Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Linguistics

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Hypothetical proto-Indo-European

I've just noticed that Deity says "In the reconstructed and hypothetical Proto-Indo-European..." whereas Proto-Indo-European language says

The Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans. The existence of such a language has been accepted by linguists for over a century, and reconstruction is far advanced and quite detailed.

That seems a pretty strong assertion of consensus within the relevant scientific discipline. Can someone tell me if Proto-Indo-European language is overstating the strength of scholarly consensus? If not, surely we can drop "hypothetical." I've left a note at Talk:Deity. "Hypothetical" was added to Deity in this edit in 1985, with the edit summary "PIE is less certain than was presented here." --Anthonyhcole (talk) 13:10, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

1985?? Your watch seems to be 20 years slow. Anyway, there is definitely scientific consensus that the attested Indo-European languages are descended from a common ancestor, and there is definitely scientific agreement to refer to that common ancestor as "Proto-Indo-European". Any specific terms reconstructed in PIE are hypothetical, but the term "reconstructed" in historical linguistics already entails "hypothetical" so calling PIE "reconstructed and hypothetical" is unnecessarily redundant. The sentence currently in the article Deity, "In the reconstructed and hypothetical Proto-Indo-European, humans were described as chthonian ('earthly') as opposed to the deities which were deivos ('celestial')", is simply mistaken: chthonian is not a reconstructed PIE word at all; it's an English word derived from Ancient Greek. And deivos is a very old-fashioned spelling for a reconstructed PIE word that most scholars nowadays would spell either deiwos or deiu̯os. Angr (talk) 13:25, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

Oops. Thank you for the clear explanation. Since I know nothing about this, do you feel like correcting it, Angr? --Anthonyhcole (talk) 15:34, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

I've removed the redundant "hypothetical" but haven't made the change to the etymology of chthonian and deivos because I couldn't support it, but someone with sources should probably see to it at some point. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 05:41, 1 December 2011 (UTC) --Anthonyhcole (talk) 05:22, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Having thought about it for a while (indeed since you first asked me if I felt like correcting it), I decided to remove the whole sentence. The PIE reconstructed words for "human" and "divine" aren't really relevant to a discussion of the concept of deity and don't support the (wholly unsourced) point the paragraph appears to be trying to make. Angr (talk) 08:22, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Thank you, Angr. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 10:58, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Shekawati

Shekawati - language or dialect? I don't know if there should be one article or two on the topic, and which title should be used in the end. Please comment at Talk:Shekhawati language D O N D E groovily Talk to me 05:02, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

The question of whether something is a language or a dialect is as much a political question as a linguistic one. In this case I would say that since Shekawati has an ISO 639 code, there is valid reason for calling it Shekhawati language, though as in any such case there may be political or scholarly arguments against that position. From my (quick) reading of the two pages, they appear to treat the same entity and in my opinion should be merged. Cnilep (talk) 05:24, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Merge tags were placed on both articles in November 2008, but no merger discussion ever took place. Moreover, the page Shekhawati dialect appears to have been created in January 2008 by copying the content of Shekhawati language, without attribution. Cnilep (talk)

I've listed the two pages at Wikipedia:Cut and paste move repair holding pen. Cnilep (talk) 11:57, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Issue with English Grammar

I have started a post in a Village pump page advocating for something to be done regarding the contensious issue of team and band names being treated as plurals ("Chelsea are a football team"). Could someone knowledgeble in grammar give their opinion there? Thanks --Squidonius (talk) 23:03, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Changes to Preterite

Preterite has had some strange additions/modifications lately, some of which I have reverted. Could someone check the changes to the French table [1] and the translation of Spanish "Comí todo el día." as "I ate all day long."? Thanks, ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 12:59, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

How to name language history articles

Looking at Category:Language histories, I'm seeing some articles titled like History of French, and others like History of the Welsh language. Can we not make them uniform? My preference would be for the shorter form, since I don't think "History of Welsh" could possibly be taken to mean anything other than the history of the language.--Kotniski (talk) 10:44, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

