User talk:Nohat

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• Archive I – User talk:Nohat/archive 2005-02-22

AIM name?

Hello, I'm Jordan; you remember me as the one who offered some controversial suggestions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for English and "cot-caught" merger articles. I was wondering if you had an AIM screen name so we could continue our linguistic conversations.

See Wikipedia:Instant Messaging Wikipedians. Also, please feel free to create an account. You can read about why that's a good idea at wikipedia:why create an account?. Nohat 05:13, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Cornell lowest ranked school

You should be aware of this discussion: [1]

USF seal

Thanks for fixing that picture for me! The seal was atop a building and I was at ground level; I'm afraid I didn't know how to fix it myself. Again, thank you. Mike H 08:18, Feb 28, 2005 (UTC)

Corrected perspective

Thanks for correcting the perspective on architectural images. I'm not the only one who appreciates it, though I might be the only one to tip you a note! --Wetman 09:23, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thanks! It's kind of fun, although I wish I had higher-resolution photos to work with. If you can point me to other photos that need it, I'll be glad to oblige, eventually. Nohat 09:27, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia Logo

You actually made the Wikipedia logo?! That's so cool! Great Job! What program did you use to make it?

- mathwizxp

Syntactic saturation

Hi, Nohat! I understand from your profile that you are interested in linguistics. "Syntactic saturation" is a long-time article request that seems to be unfillable. I can't find anything useful about it on Google, otherwise I'd write a stub myself; I would greatly appreciate it if you or any of the other linguists on Wikipedia might be able to help. -- The Anome 10:50, Mar 8, 2005 (UTC)

California English

When I added the link to California English, the article existed! It doesn't anymore; it must have been speedily deleted. But why? It was actually a pretty good article, I thought. Do you have any idea what happened? --Angr 08:20, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Californian Accent. RickK 08:31, Mar 20, 2005 (UTC)

If underlined links are annoying you, you can click preferences at the top of the page, then click "Misc settings", and then uncheck the box marked "underline links". --Angr 19:07, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Typeface for the Arabic logo

Ahlan Nohat:

Elian referred me to you as I was enquiring about the name of the typeface used in creating the Arabic version of the logo. I originally wanted to create some banners and buttons, and now I'm interested in designing a leaflet and a high resolution version of the Arabic logo. Also, before I downloaded your high resolution Photoshop version, I had wondered if there is a vector format version of the globe.

I was also reading about the history of I must say that I prefer the current one to all the previous phases. --Alif 19:02, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I appreciate your reply.

I can see that the version currently in Wikipedia is different than the one :currently in use. Do you have any idea when did this happen or why?

Is the font file usable on Windows systems? Is it possible/legal for you to give me a copy of it?

Any other suggestions regarding this issue would be great.

And, regarding a scalable format, recently Adobe have incorporated 3D capabilities in Illustrator. I have no clue what/if it is useful for this case. --Alif 00:04, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Vowel sound samples

I noticed you uploaded sound samples for the vowel articles, but it appears that the sounds for Close-mid central unrounded vowel (Media:Vow-011a.wav) and Open-mid central rounded vowel (Media:Vow-019a.wav) are missing. Could you either upload these sounds or provide a link to where you got them? I need all the samples because I plan to add plots of their power spectral densities to the respective vowels articles (to see the different formants). CyborgTosser (Only half the battle) 01:55, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Swedish speakers

At RfC I listed:

• Talk:Rikssvenska, Talk:Swedish language, Talk:Swedish phonology, Talk:Voiceless dorso-palatal velar fricative, and most probably soon in more related articles, souring relations between contributors with conflicting attitudes and personalities (likely related, among other things, to the status of Finland-Swedish and the Mandatory Swedish education in Finland)

I guess this is a field where you can weight in as a moderating force.

Regards!
--Johan Magnus 09:59, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Dr Zen enforcement / stricken portions

Thanks for removing those - I was going to do so when putting that there, but must've forgotten to do so. -- Grunt 🇪🇺 00:50, 2005 Mar 27 (UTC)

Sandbox

I saw you clean out the Sandbox... would you prefer the Sandbot to clean the sandbox more often or less often? -- AllyUnion (talk) 09:16, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Macedonian Wikipedia

I have seen that you have posted on some discussions on the macedonian wikipedia ( www.mk.wikipedia.org ) regarding the logo of the macedonian wikipedia. Are you somehow involved in the making of the national logos? Because there is a little mistake with our wikipedia logo (Vikipedija: Slobodnata Encikopedija - Википедија - Слободната Енциклопедија)... although it is gramatically correct, it is unusual to use the -ta article in macedonian(it has a somewhat a bulgarian spirit in when it's put in that way)... so could you please change the picture and replace it with Vikipedija: Slobodna Enciklopedija (Википедија: Слободна Енциклопедија)... without 'TA'... our logo should be exactly as the Serbian one... although our languages differ much. However if you're not in the logo business, could you please instruct me how it is possible to change it? :) thank you for reading.

