Talk:Latin tenses/GA1
GA Review
[edit]The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
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Nominator: FloridaMan21 (talk · contribs) 23:33, 22 July 2024 (UTC)
Reviewer: UndercoverClassicist (talk · contribs) 20:38, 3 August 2024 (UTC)
This is a real labour of love, and shows a great deal of erudition and knowledge. To get the bad news out of the way first, I'm going to have to fail this GA nomination on technical grounds. For GA, every statement of fact or analysis needs to be referenced to a secondary source (that is, a modern work of scholarship): while the examples from Latin authors are extremely impressive, they don't meet this criterion (under WP:PRIMARY). Nearly the whole article would need to be re-sourced to meet this criterion, and this is an unreasonable amount of work to expect to be done (or checked) within a seven-day hold period, so a quickfail is the only available option.
On another procedural note, we would normally expect a GA nomination to come from, or at least be co-sponsored by, the main editor of the article: I would suggest working with Daniel Couto Vale and the other major contributors before re-nominating. I hope the article will come up here again, once properly reworked, and continue to improve. A couple of pointers for that process:
- Remember that Wikipedia is not a textbook: make sure that the prose focuses on describing how the Latin tense system works, not how best to learn it.
- At the moment, the article seems to focus entirely on morphology -- as it's an article about tenses, not verb tables, I think the division into indicative, subjunctive etc is a mistake -- the article's sections should instead be tenses, and should primarily discuss (e.g.) the history and different uses of the present tense, rather than simply listing the endings used by it.
- It would be useful to draw on some discussion of the development of the language and its changes over time: although most of what is taught in schools as "Latin" is a century or so on either side of Augustus, Latin has a much longer linguistic history than that in both directions.
Do drop me a line if I can be of further help as you work on the article. UndercoverClassicist T·C 20:38, 3 August 2024 (UTC)
@UndercoverClassicist: Thank you very much for your review. If that is the case, I accept it. However, may I reply to one or two points?
1. "At the moment, the article seems to focus entirely on morphology". Well, this comment seems to be a bit of an exaggeration: the morphology forms only a small portion of each section. As to whether morphology should be included at all in the article, I think it should, since the article is about "Latin tenses", so it ought to contain material about how the tenses are formed as well as how they are used. I have just been reading an article about Italian tenses which is organised in this way, and it seems entirely satisfactory. Without a sketch of the morphology of each tense it would be hard to follow and much less useful.
2. "I think the division into indicative, subjunctive etc is a mistake". Well, possibly, but I don't think I agree. The way the article is organised at present, which was recently suggested by Daniel, does seem to me to be the best one and the easiest for readers to navigate. I presume you would prefer it if the headings were "Present", "Imperfect" etc and the material about the present subjunctive was included in the section "Present". And yet this would not really do, since the use of tenses in the subjunctive is quite different from the same tenses in the indicative (for example, the imperfect indicative is invariably imperfective in aspect, which is not always the case for the imperfect subjunctive; the perfect indicative is usually counted as a secondary tense, but the perfect subjunctive is primary, and so one). So I think indicative and subjunctive need to be split up.
At present the article is organised tense by tense (formation and meaning of the present tense, formation and meaning of the future tense, and so on). This is the way it is done in the standard grammars, and so it seemed the best to follow. An alternative way of organising the article, originally suggested by Daniel, is by functions (different ways of expressing actions in the past, different ways of expressing situations in the past, and so on). This is possible, but I don't know any reference work that does it this way. It would also lead to the same tense being split up in a way which might be inconvenient to readers: for example, dūcēbat, which can mean 'he was leading' or 'he began leading', would be found in two different sections, when really for Romans the meanings overlapped and weren't really different. The same goes for quite a few other tenses. It's useful to know that ductūrus fuit can mean either 'he was going to lead' or 'he would have lead', information which would not be so easy to find if the meanings were split between different sections.
- I agree with Kanjuzi that the article is not wrong when split in this way.