I agree with the need for uniformity and also prefer the shorter wording. There seems to be no ambiguity in it. Tony (talk) 11:16, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

I also prefer the shorter wording but don't see any particular need for uniformity. As long as History of the French language and History of Welsh are both redirects (and likewise for other languages) that's good enough for me. Angr (talk) 20:54, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Agreed. I don't think we need to worry too much about uniform titles across hundreds of articles; that provides little benefit to readers. Also, as there are lots of cases where language overlaps with ethnic/nationalist disputes &c and hence serious problems of neutrality and scope, there could be a few articles where a slightly different title would be appropriate. But apart from that, if somebody really wants to spend their time moving lots of articles, I don't object. bobrayner (talk) 13:29, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Gaps in Aspect

I see at least two places where work on aspect is needed. First, the current article on Lexical Aspect is in need of several additions, not least of which is how it relates to second language acquisition. For example, the Aspect Hypothesis (as covered by work of Andersen, Bardovi-Harlig, Shirai, and others) is not mentioned at all, and yet this is a fairly large area of SLA research. Nishi and Shirai's (2007) work on the non-universality of Lexical Aspect and cross-linguistic differences in the lexicalization of concepts would also help to make the discussion less Anglo-centric and more complete.

The current article on "resultatives" mentions only resultative noun complements, and only in English at that. Resultative meanings as their are related to aspect, as in Chinese (zhe), Korean (a iss- / go iss-), Japanese (-te i(ru)) is not covered at all, either there or in the larger section on Grammatical Aspects. Right now, imperfective aspect is broken down into progressive and inchoative meanings, but resultative is currently missing and needs attention. (I'm not sure how it should be classified, though, since it is also considered a part of perfective aspect in some languages)

Amieni (talk) 22:29, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Hi Amieni! It's good to see someone else here who is interested in second language acquisition. If you see something that needs changing, I encourage you to be bold and change it yourself. We don't have a lot of editors active in linguistics, and even fewer who are interested in applied linguistics or second language acquisition, so if you are willing to put the effort in, these articles could be your playground (within reason, of course). I'm willing to help out with work on Aspect, but I'm not exactly an expert. How about you put your name down at the Applied Linguistics Task Force and we work on adding these things to the To Do list there? Let me know if you have any questions. — Mr. Stradivarius ^♫ 06:03, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

templatizing

The article Assimilation (linguistics) has a rather long 'see also' section that might make a good template to be added to the bottom of this and related articles. (Or it might be better just to significantly reduce the size of the see also section.) Can someone suggest whether such a footer template should be made and applied? RJFJR (talk) 20:19, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

I'd remove anything from the See also section that's already mentioned in the body of the article as well as anything listed on the {{Sound change}} template. Angr (talk) 22:28, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Dispute at Constituent (linguistics)

There is a dispute at Constituent (linguistics) over removal/retention of a section (discussion at Talk:Constituent (linguistics)#Phrase structure, dependency structure). Third party opinions are needed. -- Donald Albury 13:02, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

Proprioceptive language learning method

Hi everyone, what do you make of our article Proprioceptive language learning method? This article vaguely bothered me when I first saw it back in November 2010, and coming to look again I see that the entire premise of this being a language learning method is based on a book by Lundquist which appears to be self-published. (Working link here.) I've certainly never heard of the method outside Wikipedia, and I can't find it on Google Books. So I think the article should probably be deleted or merged, but does anyone think that there is anything that we can salvage from it? There does seem to be some good material on proprioception and language acquisition in there, but I'm not sure if it's too tied up with the material about the method, and I'd like a second opinion. Thanks — Mr. Stradivarius ^♫ 21:25, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

And now I've nominated it for deletion, if anyone would like to comment. — Mr. Stradivarius ^♫ 00:47, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

