User talk:Minaasak

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Hi Minaasak! I noticed your contributions to Minahasan languages and wanted to welcome you to the Wikipedia community. I hope you like it here and decide to stay.

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Happy editing! Austronesier (talk) 19:55, 24 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Can you also have a watch over Mongondow language? The IP is trying to add an unsourced "comparison" table, which is not only unsourced, but also misleading, as it tries to make Mongondow look even more similar to Philippine languages than it actually is (not to talk about the bogus "cognates"). –Austronesier (talk) 08:58, 11 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Austronesier: Sure. I don't know if they intend for those to be diagnostic or just want to add a bit of trivia (??), but it's misleading nonetheless. Especially if accidental lookalikes are involved too. Minaasak (talk) 09:28, 11 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Accidental lookalikes, and also what I call the "asu/ulu/manuk-fallacy" whenever Indonesian comes into play as comparandum in such trivia comparisons, I guess you know what I mean: Language A asu/ulu/manuk ~ Language B asu/ulu/manuk ~ Indonesian anjing/kepala/ayam → A and B are soooo similar!

It's quite a pity that there is little to add to the Mongondow language article other than trivia. Extracting the phonology and pronouns from Dunnebier is still feasible, but anything else would be WP:OR, since his descriptive method is so outdated. There is no useful grammatical description of Mongondow in a modern framework AFAIK. By "modern" I don't mean generative, but just plainly descriptive. The Pusat Bahasa report Morfologi dan Sintaksis Bahasa Bolaang Mongondow just lists affixes but doesn't put them into a voice-TAM paradigm, and has nothing about case marking. And most sample clauses are SV(O), whereas Mongondow actually is verb-initial. I have written a private grammar sketch based on Dunnebier's text collection, but I can't use it here of course.

Do you have an idea how to expand the article further? Austronesier (talk) 11:22, 11 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Austronesier:: Oh dammit, I needed a minute to grasp that, but I get it now :-D Yeah, comparing every word to Indonesian in particular (and jumping over other Austronesian groups/languages) does misrepresent the relationship between the other two languages.

As for Mongondow, I have no idea. Those Indonesian reports do tend to be disappointingly cursory. I know there's a relatively recent dictionary, but I'm not sure if it has any grammar-related information. I was hoping to find some info about loanwords, but there really isn't much (and my understanding is that the Dutch and Spanish influence was much weaker there compared to the rest of North Sulawesi). It doesn't help that the language appears to be dying, following in the footsteps of Minahasan... :-/ But yeah, I'd love to see more detail too... so good luck, I suppose. Minaasak (talk) 14:31, 11 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]