Category talk:Consonant templates

redundant?

"These templates centralize the redundant wording in the 'Features' section of the many individual consonant articles."

In some cases that unification of wording leads to inappropriate and incorrect readings. Alveolar lateral ejective affricate#Features was certainly neatly and compactly formatted, like so:

Features of the alveolar lateral ejective affricate:

{{affricate|affricate}}

{{alveolar}}

{{voiceless short}}

{{oral}}

{{lateral}}

{{ejective}}

This neat and simple construction produced the following text (boldface added, links not shown): (as of December 2015)

Features of the alveolar lateral ejective affricate:

• Its manner of articulation is affricate, which means it is produced by first stopping the airflow entirely, then allowing air flow through a constricted channel at the place of articulation, causing turbulence.
• Its place of articulation is alveolar, which means it is articulated with either the tip or the blade of the tongue at the alveolar ridge, termed respectively apical and laminal.
• Its phonation is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords.
• It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth only.
• It is a lateral consonant, which means it is produced by directing the airstream over the sides of the tongue, rather than down the middle.
• The airstream mechanism is ejective (glottalic egressive), which means the air is forced out by pumping the glottis upward.

But English and the Romance languages have no alveolar lateral ejective affricates, as the parenthesized text implies that they do. I have replaced the transclusion of template:Alveolar with a quote of the text, omitting the inappropriate part. I suggest a general reexamination of these centralized texts and their uses, to avoid such infelicitous misgeneralization. See

• Template talk:Alveolar#too much info for some contexts
• Talk:Alveolar lateral ejective affricate#alveolar

And now, after typing all this into this talk page, and finally noticing the "Attention" warning above, I will copy it into some more visible place. (Sigh.) --Thnidu (talk) 02:42, 10 June 2011 (UTC)

--!!

Above comment amended to fix categorization. DexDor ^(talk) 23:28, 30 December 2015 (UTC)