Dead languages in phone tables

The guidelines here, which reflect the discussions regarding the format and content of tables in articles on specific sounds, say "only modern spoken languages" are allowed in the tables. This means that dead languages are out unless they have been studied and analyzed in the methods deemed acceptable by modern linguists. Currently, the article voiceless velar fricative has an example from Old English and my efforts to remove it have been met with resistance. In the article's talk page, two users, Selket and Wareh have argued that dead languages should be allowed in these tables (a discussion I have shamefully put off bringing up here till now). More recently, Erutuon has also expressed a desire to change this convention to allow dead languages in the tables. While I don't particularly care for changing the policy on dead languages, bringing it up here will help get a broader discussion on the matter. Some issues to cover

1. Should dead languages be allowed in the tables?
2. If so, is there a standard of inclusion? Or is any language allowed no matter how confident we are about its phonology?
3. If not, should there be another table for dead languages?

My own opinion is that we should put information about a particular sound's distribution in dead languages in article prose. This would allow proper caveating to confidence of this distribution and would help turn the occurrence sections of these articles into more than just information pigeonholed and squeezed into tables. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 05:10, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

I think we should consider including "dead" languages if we have good sources to support the claim made in the table. If not, leave it out. If there are concerns that tables are getting "too crowded" then I think it would be reasonable to prune dead languages first. Why restrict ourselves to only "live" languages? en.wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopædia. bobrayner (talk) 13:28, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

The reason to restrict ourselves to living languages is that the precise phonetic realization of phonemes in dead languages is necessarily speculative. For example, at voiceless velar fricative, one example is Old English wealh [wæɑlx], but in fact we don't know for sure whether that sound was a true velar, a uvular, a palatal, or what. Angr (talk) 16:26, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

Or all of the above. We are discussing phones, not phonemes (an equivalence class of phones). But this sort of uncertainty exists equally well for numerous living, if moribund, languages; it should be no more of a problem than (say) modern English phones, which can be different phonemes depending on dialect, and which can have half-a-dozen phones to a phoneme. I see there is a column for notes; surely it can be used to indicate uncertainty as well as dialect differentiation. Subnumine.

Please see my comments at Talk:Voiceless_velar_fricative#Old_English. An article on a phoneme should include coverage of what our (speculative) sources say about its occurrence in dead languages. When these are mentioned in the tables, that's legitimate article content, and if an editor objects to the formatting or placement of the information, I believe the right thing to do is to reformat. Unfortunately, what I saw happen at voiceless velar fricative was the removal of the information. It doesn't seem to be an issue about sources and citations, as no one is removing the entries for the umpteen modern languages that lack citations. So, I say, separate-but-equal treatment is fine (though frankly I don't see the point & doubt anyone really gets confused by seeing living and dead languages alongside each other), but the removal (as opposed to reformatting or moving) of dead-language content in these articles is troublesome to me, and I believe it violates the NPOV principle, which trumps desires for a tidier or more consistent set of tables. I would hope for a clear commitment from linguists here to including and retaining and even adding treatment of dead languages: it's simply part of the world of encyclopedic knowledge of human language. Wareh (talk) 21:22, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict)I agree that dead languages are still under the purview of an encyclopedia, which is why I think putting information on them, albeit outside the tables, is still appropriate. Some articles do this a little bit, such as the voiceless and voiced dental plosives, dental nasal, Voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant, and the voiceless and voiced pharyngeal fricatives. These articles have a little information not contained in tables, such as language-family distribution and historical occurrence.

Very few of these tables are rigorously cited in their examples, so I don't normally challenge uncited inclusions. The exception, though, is dead languages because, as Angr has touched on, "good" sources can only exist for living (or recently deceased) languages thereby excluding Old English and Latin, unless we redefine what "good" means.— Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 21:36, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

I don't understand. Are you saying there are no RS on the phonology of Latin, ancient Greek, Old English? That historical linguistics by definition is an unreliable discipline? Cynwolfe (talk) 22:12, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

Phonology, yes; precise articulatory phonetics, not so much. Angr (talk) 22:22, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

So all the tables in question occur in articles that deal only with articulatory phonetics in particular and not with phonetics or phonology as they might apply generally? And the scope of each article is circumscribed explicitly in just that way? Cynwolfe (talk) 01:44, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

