Talk:Palauan language

Oceania navbox template
The Template:Oceania topic navbox template is used in a number of Oceanian articles. It requires a naming convention as follows: but since there is no page titled "Language of Palau," this shows a red link. Is there a compelling reason to keep this page title as Palauan language or would it be acceptable to move the article to Language of Palau. Because the Oceania topic template is used also for religion, literature, and language, to edit this template to include Palauan language would break the template for the other categories. Newportm (talk) 17:06, 7 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I just thought of an alternative; a new page at Language of Palau which redirects to Palauan language might work. How does that sound? Newportm (talk) 17:29, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Katakana
Katakana is listed as an orthography of Palauan, and Palauan is listed in the katakana article as being used in Palauan, but no description is given in this article. Wakablogger2 (talk) 09:37, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

Merge proposal
The only references to "Angaur" or "Angaurese" as languages or varieties are briefly and in passing. More explicitely, the 1945 John Useem article "The Changing Structure of a Micronesian Society" (American Anthropologist, Vol. 47, No. 4, pp. 567-588), describes the "Angaurese" people as speaking (or losing abilities to speak in) "Palau". Because it thus seems that Angaur(ese) is either a dialect or a synonym for Palauan, we should merge the incredulous-toned content at Angaur language here. — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi] 19:24, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Support. Belgian man (talk) 19:37, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm guessing that somewhere in the CIA dbase s.o. made a mistake, and that others have picked up on it, but that's just a guess. Still, since the ELL doesn't feel it's fit to mention, we should probably replace it w a redirect. IMO we shouldn't merge the text, but simply delete it, since it's all OR/synth. — kwami (talk) 12:07, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

It's a pro-drop language.
In the word order section, we write:
 * Those who accept the VOS analysis of Palauan word order generally treat Palauan as a pro-drop language [...]

And then give an example:
 * Ak milenga er a ringngo pro

Where pro is the 1st person pronoun that can be dropped.

Did we get confused here? So far as I can tell, there is no word pro in this language, and although the consonant cluster /br/ is pronounced [pr], it is still always spelled br and there is no sign of a word pro, bro, or even something like buro in this very thorough dictionary of the language. I wonder if somebody misread a linguistic abbreviation PRO as if it were an actual Palauan word.

Thoughts?

— Soap — 15:57, 27 March 2021 (UTC)
 * pro is indeed just an abstract notation here, there is no word "pro"; the actual pronoun that would appear here—if Palauan were not pro-drop—is ngak 'I'. So you say: Ak milenga er a ringo, not **Ak milenga er a ringo a ngak  (ak already expresses 'I', like the o in Spanish tengo—Spanish is optionally pro-drop, so you can also say yo tengo). The whole paragraph is fixated on a debate among theoritical linguists about the deep structure of Palauan, which is probably not of great interest to our readers. And the way it is written now (unglossed), it's not really intelligible. I'll think of how to rewrite it in a more accessible and non-theoretical language. –Austronesier (talk) 16:56, 27 March 2021 (UTC)


 * Okay thank you. Writing it in small caps helps a lot; the fact that it was spelled out as a normal word was all it took to make me think it was real.  — Soap — 18:56, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for the clarification tag! It is absolutely due and reminds me of the fact that for a long time I have intended to dejargonize the subsection "Word order". –Austronesier (talk) 18:15, 28 September 2022 (UTC)