Syllabification

Thanks for catching the misuse. You're right about that. Poor attempt at irony, I guess.

Nice SPUI diagram

Thanks for making the diagram - looks good. --SPUI (talk) 10:00, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Zurich

Zürich has been nominated on Wikipedia:Requested moves for a page move to Zurich. Perhapse you might like to express your opinion about this proposed move on talk:Zürich. Philip Baird Shearer 09:53, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Pronunciation files

Hey. I've been checking out the sound files you've provided for various sounds. Are all of them by Ladefoged? There's also a reference to UCLA in the image files, but I don't quite see the meaning. Is it a URL? It would be nice to get some files of higher quality for some of the fricatives. Are there any more files like this available? Peter Isotalo 18:40, Apr 8, 2005 (UTC)

I replaced one of Ladefoged's recordings with one of my own at uvular trill. Hope you don't mind, but you can see my motivation on the talk page. I also recorded a few ejective consonants.

As for the sound files. A lot of the fricatives like voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative and voiceless palatal fricative are hard to tell apart. The velar fricatives are even more difficult to discern from one another, even in the cases where I'm actually familiar with the sounds. There's also the problem of the copyright, since I would like to start building a proper collection of pronunciation files at Commons, and I assume there would be a problem uploading the UCLA-files there with the current copyright.

Would you mind if I made recordings of the sounds that I do feel I can pronounce properly to replace those of Ladefoged's that are of very low quality? Peter Isotalo 21:14, Apr 14, 2005 (UTC)

Absolutely it would be better to have recordings that are GFDL than the somewhat ambiguous situation with the Ladefoged recordings. The benefit of the Ladefoged recordings is that there were recorded in a proper studio, so the noise floor of the recordings is very low (although the resolution is admittedly somewhat poor). If you add your own recordings, I hope you will understand if I am hesitant to replace the Ladefoged recordings if they are very noisy or otherwise amateurish. On the other hand, if you have access to a recording studio, then I'd be thrilled to replace those sounds. Nohat 21:51, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Well, what do you think of these?

Peter Isotalo 22:14, Apr 14, 2005 (UTC)

Sound pretty good to me. :-) Nohat 22:20, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Ok, I replaced a bunch of files, mostly fricatives. Just check my contributions if you want to check out the sound quality. I don't have that much experience of recording sounds myself and my equipment is rather modest. I also posted a suggestion to start improving the phonetics articles. Have a look at the talk page if you're interested. Peter Isotalo 17:04, Apr 15, 2005 (UTC)

Vowel charts

Hello! If my information is correct you drew these two diagrams:

Media:Ipa-chart-vowels.png

Media:Dutch-monophthongs.png

The axes on the IPA diagram are clearly labeled: front-back, close-open, with roundedness in place (not given an axis).

The axes on the second diagram are not mentioned. Noting the dissimilarities between the diagrams I can't help but wonder what's on the axes. What does the location of a vowel in this diagram mean? As a native speaker of Dutch I could maybe guess, but someone else might try to use the IPA chart as a reference and find them incompatible...