What do you mean by general phonetics? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 01:48, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

Well, since phonology is a concern of historical linguistics that extends to so-called dead languages, then in order to exclude them from these sorts of tables, the scope of the article (or the specific table) would need to be established as dealing only with articulatory phonetics as it pertains to living spoken languages. The article on voiceless velar fricative doesn't seem to limit the topic anywhere either as a concern of articulatory phonetics in particular or as pertinent only to living spoken language. We regularly offer IPA representations of Greek and Latin words, so WP seems to recognize in general that dead languages can be represented phonetically. I'm just trying to get a more precise understanding of the grounds for exclusion, and how scope would be established clearly and consistently. Cynwolfe (talk) 02:07, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

Okay, I see. These articles focus more on phonetics than phonology. I think that the lack of clarifying this in the ledes has more to do with the assumption by participating editors that readers would not be confused by the distinction. To me, it's obvious that it would only be tangentially about phonology since a phoneme is a group of related phones. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 02:31, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

SInce a table is a kind of list, the criteria for inclusion are supposed to be spelled out in an introduction to the section so that an editor knows whether a potential item belongs or not. From the perspective of the general reader, since Old English is the first language mentioned in the article as possessing a voiceless velar fricative, it wouldn't be clear to me why it would be excluded from the list, if you follow me. How is it logical to say that a given language, dead or not, exhibits this sound, and then exclude that language from the list of examples? I'm unclear about what criteria for inclusion. Cynwolfe (talk) 02:48, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

Reconstruction of consonantal sounds in ancient languages is not exactly a pseudo-science, and many of these sources suggest that Old English is part of the phenomenon of sound produced by humans called "voiceless velar fricative." I still see it as partial and arbitrary to exclude OEng from an article on this sound that our scholarly sources claim features in that language.

The phoneme/phone distinction is not clear. (1) What is the name of the "group of related phones" that includes OEng's sound, and where is its Wikipedia article? (2) Why does the article voiceless velar fricative not clearly say, "Many scholarly sources use the title of this article to refer to a phoneme that is not this phone. If you're looking for all the languages that have it, see that phoneme's article."?

Two unadressed points of fundamental Wikipedia principles: (A) "I think putting information on them, albeit outside the tables, is still appropriate" I'm glad to hear this, but I only ever came into conflict because, instead of retaining information about OEng outside of the table, Aeusoes1 removed it entirely from the article. Am I mistaken or confused about this? A simple assurance that no article that ever mentioned RS-supportable sound/dead-language associations would have those references cavalierly stripped out would settle the issue for me. (B) "'good' sources can only exist for living (or recently deceased) languages" That seems a dangerous assertion from a Wikipedia point of view, where we rely on the conclusions of reliable secondary sources. You will never encounter an objection from me if qualifications are made about our imperfect knowledge of the ancient past. "Voiceless velar fricative" can simply not be redefined as "The subject of voiceless velar fricative, minus everything ever said about it by those who did not base their assertions directly on living (or recently deceased) speakers." Wareh (talk) 16:47, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

1 What is the name of the "group of related phones" that includes OEng's sound, and where is its Wikipedia article?

Phonemes are language-specific, so we would never have an article devoted to one. They may often be given the name of the most neutral, context-independent, or common phone so that Spanish /d/ is called the "voiced dental stop" even though it can be both that and a dental approximant. They can also be called other things, such as English /r/ which may be named after the letter that represents it.

2 Why does the article voiceless velar fricative not clearly say, "Many scholarly sources use the title of this article to refer to a phoneme that is not this phone."

Because it would be false. Since no one here is saying that, I'm assuming you mean a phoneme that may not have been this phone. In that case, it would be redundant since all sounds of reconstructed and dead languages are just as speculative without proper phonetic analysis. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 18:15, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

Pardon me. This "guideline" appears to be a page in Ƶ§œš¹'s user space, which only he has substantively edited. Isn't there a template for personal essays? Subnumine.

