Talk:Waorani language

name
hi. do you know why Lyle Campbell & Terrence Kaufman both use Sabela in their South American surveys? is this an older term that is being replaced? – ishwar  (speak)  01:15, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (www.ailla.utexas.org) also lists this language under Sabela. – ishwar  (speak)  03:31, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

Sabela (sometimes Ssabela) was the name used by researchers in the early 20th century, but I can't find why, the SIL and DINEIIB orthographies don't include an 's' sound, so it must be another people's word for them. This seems to be a general problem, but thankfully one that doesn't place the relevant wiki standards (most common usage, clearest self-identified term) in conflict, since the early linguistic work hasn't resulted in nearly as much discussion as later evangelization and concern about the oil conflict. --Carwil 01:39, 26 December 2005 (UTC)


 * I have a *very* vague recollection, from having talked with Catherine Peeke (an SIL linguist who worked many years in Wao Tededo) that 'Ssabela' is a name that explorers gave to an ethnic group somewhere in the vicinity of the Wao territory, but that the few recorded words of this Ssabela language--if it even is a language--were not identifiable as Wao (nor as Zaparo, nor any of the other languages extant in the area from the 1950s through 1990s). I just checked her pedagogical grammar and don't see any mention of Ssabela; I don't have a copy of her technical grammar.  The earlier Saint and Pike phonology does mention 'sabelo' in a footnote, but only in passing, referring to a McQuown 1955 article in American Anthropologist (57:501-570).  The Ethnologue lists 'Sabela' as another name for Waorani, so maybe my recollection of what Catherine said is wrong.  But as Carwil said, there's no /s/ in Wao Tededo.


 * BTW, Catherine Peeke wrote a bibliography of Wao, available at http://www.sil.org/silewp/2003/silewp2003-006.pdf.


 * Mcswell 16:39, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

It looks as though the WP:COMMONNAME continues to be Sabela, with Waorani/Huaorani or sometimes Wao/Huao given as an alt. We don't always use the endonym in English: vd. Welsh, German, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, so not having an /s/ is irrelevant.

Peeke uses the endonym, but other than that it appears that Sabela is the general term in English: Campbell 1997, 2000; Greenberg & Croft 2005; Lyovin 1997; Kaufman 1990; Nichols 1999; Payne 2010; and the Library of Congress subject headings. The Languages of the Andes uses 'Huao', and Ethnologue 'Waorani'. We don't use the most precise term on WP but the most common, unless it would be confusing, and there appears to be nothing confusing about 'Sabela'. So I'll leave the article there per COMMONNAME unless reason can be shown that it's inappropriate. — kwami (talk) 19:40, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

Requested move

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: page moved per request. - GTBacchus(talk) 17:50, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

Sabela language → Huaorani language – Relisted. Vegaswikian (talk) 18:56, 2 August 2011 (UTC) Comments needed. The current name appears to be more common in linguistic texts, but Huaorani or Waorani may be more common elsewhere. — kwami (talk) 21:27, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

Google suggests that 'Huaorani' may be more common overall, but that's with the dab 'language' added, and most linguistic texts, which use 'Sabela', don't speak of it literally as 'the Sabela language', whereas texts discussing the Huaorani people will commonly dab 'the Huaorani language'. This may be a case of the term shifting over time, and Ethnologue uses 'Waorani', but Doris Payne (2010) uses 'Sabela'. We should also consider that we generally want the articles on the people and their language under the same name.

Nother question is whether to use the Spanish spelling Huaorani or the more phonemic Waorani, or the root Huao / Wao. — kwami (talk) 21:27, 26 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Support. Sabela? Is that a recent move? I've never heard of it. I've heard of the Huaorani though and that's the most common in Spanish at least (although I guess that means nothing here). Rennell435 (talk) 01:12, 7 August 2011 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.


 * Let me repeat: Ssabela is not the term that I have ever heard anyone in Ecuador, Indian or not, use for this language, so I don't know how it can be called common. (Most Americans have never heard of this language, or if they have they've heard it called "Auca."  I for one have never heard linguists call it Sabela.)  And if the Ssabela people existed, there is no way to know whether they were the same people as the Waorani.  IMO, saying that the right/ common term for the Waorani is "Sabela" is sort of like saying that the right term for the Irish is Leprechaun. Mcswell (talk) 21:37, 8 November 2012 (UTC)