User talk:Thefamouseccles

Hello, Thefamouseccles! Welcome to Wikipedia. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you ever need editing help visit Wikipedia:How does one edit a page or how to format them visit our manual of style. Experiment at Wikipedia:Sandbox. If you need pointers on how we title pages visit Wikipedia:Naming conventions. If you have any other questions about the project then check out Wikipedia:Help or add a question to the Village pump. I'm curious, though. Is there a reason for the perplexing fact that you've made all your edits without actually signing in...? Oh yes, and Qapla'! ;) -- Oliver P. 23:28 5 Jun 2003 (UTC)

No reason at all - I just didn't realise that signing on was something that you could do. I stumbled upon Wikipedia while searching on Google for some material on Georgian; when I found that Ubykh and, indeed, the entire family of Northwest Caucasian languages wasn't anywhere to be found, I thought "Oh my!" and did everything I could to remedy that situation. It's for the same reason that my very earliest pages were in plain text wherever I could avoid anything else. ;) BTW: tlhIngan Hol SovlIjmo' Qapla' qajatlh je. {{:) thefamouseccles 04:48 8 Sep 2003 (UTC)

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Hi there! I've not been Wiki'ing much lately, but stumbled across your stuff on Ubykh and Abkhaz - I'm fascinated by phonology, particularly of languages at the extremes of inventory size such as !Xu and Rotokas. Would you be interested in working together to construct a phonology chart of !Xu for the article? Drop me an email at pgdt AT comcast DOT net if you're interested... cheers! pgdudda 02:49, 11 Oct 2003 (UTC)

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Hello thefamouseccles! I wonder whether Esperanto might be of interest to you. Oh, and, nuqDaq yuch Dapol (my Klingon's a bit rusty).

qatlho', 'ej qay'be'. <<Esperanto>> Hol vIghojpu', 'ach tlhIngan Hol vImaS; tlhIngan Hol ngeD law' <<Esperanto>> Hol ngeD puS. :D I did learn Esperanto for a time, and I found it quite interesting; I particularly liked the idea of Zamenhof's derivational suffixes. Just so long as the Indo-European world (including me!) does realise that it's worth studying in its own right, not as an international auxiliary language. But it's very different from most Indo-European languages, and so an extremely interesting study.

Greetings thefamouseccles! I found your page on Ubykh interesting. I was kind of surprised to find that anyone else had an interest in the language, and still more surprised to see someone who was also interested in Basque, Egyptian, German, and Elvish (all languages I have a smattering of knowledge of, except for German which I can read as long as there's a dictionary handy and can speak a few sentences here and there).

As for me, I first came across Ubykh while reading an old Guiness Book of Records, which listed the language as having the most consonants. Later on I came across an early publication on the language, "Die Sprache der Ubychen", in the journal Caucasica, Vol. IV, p. 65 (1927) by a German scholar named Adolf Dirr. I began translating the German but never got around to finishing it, so I'm not sure how well it comports with the most recent scholarship on the language. I'm pretty sure, however, that Dirr's description of the Ubykh consonants isn't the same as the one you posted.

Anyway, I'm wondering: have you gotten many responses from people who want to learn the language? Do you have study materials prepared for it? I might have some interest in studying, but I'd want to know more about what I'm getting into--it IS pretty complicated and time-intensive, as you well know. Feel free to e-mail me at wesaydti@yahoo.com. Regards.

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Hi! I notice you're interested in such exotic languages as Pirahã! Just thought you might be interested in this link, which I've added to the Pirahã article:

"Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã: Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language" http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/Info/staff/DE/cultgram.pdf

--Trebor1990, 26 June 2004

Thanks for the reference! I'd read some of Dan Everett's stuff before, but have never seen this paper. thefamouseccles 10:58, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Tevfik Esenç

I posted a question regarding a matter of clarity in the language of the Tevfik Esenç article on its talk page; it was suggested that you be consulted regarding this issue.

Incidentally, Turkic languages also use the phrase see X well to mean love/like X (it varies from language to language, and there are other verbs which overlap, like sev- (Turkish, Uzbek) / süy- (Kazakh) and unat- (Kazakh)). —Firespeaker 12:58, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Ah! I see what you mean; I wasn't very clear when I posted that, was I? I'll change it now. Yes, the idea was that since Esenç spoke Ubykh and Adyghe, there was some Northwest Caucasian comparative work he was able to substantially contribute to. Nevertheless, he was also fluent in Turkish, which is why he was so competent as a native linguist. I wasn't aware of the Turkic "to love" phenomenon, but that's very interesting too. thefamouseccles 00:34, 29 Mar 2006 (UTC)

piraha

hi eccles,

i've reverted your changes to piraha, since i don't see how you get 11 phonemes. kwami 05:54, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

[p t k ? b g s h a i o], with various allophones. Everett's and Sheldon's published papers (which are the only substantially documented literature) both support Piraha having only eleven phonemes. The page originally said 13. I have no idea what the other two phonemes are supposed to be, unless tone is being counted as phonemic, and tone is usually not treated as part of the segmental phonemic inventory of any language (IIRC, tone is typically considered as suprasegmental, which I imagine was the case when Everett was writing his works on the language). Anyway, unless there is literature to support a 13-phoneme inventory for Piraha, the conclusion is original research and can't yet be included. Thefamouseccles 08:59, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Just to add to that: I note that the Tone page describes tones as "phonemes", so I must retract my previous statement, but I still think it would be more instructive to keep the phonemes and tonemes separate (in order to avoid confusion such as this). Thefamouseccles 09:14, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Hey