Found it. It seems to be called Template:Essay. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Subnumine (talk • contribs) 19:01, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

As I said above and as should be clear in there, the guidelines reflect extensive discussion. I've even gone as far as to mark the parts that don't reflect discussion but seem to be agreed on in practice. If there's a better place for the guidelines, I'm open to moving them, but they definitely are not a "personal essay." — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 19:06, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

Then let's have a link to this "extended discussion", shall we? Subnumine (talk) 19:11, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

The link to the major portion of discussion is in the second sentence of that subpage and subsequent clarifications are in the footnotes at the bottom. You don't need me to duplicate those links here, do you? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 19:56, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

It would have been courteous to do so; it would have saved clicks for all of us - and anybody else whose interest was attracted to this discussion. But the link is Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Phonetics/Archive_2#Proposed_style_guidelines; fortunately I have figured out how to make one. I would not call it extensive; it is a lengthy proposal with several comments by one other editor and one comment each by three or four more. This point does not happen to have come up. Subnumine (talk) 20:56, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

Above, you argued that the guidelines are simply a personal essay because I created them. As a rebuttal, I referred to the discussions that they reflect. Whether these discussions, only one of which you seem to have looked at, were extensive to your liking is irrelevant to that point. The guidelines being in my subpage is a red herring. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 01:32, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

As a non-linguist, but a student of ancient languages, let me ask the question differently. If I'm a student of Old English, and the textbook or grammar I'm using speaks of the voiceless velar fricative, I should not expect the Wikipedia article to offer me any elucidation because ... ? I'm missing the "readers first" perspective. Cynwolfe (talk) 19:18, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

I don't think anyone is arguing that the information shouldn't be present at all. The kind of information is already present at, for example, voiceless alveolar lateral fricative, Voiceless alveolar retracted sibilant, and Voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant. The issue is more about how to include it. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 01:34, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

I appreciate Aeusoes1's informing me of this discussion, but otherwise I am concerned at the effectiveness of communication here. At Talk:Voiceless_velar_fricative, two editors raised the simple point that references to dead languages might be presented in or out of the table, but that they should not be deleted. The discussion ended there with almost nine months of silence. Thank you, Aeusoes1, for the responses to some of my questions, but I am still confused about whether you defend your simple deletion of the dead language mention from the whole article. In short, my "fundamental Wikipedia principles" points (A) and (B) are not getting any response at all, even though they would seem to be more important than the matters that have received response. In particular, please clarify whether or not your professed willingness not to delete now actually indicates a willingness to conserve dead language mentions in the articles (as it did not, in practice, before).

Subnumine is right that there was no "extended discussion" of the propriety of mentioning dead languages in articles on human consonantal sounds. Selket's characterization, "What I saw in the linked discussion was you proposing your template (a tiny part of which was the modern spoken languages only rule) and a couple other people not objecting," is accurate. Moreover, no extended discussion could get around the fact that, as Cynwolfe says, there is no end of RS's that clearly associate terms such as "voiceless velar fricative" with various dead languages. Are you saying that the books linked by Cynwolfe and by me using the term "voiceless velar fricative" in reference to Old English are in error? If so, it doesn't really matter, since these are not fringe sources subject to WP:UNDUE. Try, if possible, to address it in these simpler terms, since I think we confused each other with the phone/phoneme hatnote discussion; I should have written something like "Many reliable scholarly sources identify this phone as an Old English phoneme, to be named as the title of this article, but it is not covered in this article because XXXX, so please see article YYYY." I'm still not seeing how (A) what I write before "but" is incorrect; (B) what you may be proposing for XXXX and YYYY. Wareh (talk) 20:17, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

I would rather this conversation not derail over contentious personality conflicts. I've already said that information on dead languages is appropriate and your request for clarification on that comes off as an attempt to badger me into committing to keep information added on dead languages. Any further clarification on what I would or would not do really depends on the new consensus that is yet to be made. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 01:35, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

If I may bring this discussion away from Voiceless velar fricative, I would like to address the three questions asked by Aeusoes.

