Talk:Beja language

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Untitled
the article needs to answer the question: is there an ethnic group name for the people who speak the beja language? Gringo300 23:42, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
 * Answer is the Beja people.

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Wedekind & Musa
Pathawi, please leave any other comments you may have here on the relevant talk page. I was able to independently confirm Cohen's 20% cognate ratio between Beja and the other Cushitic languages. I also found the open access link you alluded to at the bottom of the Wedekind & Musa url. However, it doesn't appear to mention either the Arabic transliteration or Ethnologue. Other than that, all seems okay. Soupforone (talk) 06:56, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

The Wedekind, Wedekind, and Musa book does not mention Ethnologue, nor did I ever say that it did: My comments to you on Ethnologue referenced a review in the journal Language, for which I provided a link and direct quotation from the abstract. Ethnologue does not provide the Arabic script version of the name of the language that you continue to reintroduce… I think this may come from Omniglot. This name is incorrect: It's not just an alternative. You can find the name of the language represented in Arabic script in dialogues on pages 126, 244, 245, and 267 of the PDF version of Wedekind, Wedekind, and Musa. You can also find an Arabic script representation in محمّد أدروب محمّد's translation of Roper's glossary. محمّد أدروب محمّد represents the name as بِذاوِيـّتْ. Wedekind, Wedekind, and Musa represent it as بِذاوِيـّتْ. I have not added these versions to the language name box because I can't find any reason to think that they are anything other than idiosyncratic, personal uses: The transcription used by Wedekind, Wedekind, and Musa was apparently employed by the now-defunct Website Sakanab, and is in use on the Website that Klaus Wedekind created before he passed away. The Roman transcription, however, is official in one country and has been used at the only university in a Beja-majority city in another. I have not been able to find the version بداوية in use by any source other than Omniglot. Omniglot is not a specialist source. The site's maintainer, Simon Ager, writes: 'I have A Levels in French and German, a BA (Hons) Chinese and Japanese, and an MA in Linguistics. I have also done short courses in Welsh and Irish, and in traditional Irish and Scottish Gaelic songs, and have taught myself quite a few other languages. So I know quite a lot about some languages, and a little about many others, but would not call myself an expert on any of them.' (here) The sources that the Beja page cites are Wolfram Siegel and Michael Peter Füstumum. I can't identify Siegel ('Wolfram Siegel' is a pretty normal-ish German name), but a Google search on his name in relation to "Beja" returns only Omniglot. Füstumum appears to be a contributor to Spanish Wikipedia. On his user page, he claims varying degrees of proficiency in Spanish, Catalan, English, French, Chinese, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Galician, but none in Beja, any other Cushitic language, or Arabic.

Wikipedia articles should be based on "reliable, published sources," among which "academic and peer-reviewed publications are usually the most reliable sources." The name بداوية does not appear in any peer-reviewed or otherwise academic source I can find. It is not in use on any Beja-language Website I can find. Do you have any source to support this representation?

Wedekind apparently has a work on Beja in the Arabic script. Can you point me to an open access link of it? Soupforone (talk) 14:23, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

I can't. It was on Dr Wedekind's personal Website, but he passed away a couple years ago and his site seems to have gone down in the interim. I've read it, though. If I recall correctly (it's been a couple years), it was an explanation of why Dr Wedekind thought Roman script was a better choice for representing Beja than Arabic. The reasons I remember were that Beja has five vowels, while written Arabic has only three, and that Roman script already had a degree of acceptance among Beja-speakers. (I can't support the first argument, though I've heard it made by a few native speakers. As to the second, the Roman system is used in a more or less consistent manner in Beja-speaker Facebook groups. You see the language written in Arabic frequently, but in an ad hoc, impressionistic manner.) I'm in Egypt where the Wayback Machine is blocked. If you're in a country with access, you may be able to get a copy of the paper from an archived version of Dr Wedekind's Website that way.

Why do you want an Arabic orthography to exist?