Hey famouseccles, I just wanted to let you know that there's a new comment at Talk:Ubykh phonology. Cheers, —Khoikhoi 23:48, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

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Unfortunately I do not speak Ubykh, but a language which is from the same family, which is Adyghabze. AsliSinan

No problem. I'm actually interested in all Northwest Caucasian languages, so would you mind if I emailed you about Adyghabze? Cheers, Thefamouseccles 13:14, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

planning to send e-mail

i'm planning to send an e-mail, but i've been rather busy, so it may be a little while. Gringo300 09:02, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

Not a problem, take as long as you need. Thefamouseccles 09:38, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

languages

G'day Thefamouseccles! Can you translate my name in what language you know please, and then post it on my userpage in the section with all the different languages. I would be very grateful if you do (if you know another language apart from English and the ones on my userpage please feel free to post it on) P.S. all th translations are in alpahbetical order so when you add one please put it in alpahbetical order according to the language. Thanks!!! Abdullah Geelah 14:11, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

Done, Abdullah! I've added Ubykh, and should be able to throw it together in Abkhaz in the next day or so. :) Thefamouseccles 13:13, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

Phonetics

I've been reading about extinct Indo-European languages in encyclopedias since I was about eight years old, fascinated by the comparisons and lineages and the words and historical context, but never really understanding what alveolars and gutturals and such meant. Recently I've started looking through language articles in Wikipedia, and it occurs to me that a good place to start understanding these articles would be understanding the IPA; however I'm having a lot of trouble getting the details to stick. Do you have any advice for coming to grips with the phonetic terminology and symbology? You seem to know a ton of languages... do most people just sort of pick up on it? What do you think? —vivacissamamente 04:30, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

While I'm flattered by your comment, I'm afraid there's not a whole lot of help I can offer... the way I familiarised myself with the IPA was more or less merely to use it. Eventually I got the hang of the details. There are a few series of symbols that have some degree of regularity about them - the retroflex consonants, in particular, which are all distinguished by a right-facing subscript hook - but there are a lot that don't, so the symbols for those must be learned individually. I also had a big bonus in the fact that Ubykh's 84-consonant inventory requires one to learn a lot of IPA symbols in order to represent it properly.

Another thing that I did a lot of when I was first learning both Ubykh and the IPA was to play around with my tongue a lot. I'd get a sagittal image of the articulatory tract, and I'd go through the IPA and babble like a baby, going "ɖaɖaɖaɖa" or "ʙʌʙʌʙʌʙʌ" to familiarise myself with sounds. It's a whole lot easier to assign sound to symbol when you actually know what the sound is. :) — Thefamouseccles 21:47, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for your help. I've memorized most of the consonants that occur in English, probably because the symbols intuitively reflect the uses of the letters in English. In other words, it wasn't much work. What is a good way to learn sounds that aren't in English? I've been relying on the sound samples on Wikipedia, but I have trouble telling one sound apart from another sometimes. I read all the terms indicating how to articulate them, and then try to do it with my own mouth, but I'm never quite sure if I succeed.

By the way, there are several articles for phonetic sounds that don't have samples, by the way, if you know how to add them.

How do people tell aspirated from non-aspirated consonants by sound? I always have to put my hand in front of my mouth to be sure. —vivacissamamente 00:59, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

cornel

Hi Thefamouseccles,

You asked about commons:Gele_kornoelje_27-08-2005_15.12.06.JPG. My pix are available under both GFDL and CC-BY-SA-2.5 licneses. So you can use the photo as "By Teun Spaans, license GFDL" or as "By Teun Spaans, license CC-BY-SA-2.5" Either credit should suffice for usage in a commercial hardcopy book.

kind regards,

TeunSpaans 20:43, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Ubykh

Hi, I noticed your message on the talk page for Ubykh language, though I'll admit I actually started reading after my interest was peaked looking at your Livejournal userpage! (I read linguaphiles.)

I'm interested in learning a little more about the language, at least to the point that I could recognize the main parts of speech by plowing through a word or sentence. I don't have much trouble with the pronunciation, though I may not be able to reliably differenciate some of the more complex pharyngealized consonants, and I've never had to deal with them before.

Do you know of any online reference, reading examples, recordings, stuff like that to get a foothold on the phonology/grammar? Thanks!  freshofftheufoΓΛĿЌ  01:29, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Actually I've found a handful of resources with good reading examples, but it seems I may be stuck for finding any recordings online...  freshofftheufoΓΛĿЌ  03:50, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm not Thefamouseccles, but there is one at youtube, where Tevfik Esenç himself tells a story in Ubykh. The translation can be followed in French. Unfortunately I don't know where to find the transcription of the text (I know there is one, since I have seen sentences from that story). Here you can hear it: "Eating Fish Makes You Clever" — N-true 04:37, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. About half of it is transcribed on the bottom of Ubykh language, and I'm at risk of memorizing it if I listen to it one more time! It's a good example, but I'll keep looking for more : /.  freshofftheufoΓΛĿЌ  11:11, 1 March 2007 (UTC)