1. Should dead languages be allowed in the tables?
2. If so, is there a standard of inclusion? Or is any language allowed no matter how confident we are about its phonology?
3. If not, should there be another table for dead languages?

I see no reason in principle to exclude dead languages from tables if there are reliable and widely (but not necessarily universally) accepted sources that agree on the reconstruction. Of course such reconstructions are necessarily speculative and generally relate to phonology rather than phonetics as such, but personally I don't see this as necessarily a disqualification. I would have no objection to, say, a footnote pointing out that the language is dead & its inclusion is based on reconstructed data.

The standard for inclusion should probably include multiple (more than two?) reliable sources for the reconstruction, and consensus among editors of the particular pages that inclusion serves some illustrative or instructive purpose. But of course, the latter is a question for editors of particular pages; I don't think it needs to be addressed in any relatively fixed policy.

In my personal opinion, the inclusion of Old English in the table at 'Voiceless velar fricative' doesn't seem to add much, since (Modern, Scottish) English is already included, but I haven't been a party to particular conversations there, and don't have an especially strong opinion. Cnilep (talk) 04:01, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

FWIW I agree fully with what I believe is the spirit of this suggestion. For the record, I have no particular interest in Old English or the voiceless velar fricative; rather as a classicist I want to be sure that scholarly researches into reconstructed ancient phonology (e.g. Greek and Latin) can be reported in phonological articles. I agree with the citability standard for inclusion, though I remain worried that citable but uncited (dead language) items could be removed while citable but uncited (living language) items were allowed to stay. My hope is that people would pause before removing content and take note if there is abundant scholarly support for something to mention. Wareh (talk) 20:02, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

This seems to be approaching a reasonable standard, but I want to clarify some issues i have.

1. What is our standard of good sources? It apparently goes beyond basic historical linguistics. But I'm not sure what it is beyond this
2. Why would we need multiple sources for dead languages but not others?
3. Why would we need to get explicit community support that examples from dead languages "serves some illustrative or instructive purpose" but not for living languages?

These aren't rhetorical questions. I can agree with having such a standard and implementing such a policy, but I would like to be able to justify it to anyone who questions why we're giving extra scrutiny to examples from dead languages.

By the way, as an alternative to a footnote, including a brief mention about reconstruction/speculation could also fit in the notes column, which would make its speculative status more transparent to the reader. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 00:45, 14 January 2012 (UTC)

I take it that those questions are addressed to me and not to Wareh, right? In order:

1. What are good sources? Scholarly sources per WP:SCHOLARSHIP. This would, I presume, be primarily from historical linguistics, but I wouldn't rule out, say, philology or classics out of hand if the sources are reliable, non-fringe, etc. Actually, I would guess that basic phonetics or phonology texts might be the best source of illustrative examples.
2. Why multiple sources? I'm not married to the suggestion, but I thought it might help guard against argument over controversial, potentially WP:Fringe theories.
3. "Why would we need to get explicit community support that examples from dead languages "serves some illustrative or instructive purpose" but not for living languages?" I think you've inferred (reasonably) something that I didn't intend. I think that all examples should be illustrative or instructive, whether they come from living or dead languages, whether in scholarly or "vernacular" articles (e.g. Eggcorn). Personally, I don't like "Hey, I've thought of another example!" types of example lists. YMMV.

Cnilep (talk) 04:24, 14 January 2012 (UTC)

Comment I think that reconstructed languages such as proto-Indo-European or proto-Semitic should be banned. They are simply too speculative to be of any use, and would almost certainly be misinformative. I don't think anyone would attempt to add one?

There is general disagreement as to how to pronounce even extremely well-attested dead languages which were not transcribed in, say, the last century (and generally much less time than that). The pronunciation of Ancient Greek, for example, has sparked several edit wars here on WP. In most of these cases, the pronunciation is actually reconstructed rather than recorded, and where there is one reconstruction, there is probably another to contradict it. With less well attested languages of the same era, such as Etruscan, forget it.