I checked out Ethnologue. It doesn't say that Arabic writing was "traditional," but merely that it's been used. The 2005 version of Wedekind, Wedekind, and Musa has this to say on page 6:

"There also is an Arabic transliteration of the Beja data. Among the various Arabic transliterations which were in use, this particular one has been promoted in the internet for several years. It distinguishes uu and ii from oo and ee, but its disadvantage is that it uses diacritics to do so. Recently, however, its main website (sakanab) stopped supporting it.

Since there still are Beja individuals who occasionally use Arabic letters for their language (cf. the “bejaculture” website), the Arabic transliteration - although defunct - has not been deleted from this book."

The 2007 version goes further on page 11:

"There have been two or three Beja writing systems based on Arabic letters. None of them has gained wide support in the speech community, and in 2007 even the most prominent one of these writing systems has been removed from Beja websites."

I can't find any indication in other sources that there's any older tradition of writing in Arabic. Roper, page 1, writes:

"It has no script and there is no trace of its ever having been written other than in Latin character by European travellers during the past hundred and fifty years." (1928)

Hudson, on page 2 of his thesis, describes Beja as "normally unwritten," but doesn't give any further detail. (1964) Vanhove makes no mention of writing in her sketch. On the first page of her 2006 overview, she describes Beja as "unscripted," but mentions that an SIL missionary named Anna Fisher was working on an Arabic-based orthography at that time. I haven't been able to find anything further on that orthography or Anna Fisher. I suspect it didn't get off the ground.

To go back further in search of a tradition of writing in Arabic: Münzinger describes Beja as an „ungeschriebene Sprache” on the first page of his grammatical sketch. (1864) Almkvist tells us (p 37): „[H]euzutage besitzen die Bedja-Völker weder Schrift noch Inschriften oder Literatur in ihrer eigenen Sprache. Ihre Laute können und sollen daher von uns it lateinischen Buchstaben bezeichnet werden.“ (1881) Reinisch agrees, saying in the very first sentence of the grammatical portion of his collection: „Die Bedscha sind des lesens und schreibens durchaus unkundig…” (1893)

Almkvist mentions that a writing system is mentioned by ابن النديم in his فهرست (eleventh century CE). I dug that up:

فأما أجناس السودان مثل النوبة والبجة والزغاوة والأسْتان والبربر وأصناف الزنج سوى السند فانهم يكتبون بالهنديّة المجاورة فلا قلم لهم يعرف ولا كتابة‥

وخبّرنى بعض من يجول فى الزرض ان للبجة قلما وكتابة ولم تصل الينا‥

That's on Arabic page 19 of the 1871 Flügel edition. (The Arabic pages start from the opposite side of the book from the Latin & German pages.) So, maybe a thousand years ago there was a Beja writing system, but: 1) it was rumour then; 2) it wasn't Arabic. Other Arabic sources from the era (collected by Vantini in his Oriental Sources Concerning Nubia) describe Beja-speakers as illiterate.

I don't think there's any other grammatical source where we might find something different, tho it's possible I'm forgetting something. Ethnologue is not wrong to say that Beja has been written in Arabic script: It has. It was probably written in Arabic script today. I've read it in Arabic script. I've written it in Arabic script. I have a photo I really like of a graffito of Beja in Arabic script. But this is a different thing from an actual orthographic system or a traditional practice. I don't know of any text longer than a Facebook post in Arabic script aside from محمّد أدروب محمّد's قاومس.

Two more things: 1) It turns out that the Wedekind paper you asked about his on his Academia.edu page! It's a little different from what I remember, but probably not useful for what you want. 2) I know of a masters thesis from the University of Khartoum from last year proposing that Beja should be written in Arabic script. I have so far been unable to obtain a copy. Pathawi (talk) 23:01, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

It would appear that the late Wedekind actually recommended the use of the Arabic script to write Beja. However, he apparently thought that Modern Standard Arabic was unsuitable for the purpose since it used weak letters for vowels and discouraged use of the shadda, sukuun and short vowels. Soupforone (talk) 05:29, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

He didn't recommend it: The paper says that "there would be no problem with" the use of Arabic script were it not for those problems. I think you'll find that his 1999 paper on the topic is the closest he comes to advocating the use of Arabic script, but no particular script and only in parallel with Latin. In 2005, he made use of a particular Arabic orthography as second-fiddle to the Latin orthography. By 2007, he'd given up on Arabic.

