly implying they're the scholars in question, and sometimes denying it, so this could get to be a real mess, and the more numerous the voices of reason the better. kwami (talk) 21:08, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Just to make ti easier to read these "theories" add links to their papers and to illustrative previews of their books in Google-Books:
  • Arnaiz Villena, A. & Alonso García, J. (2000b): “The Usko-Mediterranean languages” in Gomez-Casado, E., Jorge Martinez-Laso & Antonio Arnaiz-Villena: Prehistoric Iberia - Genetics, Anthropology, and Linguistics, Springer, ISBN-13: 978-0306463648, pp. 205-246.
Also remember that according to user:Arnaiz1 (who claims to be Arnaiz-Villena) to say that his books "are a plain disaster" is defamation and that to say that they are "an a aberration in methods and results" is a libel Talk:Antonio_Arnaiz-Villena#Libels_or_defamation_in_Wikipedia_articles.
My proposed text to abstract the Usko-Mediterranean theory before its deletion by user:Virginal6 (a "fan" of Arnaiz as can be seen in his editions on linguistic and biological theories of Arnaiz and also on biographical data) is here and can be useful as a first approach to the "theory". The notes show where the data can be find (and the two books offered to preview by Google show most ideas on the Battle of Kadesh, Gilgamesh and some other famous inscriptions to evaluate. --Dumu Eduba (talk) 13:07, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Chinese classifier FAC

Just a quick message to say that Chinese classifier is currently a featured article candidate, and anyone who knows about this area (whether you know a lot about Chinese, or classifiers in general, or whatever) is certainly welcome to leave comments at the FAC page here. Thanks, rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 04:16, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Help on the wikipedia dyslexia project articles needed

We are trying to develop Dyslexia into a summary article, with many sub articles for the more detailed information. Some of the Sub articles are going into areas or topics which have only previous been touched on, but now these sub articles require multi-discipline input from those who have specialist knowledge, which we do not have and we may need the provision of some detailed explanation so that we can build sub articles that have a strong content. The existing sub articles are as follows:

There could be more articles to be added to this list, such as "the cognitive issues that can cause dyalexia" Hopefully you can help us develop these articles.

best wishes dolfrog (talk) 15:36, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Culture and language

Over the past several months and with the help of a few others I did a major revamp of the article Culture - it seemed to me that such an important concept in cultural and social theory deserved a thorough encyclopedic treatment. It is my sense that there is an important connection between language and culture - language as an important component of culture; many have looked to linguistics for methods for studying culture (Claude Levi Strauss, Ward Goodenough, Floyd Lounsbury, Charles Frake). Consequently, one section of the article is specifically on language and culture. To those involved in this project: if any of you come to linguistics via anthropology, or have expertise in ethnolinguistics or sociolinguistics, are especially interested in the relationship between language and culture, or view linguistics as one way to study culture, please take a look at this section and see if you can improve upon it. Thanks, Slrubenstein | Talk 17:18, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

In the courses I've taken language and culture are almost part of one entity. I'll dig out some textbooks and take a look. Irbisgreif (talk) 21:38, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
That is pretty much what the section says at it is now. Feel free to improve - the organization and structure of the section has been given a lot of thought though. ·Maunus·ƛ· 21:39, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Theories of language

Much to my surprised I realised that wikipedia does not have a general page about Linguistic theories or Theories of language. We have a page on Theoretical linguistics but to my mind that is not at all the same. I think we should have a specific page to serve as a hub for all of the attempts of all-encompassing theories of language from Saussurean structuralism and glossematics to Chomskyan generative theories like minimalism, government and binding, functionalist theories and what have we. I am not the right man to write such a page however - but I encourage someone to make a good overview. The best book I know about the subject is Pieter Seurens "Western linguistics" but that only goes up to ca. 1970 and excludes newer theories.·Maunus·ƛ· 20:07, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

We do have a Category:Theories of language. It would be nice if there were an article also.Pontiff Greg Bard (talk) 20:32, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Articles on words and affixes, -logy at AfD

Please comment at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/-logy, regarding the AfD of -logy.

We could use some feedback on the "encyclopedic potential" of articles like this, and whether it is appropriate information for Wiktionary at all, otherwise the nominator intends to delete much of Category:Suffixes (eg old afd for -ism and -holism). More context at this Talk:-logy thread. Thanks. -- Quiddity (talk) 17:16, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

The entry in Wiktionary are essentially identical, and in a lot of cases, much better and more comprehensive. The fact is that these articles in most cases violate WP:Wikipedia is not a dictionary as well as WP:MOS on article naming, and so having a wikipedia's version is unnecessary and pointless duplication. Suffixes are welcomed with open arms in the Wiktionary. There's over 200 suffixes listed in Wiktionary, but Wikipedia's never got going, and are never going to do so. Why would you when you can just use interwiki links to point to the Wiktionary?- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 17:30, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

