Talk:Nawat language (typological overview)

New article
Please see my comments on the discussion page of the Pipil language article. --A R King 10:53, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

I still need to put in a bunch of wikilinks here. --A R King 11:15, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

Done! --A R King 16:37, 1 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Some great work here Alan, on this and the other Pipil-related articles - nicely done!


 * A suggestion: I gather these are intended somewhat as a series, and as such it could be useful to flesh out a little more with some context and cross-referencing and hierarchy between them. Ideally each wiki article should provide enough context and description that it can stand-up on its own without being entirely dependent on other articles, so maybe an introductory para or two might help describe what this article is about and how it relates to the topics covered in the other articles.


 * Would you have any objection if the article were to be retitled something simpler likePipil language typology or even Pipil typology? Regards,--cjllw | TALK  09:30, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your complement, cjllw, and for the suggestions. I accept your suggestion about "an introductory para or two", and will try to get around to that asap. As regards renaming the article, I do agree that the current title is a bit too complicated, but have some trouble with your suggestions (or any others I can think of) to simplify them because Pipil language typology or even Pipil typology as titles give progressively less and less information about what the article is really about. "Language typology" is a term referring to the general study of language types (i.e. how to go about classifying languages into types, and what we discover when we try to do this); this article does not discuss that, but gives an overview (from a typological perspective) of one particular language. As for Pipil typology, here it is no longer obvious (I think), in the context of a general encyclopaedia, that we're even talking about the language.

I would also point out that I do not see this article necessarily as a "one-off". Although I cannot commit to working on this at this stage, it might be interesting, as a long-term objective, for Wikipedia to include such typological sketches on many languages. I therefore think that it would be best to weigh up the issue you raise (of the title) from that broader perspective. If there were eventually to be a series of typological sketches of different languages, what format should their titles take? If not X language: typological overview, then what? --A R King 10:20, 29 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Well, if there were to be a number of articles of this nature for other languages (and one can see that these would be useful and welcome), I suppose that the naming convention (if it is to resemble other article names, if only for the slight convenience of consistency) would be either Typological overview of X language, or X language (typological overview), which are the two most common ways of titling articles which do not really have some definitive label. In general, article titles avoid colons, dashes and the like unless absolutely necessary, and qualifying terms are either written out in full or appear in brackets. The Naming conventions guidelines might also offer some pointers.


 * Thanks for fleshing out that intro, that should provide the casual reader coming across this with at least the background, nicely done.--cjllw | TALK  09:38, 30 October 2006 (UTC)