Can we consider this matter settled until there's some academic, journalistic, or native-speaker published ("published" by Wikipedia standards) source that attests to a consistent current Arabic orthography, or an actual traditional practice of writing Beja in Arabic? Pathawi (talk) 06:23, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

Wedekind actually did appear to recommend use of the Arabic script; albeit Classical Arabic rather than Modern Standard Arabic-- "Beja would seem predestined for the Arabic script, being the Cushitic language with the highest proportion of Semitic verbs, many Arabic loans, even tentatively classified closer to "Semitic" (Wedekind & Abuzainab 2006 / 2007)". Anyway, Bidhaawyeet seems okay for the infobox parameter. Soupforone (talk) 15:16, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

I disagree with your interpretation (this is a prelude to why one might think writing Beja in Arabic script makes sense, when he ends up focusing on difficulties—it is a rhetorical gesture at the beginning of a talk; note multiple forms of deliberate hedging with the conditional in that introductory section), but our disagreement here probably does not matter for the article. Pathawi (talk) 15:28, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

Citation Style
The citations for this article are a bit messy—in no small part my fault. I'd like to clean this up. I don't have a very strong opinion, but my inclination is to shift it to list-defined references, then do short citations throughout. Any thoughts from those who are watching this? Soupforone, you & I have had a couple back-&-forths, recently, which makes me think you might be the person most likely to have an opinion. What do you think? Pathawi (talk) 17:05, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

WP:CITETYPE indicates that full citations are the most commonly used citation method, so we should probably go with that. Soupforone (talk) 04:55, 22 November 2017 (UTC)

I'm not out-&-out opposed to long refs, but given that some are repeated, I thought short refs might make it easier to read. Pathawi (talk) 06:10, 22 November 2017 (UTC)

That would perhaps be feasible for those phrases. Soupforone (talk) 16:16, 22 November 2017 (UTC)

All right. Nearly three years later, I'm finally getting started on this. Because no one else responded to the above, I have assumed that there are no objections. My apologies if that's not the case. I've just finished the first phase of citation cleanup. I think I've improved legibility, but things still look a little wonky. I've gone thru & tidied up everything that occurs multiple times using sfn & sfnm. A little later (today or tomorrow), I'll integrate the one-offs. Pathawi (talk) 15:46, 25 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Looks great, you have my full support (although personally, I go for sfnp). Cushitic languages is still a mess in some parts, too (especially Cushitic languages), maybe we clean up there together. –Austronesier (talk) 19:45, 25 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Yeah, Cushitic could definitely use some work. I'd be very glad to collaborate with you on that. Pathawi (talk) 20:14, 25 May 2020 (UTC)

jʤdʒɟ…
I'm going to lean a little bit on personal knowledge of Beja, here, as a researcher & speaker of the language. I'm not trying to incorporate anything unpublished into the article, however: The phoneme that contemporary Latin Beja orthography represents as "j" is an odd one. It is one of the phonemes that Beja-speakers identify as Arabic, and it does occur most frequently in loanwords. However, it also occurs in Beja words that have no clear Arabic etymon, & it often appears as a development out of an alveolar or retroflex stop followed by /i/. (i.e., [coronal][+voice] → /ʤ/ /_i, so diik often becomes jiik; dhiw'areeb for some people becomes jiw'areeb) It is unquestionably phonemic, & it is a single phoneme. For broad transcription principles, it should be represented by a single sign.

It's for cases like this that the IPA introduced a ʤ ligature for dʒ: A phoneme should not appear to be a cluster. &, in fact, Vanhove uses this ligature to represent this phoneme in her work—not the two separate signs d & ʒ. (This is true not just for Vanhove 2014, which predates the most recent version of the IPA, but also for Vanhove 2017.)