- First, this is an article about "Forms and uses". It does two things: (1) it systematises verb groups into paradigms by fixing all features that are neither agreement (person, gender, number) nor case; and (2) it gives a unique name to each verb group paradigm following the naming convention found in formal grammar books. Latin verb groups are also traditionally classified based on the stem aspect of the main verb in active verb groups. This means that amāmus and amāmur are said to be infectum verb groups because amā-mus has the infectum stem amā whereas amāvimus and amātī sumus are said to be perfectum verb groups because amāv-imus has the perfectum stem amāv. The supinum stem amāt of the verb group amāt-ī su-mus is irrelevant for the classification of these verb groups (only the stem aspect of the main verb in the 'active' verb group counts). Moreover, it is also a common practice to classify further the same-aspect paradigms of verb groups with tense names and mode names whereby the underlying logic is that there are different modes of construing the same tense for the same aspectual class. As a last step, the verb groups are further classified for voice. All of this is well documented in traditional grammar books and the common sequence of classification is (1) aspect, (2) mode, (3) tense, (4) voice. This sequence reflect a descriptive movement from the verb stem, via the verb branch if any, to the verb leaf for the verb groups of the infectum paradigms. However, this traditional practice has a shortcoming for an article about tense. It applies this schema (aspect, mode, tense) only to finite and infinitive verbs, ignoring imperative, participle, supine, gerund... all of which have aspect and tense. Here, in this article, we backgrounded the aspect component of traditional grammars and foregrounded the modes, opposing the finite/infinitive modes to the other 'modes' of construing tense found in non-finite and non-infinitive verb groups. This is a way of content structuring, a way to make the article easier to navigate without changing the underlying theory. This way of structuring was motivated by the fact that the lists of paradigm sections are shorter in an article with 5 mode sections than in one with 2 aspect sections or in one with no section above paradigm sections at all. This is a way of organising content to focus on tense. In contrast, the way of organising content in traditional grammar books is meant to present on an overview picture of most frequent verb groups without focusing on any of the specific formal components. So the mode sections above paradigm sections are not an issue from a formal perspective, nor is the inclusion of both active and passive voice in the same paradigm section.
- However, the issue here for the reviewer Undercover Classicist seems to be of another nature. The reviewer seems to want sections for tense from a semantic perspective and to classify examples based on their experiential meaning, based on semantics. There is already an article for that: namely Latin tenses (semantics), which is organised in such a way. The article Latin tenses is not about tenses in this sense. This article is about the 'tense' constituent of the verb group paradigm names. I shall explain. A paradigm such as (amō, amās...) is called '(4)[active] (3)[present] (2)[indicative] of the (1)[infectum]' and each slot in that name has a proper name: (1) 'aspect', (2) mode', (3) 'tense', (4) 'voice'. The purpose of this naming system is to name a paradigm of verb groups, not to describe the meaning of the verb groups. Once we have a full four-component name of the paradigm, we know which verb groups we are talking about and we can talk about their 'potential meanings', also known as 'uses' and 'functions'. This is how a formal grammar book works and most of the literature about Latin was written in this way with such a theory that has two steps: (1) form naming and (2) use listing for each form. So we cannot expect an article describing Latin with a formal theory to have a content structure that is typical of a functional theory, whose two steps are inverted: (1) function naming and (2) form listing for each function. Only a description following a functional theory allows us to place semantic tense at the content structure of the article. For that, the suggested content structure is only possible in a differet article, which already exists: namely Latin tenses (semantics).
- Yet, we could do four things to improve the article Latin tenses: 1) we could extend the introduction section by providing an explicit account of the way the article is organised and why it is organised in this way; 2) we can provide pointers to articles organised in a different fashion for people searching for tense from a semantic perspective; 3) we can add a parenthsis to the title as in "Latin tenses (forms and uses)", priming the reader for what he or she should expect; and 4) provide a table with the different ways that different reference grammar books and dictionaries call each paradigm at the beginning of each paradigm section. In this way, we prove to the reader that we are not 'inventing' stuff and we make sure they understand that 'tense' in this article is a component of paradigm name, not a component of meaning.
3. "It would be useful to draw on some discussion of the development of the language and its changes over time". The article does indeed at present do this. For example, it notes which authors first used the form ductus foret; the different use of tenses in conditional clauses in early Latin; the later development of the perfect active with habeō and the pluperfect passive with fueram and so forth. What more can be added? Most of the main tenses are in fact used in much the same way throughout the history of Latin and even in modern Italian, so there is no need to comment on them.
However, no doubt these points are not relevant to the main question. Meanwhile, I see that another editor, AirshipJungleman29, has downgraded the article's rating to a C, which seems a bit harsh. Is that your assessment also? Kanjuzi (talk) 14:09, 4 August 2024 (UTC)
- My suggestions are just that -- you're welcome to disagree. As for the article grading, B class requires the whole article to be appropriately sourced, which currently isn't met, so C is currently the highest assessment possible. UndercoverClassicist T·C 14:39, 4 August 2024 (UTC)