List of words that comprise a single sound

This is a potentially fun, if somewhat trivial, article. However, in order to keep from getting overwhelmed if it expands to a reasonable subset of the world's major languages, we'd need to establish some limits. We already exclude diphthongs, interjections, and mimesis; some other possibilities:

Include national/official languages only
Exclude function words, as there are loads of languages with single vowels for preps, PNs, & the like (perhaps make an exception for Slavic consonantal preps, since there wouldn't be many of those, or maybe just mention them in the intro)

I added Japanese. Should we include Mandarin and Cantonese, or would vowel+tone or consonant+tone not count as a "single sound"? kwami (talk) 21:11, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

I think that the definition of sound as "a single letter of the International Phonetic Alphabet, not counting diacritics" allows for tone plus segment. On the other hand, you're going to need to rule out several things, lest the list get way, way too long. Ruling in only national languages feels a bit POV or neo-colonialist or whatever, but allowing for every language in the world also seems unworkable. I think you will need to rule out all function words, without exceptions for consonants. You may also need to rule out other things. Full disclosure: I !voted to delete the page as trivial and original research last April. Cnilep (talk) 21:43, 20 August 2009 (UTC)
Maybe languages over X million speakers or s.t. After a while it would simply be uninteresting. kwami (talk) 21:47, 20 August 2009 (UTC)
Yes, that sounds workable. According to List of languages by number of native speakers, there are about 275 languages with over a million speakers (about 190 with around 2 million, about 155 with around 3 million). The sources are most Ethnologue and various censuses. The one million figure rules out some official languages, such as Ossetic and West Frisian, but seems like it would avoid any suggestion of picking favorites. Cnilep (talk) 22:14, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

Chinese classifier

Chinese classifier is up for FAC again, at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Chinese classifier/archive2. If anyone is interested, comments would be welcome. Thanks, rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 16:14, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

Cantonese

The article Cantonese was renamed to Yue Chinese unilaterally by an editor, even though several past proposal at WP:RM have failed to move the article... in a previous move discussion, it indicates that this project prefers the term Cantonese (linguistics). Input from this project would be good. 76.66.196.139 (talk) 11:27, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes, do we go with the term "Yue", used in Ethnologue, Modern Cantonese Phonology, international conferences, and the like, or can we come up with variants of the name "Cantonese" that adequately distinguish Yue from Canton-ese? So that we don't contradict ourselves by saying that Taishanese is a Cantonese dialect in one article, and a sister of Cantonese in the other? Also up for discussion at Yue Chinese is the name of the Canton-ese article (currently at Canton dialect), where for some reason "Modern Cantonese" keeps coming up, despite the fact that the article is not about modern Cantonese, which describes Yue and Taishanese as well as Canton-ese.

Most of the objectors to the name "Yue" are Cantonese speakers who originally took affront because that's the Mandarin pronunciation; once it was shown that Yue is also an English term, the argument shifted to one based on WP:Common Name, that the article (both articles?) had to be named "Cantonese" despite the resulting ambiguity and confusion, with even editors adding material to the wrong articles because they can't keep them straight. kwami (talk) 11:36, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

Let's compare the situation at French language. The article is primarily about the standard language but also has a section on dialects. The full taxonomic classification with all cladistic nodes "Indo-European Italic Romance Italo-Western Western Gallo-Iberian Gallo-Romance Gallo-Rhaetian Oïl French" is given only in an infobox. Most of the intermediate node articles are short, lists only, or even nonexistent. Langues d'oïl is the only substantial article, and concentrates on dialects and history, not giving the impression that Langue d'oïl is a common contemporary name for the standard language and related dialects. In this case I'd suggest:

  • The article on the dialect group should be called Yue dialects or Dialects of Cantonese or something else that emphasizes it is not about the standard language or Dachsprache, but just covers the dialect the standard is based on as one in a taxonomy of dialects
  • The word "Cantonese" should be used less in the dialects/linguistics/historical article and removed from the introduction to avoid confusion with the standard language

How much precedent is there for the use of the bare word "Cantonese" to refer to the dialect cluster? My feeling is that the Yue dialect group is most often referred to as such or by the names of the provinces and cities, and that when the word "Cantonese" is used it is usually with a qualifier like "dialects", with abbreviation to the bare word Cantonese only happening in linguistics articles where the context is understood and it is clear the standard language is not being referenced. --JWB (talk) 20:04, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

Proposal to move English passive voice to passive voice

See talk page there. Pcap ping 09:59, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Relevant AfD

Please see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Moonies. Thank you, Cirt (talk) 07:21, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

Notability discussion of numerical systems.

For anyone who is interested, there is a discussion Category talk:Positional numeral systems as whether certain articles, such as Quinary meet notability guidelines. Many of these articles contain material which may be of interest to this project.--RDBury (talk) 17:44, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

History of Slovak

Could someone here have a peek at the History of Slovak article? Most of it seems accurate, but very poorly sourced, it could use a few more cites and references from someone with access to linguistic books and papers. Assistance would be much appreciated. —what a crazy random happenstance 05:31, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

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