It is true that the sign ʤ appears on prior published versions of the IPA table & does not appear in the post-2005 charts. However, I cannot find anything from the International Phonetic Association which indicates that the ligatures are deprecated: This seems to be an inference by non-phonologists/non-phoneticians drawn from the absence of the ligatures from the more recent charts. In fact, the Association continues to use the ligatures in its journal. For phonemic descriptions published to the Association's Website over the past twelve months: So of the twelve languages for which some IPA member made a decision in the past year: Three used tie bars, five use ligatures, four use two separate signs. Where /ʤ/ itself is in question, three used ʤ, two used dʒ, one used d͡ʒ. If the International Phonetic Association has deprecated ligatures in general—or the ʤ ligature specifically—it hasn't done a great job of it.
 * that for A'ingae uses ⁿ͡dʒ (could have been ⁿ͡ʤ or even ⁿʤ)
 * that for Malagasy uses tie bars (tho there is no d͡ʒ)
 * that for Bajau uses two separate signs (tho, again, no dʒ)
 * that for Bai uses ligatures (no ʤ)
 * that for Kalasha employs ligatures (no ʤ)
 * that for Kazakh employs ʤ (in a phonetic transcription of жолаушы as [ʤoɫɑwʃə]—the phoneme represented by Cyrillic ж is usually realised as [ʒ])
 * that for Kejom uses a tie bar d͡ʒ
 * that for Khuzestani Arabic uses the ligature ʤ
 * that for Punjabi uses the ligature ʤ
 * that for Scottish Gaelic uses two separate signs (tho no dʒ)
 * that for Urarina uses two separate signs dʒ
 * that for Xiangxiang Chinese uses two separate signs dʒ

Wedekind—in both 2004–2005 & 2007—mistakenly gives /j/ as the IPA sign for "j". I initially employed ɟ on this page, thinking that this was likely his intention (older IPA charts specify that ɟ may be used for ʤ). Vanhove uses the ligature ʤ both in 2014 and 2017. As the source you're drawing from uses the ligature, & as I can see no clear reason to believe that the International Phonetic Association has actually deprecated ligatures in general or this ligature specifically, it seems to me most appropriate to follow the usage of the researcher who does not appear to have maken a mistake.

Do you know of any explicit statement from the International Phonetic Association that the ligature is to be considered obsolete? Pathawi (talk) 20:23, 18 June 2020 (UTC)


 * I did look it up—a little while ago. You can continue the conversation here if you like. There are multiple reasons that this page should use the ligature, but the clearest of them is that we should follow the sources when there's not a clear reason not to; in this case, the relevant sources are Vanhove (who uses the ligature) & Wedekind (who uses nothing). When the IPA has printed more language descriptions using the ligature than the two signs over the course of a year, & when we're clearly dealing with a phoneme rather than a cluster, it's not clear to me why the version you prefer could be more proper. Pathawi (talk) 19:43, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

Phonological table word breaks
The reason why I support word breaks is because they organize the chart better, and gets rid of the excess space. It just makes it look nicer Fdom5997 (talk) 21:31, 18 June 2020 (UTC) dental " won't match a search for "labiodental". Pathawi (talk) 21:38, 18 June 2020 (UTC)
 * They also introduce an element of disorder. This is the sort of thing I might want to do for my own print publication in which I would want to exert the greatest degree of control over the appearance & in which readers would not have digital access to the text. In a digital format, however, it means that " labio-