I hope you can enlighten me on this. Cordially yours, Shinobu 01:03, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I drew that diagram based on a similar diagram which appears in The Handbook of the International Phonetic Association. The slighty variant location of the vowel sounds represents the fact that the actual position of the tongue and the resultant formants in the produced vowel vary slightly from the "standard" positions as described by the International Phonetic Alphabet. For example the Dutch [y] sound (as in fuut) is significantly more centralized than the Dutch [i] sound (as in biet). In fact, the IPA symbol [ʉ] is probably a more accurate transcription of the sound. However, [y] is used for phonological reasons—in the sound system of Dutch, it works in a way that is parallel to [i]— in particular there is not a 3-way contrast in backness in Dutch, so there is no reason to posit that the vowel of fuut is both rounded and centralized, as rounded is sufficient to describe the phonology of the vowel. I hope this explains it. Feel free to ask me if any of this is unclear, as it very may be, considering I've just had a couple glasses of wine :-). Nohat 03:47, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Okay, that makes sense. If Dutch "uu" resembles more IPA [ʉ] than IPA [y] then I think that should be symbol used, but that's only my personal opinion I guess. It would be less confusing, though. Also it might still be nice to "put something on the axes" so to speak. Maybe some mention of all this could be made in the text. I'll think about it some more time. (And give my coffee some time.) It would be nice if the vowels were somehow hyperlinked to pronunciations as sound files. Shinobu 13:37, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The vowel /o/ (in Dutch orthography usually spelled oo in closed syllable, o in open one) is missing from the chart. It occurs in Dutch in contrast with /ɔ/ (spelled o, always in closed syllable, often before doubled consonant). You can find an example in the table in the article. The IPA manual shows it in the diagram as start of a diphthong, but in the example text there you can see it occurring as a pure vowel. −Woodstone 19:13, 2005 Apr 14 (UTC)

The diagrams were drawn based on one from The Handbook of the International Phonetic Association, which says that the Dutch /o/ phoneme is actually realized as a narrow closing diphthong. This is supported by Geert Booij's authoritative The Phonology of Dutch, as well as most other phonetic analyses of Dutch. Nohat 20:04, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The IPA manual shows the /o/ used in English, which has in effect a much bigger glide than the Dutch one. The German /o/ is shown as well, wich is quite similar to the Dutch one. The example text in the IPA manual shows all occurring /o/ as /oː/ not as /ou/ or /oʊ/. I'm afraid the handbook is not consistent. But no matter, I just saw the diphthongs are shown in additional chart in the Dutch language article. −Woodstone 20:53, 2005 Apr 14 (UTC)

Tkorrovi vs Paul Beardsell

User Chinasaur moved comments from Wikipedia talk:Requests for arbitration/Tkorrovi vs. Paul Beardsell, remaining his there and moving mine [2], just after I put a link on an evidence page to that page [3] because it contains important information. Also, he moved a question about his nationality to my talk page [4]. I understand the reason, but I demand for me an equal right, to remove mentioning my nationality against my will by Matthew Stannard from that page (unfortunately cannot provide diff, as the commentary was moved that after).Tkorrovi 02:54, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Bot

I am trying to complete Ranks and Insignia of NATO. As you can see airforce and navy are basicaly untouched. I have the images but lack the patience to upload them (as we are talking about 500-700+ images) . I was wondering if a bot could be usefull. --Cool Cat ^{My Talk} 15:35, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

IPA consonants for Thai

Hi Nohat. I typed the IPA consonant table for Thai. You might have a look in Thai language. I am wondering about [w], which appears in the IPA handbook in the Thai section as a velar approximant, whereas in the general tables it is set apart as a voiced labial-velar approximant. Any idea why that could be? The Thai /w/ does not seem much different from the English one to me (perhaps slightly more affricated). −Woodstone 22:03, 2005 Apr 17 (UTC)

It probably has to do with roundedness. If Thai [w] is not rounded, or not very rounded, or its roundedness is not relevant to Thai phonology, it may make sense to group it as a pure velar. As for why they would use the symbol w instead of the normal velar approximant symbol, it may just be the principle of using normal Roman letters where possible. I don't have the handbook in front of me, so I can't see for myself at the moment. That's my guess. Nohat 22:06, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Your final logo variant

Hi Nohat, I'm trying to gather together the source material necessary to reproduce an exact duplicate of the current international Wikipedia logo from scratch. You seem to have changed Paulus Magnus' POV-Ray stuff quite a bit; is there anyplace on Meta where the source files for the current logo are stored? I'm also trying to track down the exact variants of Garamond that are used in the text for the English logo. Thanks for any help you can provide. silsor 08:06, Apr 19, 2005 (UTC)

Oh, and I'm also looking for the characters used on the current logo. At one point you had a list of characters here but I don't think those are the ones on the current puzzle globe. Also, what font are they in? silsor 08:08, Apr 19, 2005 (UTC)

It's not Garamond, it's Hoefler Text. I will have time to look around on my computer for the source files possibly tomorrow. E-mail me via the e-mail this user feature and I'll send the files in an attached reply. The characters on the globe are in a variety of fonts. I don't recall them all specifically :-/. They're probably mostly characters from the default fonts for those scripts that come with Mac OS X. I will see if my original files contain that information. Nohat 08:30, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)