Talk:Uilta language

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 25 August 2020 and 10 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Ramos Adrian, Esando25, Momovuwi. Peer reviewers: Michelle MR, Katialopez2, Psantos4, Yosuna5.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 11:15, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Recent changes regarding phonology

@Fdom5997: Hello, I was hoping we could have a brief discussion about your recent edits. Some of them I think are uncontroversially improvements, but I'd also like to express my thoughts on 3 changes and invite you to provide yours. In order of how strongly I feel about them from least strongly to strongest:

• Changes to the vowel table: phonemes are not in the right place, added central column. The phonemes were placed where they were intentionally. The source doesn't present a vowel chart so some liberties had to be taken with the construction, but the original table was intended to portray the phonemes.I thought it was most important to group things so that the harmony groups would be clearest. I see this distinction as being between a phonemic and phonetic table. Your version is more phonetically accurate (I still might be inclined to change the /a/ back to spanning the entire bottom row), but I'm not sure if phonetic accuracy is necessary. And I would prefer to present phonemic information over phonetic.

• Changes to the consonant table: plosive. This one is a little more straightforward; /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ are not plosives. All the phonemes in that row are oral occlusives which is a broader category including both affricates and plosives. One might argue phonemically they are plosives, but without a compelling source for that I'd say either they should be labeled as oral occlusives, or they should be put on a separate affricates row.

• Long vowel: long diacritic. /ɛɛ/ and /ɛː/ are the same thing however while I generally prefer to write /ɛː/ in this case I chose to represent the phoneme as /ɛɛ/ because:
  • The cited author does the same. I think within reason we should be consistent with our sources.
  • /ɛɛ/ acts as VV in the phonotactics and can be split into two morae. For example the author gives /xusənnɛɛ/ where the /nɛɛ/ is two morae with the accent peak falling on /nɛ/ meaning that the pitch changes during the vowel.

Anyway sorry if this is a lot and I hope this feels like an invitation to discuss and not an attack on your choices. AquitaneHungerForce (talk) 23:19, 27 May 2022 (UTC)

Okay, first things first, phonetically the vowels were not put in the right places. As I have read Tsumagari (2009), he transcribes the vowels phonetically in brackets [], which entails that they would be displayed as more phonetic rather than phonemic. The fact that you "prefer" seeing it that way, is just irrelevant. Why not show some phonetic accuracy, because that only represents the true sound of the phoneme itself. Secondly, /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ are considered affricates, which in turn, are also types of plosives, and are often combined with the plosive row as well. If you want to be more specific, I'd suggest writing "Plosive/Affricate" in the box, while saying "Occlusive" is a bit too broad. And finally, it is more accurate to transcribe the long vowels with a diacritical mark as /Vː/ rather than as a double symbol /VV/. Even though they may seem the same, it is still both more phonetically and phonemically accurate to display the phonemic symbol with a diacritic. Hope all of this makes sense to you. Fdom5997 (talk) 00:08, 28 May 2022 (UTC)

I don't disagree that the vowel chart was phonetically inaccurate. You are absolutely right there. I am wondering why it is more appropriate to take a phonetic approach to this chart, stressing phonetic accuracy than a natural approach stressing phonemic expressiveness. I'm not really sure what you mean about preferences so I'm going to ignore that.

I've never seen affricates called plosives, so I just checked Zsiga (2013). The Sounds of Language (1st ed.). and they pretty clearly distinguish between affricates and plosives as non-overlapping categories. If the terminology is used this way (and it might be) it's certainly not universal. You're welcome to provide a citation, but honestly I think it's better to just use clear neutral wording. I don't think anyone would disagree that oral occlusive is completely unambiguous for the category. And equally so would be separating the row in two.

As far as the vowels go, I'm not sure I get your point. On what grounds is /ɛɛ/ more phonemically accurate? (We are talking about phonemes so phonetically accurate is beside the point here) It still seems to me, based on the reasoning provided above, that /ɛɛ/ is more phonemically accurate in the context of Uilta. What was your reasoning that /ɛː/ is more accurate? AquitaneHungerForce (talk) 01:03, 28 May 2022 (UTC)