Addressing issues of WP:COPYWITHIN
Pathawi

Hello, I tried to make edits, that were deleted. Is there any way I could add the text without it getting deleted? I wish to address any issue that is causing the problem. Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A00:23C8:4D00:A600:39A8:4617:A24:423D (talk) 22:09, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Well, I don't know. Let me tell you what I think the problems are, & then if you still think that something like that text should be there, we can see if we can work out a solution that accommodates whatever variation there is in perspective.
 * Here's what I think you want to do: You want to add a rather lengthy paragraph that goes thru the categorisations proposed by Joseph Halévy, Leo Reinisch, Martino Moreno, Enrico Cerulli, Archibald Tucker, Andrzej Zaborski, Robert Hetzron, Anthony Appleyard, Marcello Lamberti, and Didier Morin. This seems to be mostly a summary of a portion of an article by Martine Vanhove.
 * I have a few objections to this:
 * I think that the wheat gets lost in the chaff. It's excessive detail. WP:TMI puts it nicely: 'Wikipedia is not supposed to be a collection of every single fact about a subject.' It's hard to imagine someone who's getting their information on this matter from Wikipedia needing to know about Halévy. Or Moreno. Or Tucker. In general, I don't think that there's much benefit to including here information on theories from decades ago which didn't gain traction & aren't still under consideration by linguists. (The article on Sanskrit, for example, doesn't mention that Rasmus Rask classified it as a "Japhetic" language.)
 * This is related, but I think that a lot of this detail is about sources that aren't notable. Notability is a criterion for articles, not details in articles, but I do think it's suggestive for the overall project of Wikipedia.
 * Then there's the copywithin issue WP:COPYWITHIN: This text was added to both this page & Cushitic languages. I removed it here, but left it in place there. Most of this information was added in 2017 by one user. I removed it in May for the reasons under the previous bullets, & you've restored it basically as a whole. (Are you ? If not, then what's the route that led to your resuscitating material from old edits?) The page I've linked to explains the attribution problems with this. If it were worth keeping this information on this page, then it would be possible to do the re-addition in a way that respected the attribution. One solution here might be to add a See also template that links to Cushitic languages.
 * Hope that's clear. If you want to continue this, I recommend signing up for an account & logging in with it. It's easier to track most handles than it is to deal with a changing string of hexadecimal numbers.
 * Pathawi (talk) 05:31, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I agree not to duplicate the content from Vanhove's chapter with all its detail about historical proposals. These details are due in a OUP Handbook dedicated to African linguistics, but not in an encyclopedia like WP, as explained above by . Further, there is the problem of WP:close paraphrasing: the repetition of a complete narrative from a copyrighted source borders on WP:COPYVIO. –Austronesier (talk) 08:18, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Ethnologue & Other Sources
This article draws on a number of scholarly sources concerning the Beja language. While it is not my personal preferred form, "Beja" is the form that is in overwhelming majority use in recent publications. "Bedawiye" does not have consistent use across publications. The name that we use throughout the text of the article should reflect the name used as the title of the article; the title of the article should reflect most common usage. Throwing in other names in places other than verbatim citations makes the text confusing.

As for the supposed name بجاوية—Ethnologue reports this as a representation of Bidhaawyeet. This is an obvious error, & I am asserting that WP:COMMONSENSE allows us to WP:IGNORE a (so-called) reliable source when it has made a clear mistake. I have not removed تُبڈاوِ‎ as a representation of Tubdhaawi as there is no reason to think it is a mistake.

Finally: Ethnologue does not take precedence over other sources. Pathawi (talk) 01:19, 25 September 2023 (UTC)


 * OK but why did you remove the other Arabic word? it looked nice it would be both. Cookiemonster1618 (talk) 01:24, 25 September 2023 (UTC)
 * I removed بجاوية because it was definitely wrong. What other Arabic word? Pathawi (talk) 01:26, 25 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Wrong as in spelt or not the accurate Arabic name for the name of Beja language? also in Arabic it would be بدويت I believe or بجاوي Cookiemonster1618 (talk) 01:36, 25 September 2023 (UTC)
 * It is an Arabic name for the language. It is not an Arabic script representation of a Beja name for the language. In Sudan, people do often refer to the language in Arabic as بجاوية. The Arabic script representation of Bidhaawyeet would have been بِڈاوِيێت in a now-abandoned Arabisation. The only body that advocates an Arabic script representation of Bidhaawyeet now has not actually produced materials with enough detail to know how one would represent either /ɖ/ or /eː/, so we can only guess. Pathawi (talk) 01:46, 25 September 2023 (UTC)