I think it is therefore a good idea to forbid dead (< ca. 1950, say) languages from the phonetics tables. There is little benefit to adding them anyway. However, I could see making an exception for Old and Middle English sounds which do not occur in Modern English. Those have greater interest than other languages because this is English WP and they are the ancestors of our own, and most of us have been exposed to Chaucer and perhaps even Beowulf in school. It might be difficult to decide where to place the vowels, but the only new consonants to worry about would be [r, ç, x, ɣ] (and [ʝ]? is our OE article missing a palatalized /g/?). I'm not saying it's a good idea to allow in any, but I could see allowing OE & ME while keeping the door closed on other dead languages. — kwami (talk) 05:29, 14 January 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for your input. Just two quick suggestions. First, "where there is one reconstruction, there is probably another to contradict it" seems like an exaggeration for Ancient Greek; at least I don't think it applies to the majority of the consonants, if the goal is simply to reconstruct what was part of the history of AncGk phonetics over a broad period (as opposed to making more exact claims about changes or precise times/places). Second, the special-interest-of-English argument doesn't fly for me. The only NPOV/verifiability criterion I can see is whether scholarly sources discuss the phone in connection to a language (however ancient); in cases of imperfect confidence, clarification is easy enough to provide (footnotes, etc.).

I think the basic issue here is that some linguists (including contributors here perhaps) can legitimately have interests and pursue questions that only apply to 1950-present recorded languages. However, the limited-scope area of inquiry thus defined is not the general terrain of linguistic science, phonology, etc. These include ancient languages whose reconstruction depends on argument and inference, and (by NPOV) we can't wish that fact away. Wareh (talk) 01:57, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

Considering these are phonetics articles, I think the limited scope of inquiry that Kwami has outlined is a fairly accurate outline of their terrain. What I like about what Cnilep has put forth (though I don't think this is quite what they were thinking) is that the higher standard of inclusion for dead languages would mean that we aren't significantly altering this scope because the examples would be few, illustrative, and most probably exotic. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 16:59, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

I appreciate Kwamikagami's suggestions, but I don't think it would be helpful for us editors to sit here and write a general summary of the extent to which sources support reconstructed pronunciation of dead languages, and then encode that summary into a guideline which will be applied on various topics even when sources say something slightly different on that particular topic. Can't we just stick to what sources say about specific sounds in specific articles, instead of second-guessing them? What's the point of writing a guideline that says "We don't know anything about sounds in languages which died < ca. 1950" if there can be current or future good sources for specific sounds in a language which died in 1945? (In most cases there wouldn't be good sources on that specific language, and in those cases the guideline would merely be redundant instead of harmful). bobrayner (talk) 02:31, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

Linguistic Expertise Solicited

There are several discussions in progress at Talk:Campaign for "santorum" neologism which might benefit from some linguistic expertise. Observations/comments from this WikiProject's members are solicited to, hopefully, advance the ongoing discussions. Many thanks. JakeInJoisey (talk) 01:39, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

Can you be more specific about which discussions you have in mind? The page currently has 14 sections and more than 135kb of comments, most of which seem related to NPOV more than specifically linguistic questions. Cnilep (talk) 03:30, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

Well, perhaps Question: Which grammatical classification is the most appropriate for the word in question? might be a good place to dip your toe in the water (be careful tho, it's hot). Thanks. JakeInJoisey (talk) 03:36, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

Alphabet article

I've made a move request, to make Alphabet into a disambiguation page. Please participate in the discussion there. Thanks! Mlm42 (talk) 18:08, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

Task force importance ratings

I've been rating a lot of articles for the Applied Linguistics Task Force recently, and I admit to having a nagging feeling that I made things too complicated by setting up importance ratings for each individual task force. Cnilep has just now confirmed that this is in doubt, by reinstating the importance field for all WikiProject Linguistics articles. I originally set it up like that to keep the ratings system that each of the previous daughter WikiProjects had in place, but now I am actually thinking now of scrapping all the task force importance scales, and simply merging all the task force importance scales into the main WP Linguistics importance scale. For most of the task forces this would be no problem, but the Etymology Task Force presents a problem because of the unorthodox rating system that we inherited from the old WikiProject Etymology. In quite a few of those articles, the only relation they have to linguistics is that they have an etymology section. (See, for example, Macedonia (terminology) or 15 minutes of fame.) If we do decide to merge everything into one category, we have a few choices:

1. Have articles with no obvious relation to linguistics alongside linguistics articles in the ratings.
2. Rate all the non-linguistic articles with etymology sections as NA importance, thereby losing the old priority scale that the etymology project had worked out.
3. Keep the task force importance scale just for the etymology task force, and just for non-linguistic articles with etymology sections.
4. Create a new banner for the etymology task force, just for non-linguistic articles with etymology sections. {{WikiProject Linguistics}} would only be used for linguistics-related articles.
5. Turn the etymology task force back into a full-blown WikiProject.

What do people think of merging all the importance scales, and of these four options? I personally think number three or number four might be the way to go, but what do others think? — Mr. Stradivarius ^♫ 04:57, 25 January 2012 (UTC)

I restored the general importance parameter to {{WikiProject Linguistics}} since some articles (the particular one I was tagging at the time was Cryptotype) do not clearly fit the scope of one of the current task forces.

Regarding the etymology task force, since there is already a task-force-specific class rating (etymology-section-class= ), I see no reason not to include a specific importance rating, too. Therefore, Strad's suggestion 3 seems good to me. Cnilep (talk) 01:06, 26 January 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. I think I'll wait a week to give people time to respond, and then carry out the change. I should warn people that converting all the articles from |applied-importance= and |theoretical-importance=, etc. to |importance= will be easy to do with AutoWikiBrowser, but undoing the change would not be trivial. We shouldn't just change them over if we aren't certain.

On another note, I thought it might be nice to have a simple template for editors uninvolved with this project to use on articles that need etymologies. At the moment editors have to include the following on the article talk page: {{WikiProject Linguistics|etymology=yes|etymology-section=yes|etymology-section-class=missing}}. I thought something simpler like {{etymology needed}} could encourage other editors to use it. We could do it simply by using {{etymology needed}} as a shortcut to substitute the WikiProject banner text, or by making it a completely separate template that just uses the task force categories. (Hence my distinction between choices three and four above.) Which would editors here consider the more elegant solution? — Mr. Stradivarius ^♫ 03:33, 26 January 2012 (UTC)

I can see no reason for rating the importance of the task forces. Tony (talk) 13:12, 26 January 2012 (UTC)

Fair enough - that makes three of us, then. Do you have a preference as to what we should do with the etymology task force? — Mr. Stradivarius ^♫ 14:23, 26 January 2012 (UTC)

Added an SF-MDA suggestion

I proposed an article (or an expansion of the existing SFL article) to include a section on Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Hope that's ok -- I'm new to WP, looking for projects that I might be able to help with. (I'm not an SF-MDA expert but have done some analyses with it...) aleighc 22:19, 3 February 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ana Cooke (talk • contribs)

Hi Ana! I say just go ahead and start a new section on systemic functional linguistics and/or discourse analysis - it looks like our coverage is very thin at the moment, so your contributions would be most welcome. Just make sure that you cite your sources, and be aware that standards for citing in Wikipedia are stricter than they are in academia - in our best articles, almost every sentence tends to be cited. (Have a look at the verifiability policy for more details here.) And of course, let us know if you have any questions - we'll be here to help. Best — Mr. Stradivarius ^♫ 00:24, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

Template:Varieties of Arabic

There is an edit war on Template:Varieties of Arabic about whether Maltese should be included. It would be great if anyone with a good background in linguistics could come and give an honest, unbiased opinion on the matter. Thanks — ABJIKLAM (t · c) 19:09, 6 February 2012 (UTC)

Stenomask

I would appreciate you expert participation regarding: Talk:Stenomask#Stenomask_developed_in_the_1940ies_-_Speech_recognition_added_later
Regards, --PutzfetzenORG (talk) 13:47, 11 February 2012 (UTC)