User:Chh8414/sandbox

Article evaluation
The Ticuna article was pretty barren when I came across it. I was intrigued by the language because of how unique it is in having 5 distinct tones. Most tonal languages have as many as 3 tones, so this one stood out. I also had come from trying to add to the Spanish language and since that one was so well-formed and thorough, it was a nice feeling to not have a ton of edits staring me in the face. Even though I speak some Spanish and had never heard of Ticuna, this ended up being a cool experience.

Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you?
The article was pretty minimal, so I wouldn't say there was an over-abundance of any information.

Is the article neutral? Are there any claims, or frames, that appear heavily biased toward a particular position?
The article does a good job of being neutral and there don't seem to be any stances that are biased.

Are there viewpoints that are overrepresented, or underrepresented?
Information about the language is lacking. The phonology section could use some information, and I think there could be a little more color about the language in general. I'm finding out some cool things that I think will make for a more interesting article.

Check a few citations. Do the links work? Does the source support the claims in the article?
Yes, they all work for me.

Is each fact referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference? Where does the information come from? Are these neutral sources? If biased, is that bias noted?
The information about Colombia is lacking a good reference.

Is any information out of date? Is anything missing that could be added?
The population numbers are slightly out of date. That's an easy fix.

Check out the Talk page of the article. What kinds of conversations, if any, are going on behind the scenes about how to represent this topic?
Not really much love for Ticuna right now :/

Article
Ticuna, or Tikuna, is a language spoken by approximately 50,000 people in Brazil, Peru, and Colombia. It is the native language of the Ticuna people. Ticuna is generally classified as a language isolate, but may be related to the extinct Yuri language (see Tïcuna-Yuri) and there has been some research indicating similarities between Ticuna and Carabayo. It is a tonal language, and therefore the meaning of words with the same phonemes can vary greatly simply by changing the tone used to pronounce them.

Tïcuna is also known as Magta, Maguta, Tucuna/Tukuna, and Tukna.

Brazil
Despite being home to more than 50% of the Ticunas, Brazil has only recently started to invest in native language education. Brazilian Ticunas now have a written literature and an education provided by the Brazilian National Foundation for the Indian (FUNAI) and the Ministry of Education. Textbooks in Ticuna are used by native teachers trained in both Portuguese and Ticuna to teach the language to the children. A large scale project has been recording traditional narrations and writing them down to provide the literate Ticunas with some literature to practice with.

Ticuna education is not a privilege, but part of a wider project carried on by the Brazilian government to provide all significant minorities with education in their own language.

In 2012, the Brazilian government launched an educational campaign for the prevention of AIDS and violence against women, the first such campaign in Brazil ever conducted in an indigenous language.

Peru
Ticunas in Peru have had native language education at least since the 1960s. They use a writing system that was, apparently, the base for the development of the Brazilian one. However, much of the literature available to Peruvian Ticunas comprise standard textbooks.

Colombia
Colombian Ticunas are taught in Spanish, when they have access to school at all. Since the establishment of Ticuna schools in Brazil some have ventured to attend them.

Christian Ministries
A number of Christian ministries have reached the Ticuna people. These ministries have translated the bible into the native Ticuna language and even have a weekday radio show that is broadcast in Ticuna, Portuguese, and Spanish by the Latin American Ministries (LAM).

Literacy
Besides its use at the Ticuna schools, the language has a dozen books published every year, both in Brazil and Peru. Those books employ a specially devised phonetic writing system using conventions similar to those found in Portuguese (except for K instead of C and the letter Ñ instead of NH) instead of the more complex scientific notation found, for instance, at the Language Museum.

In school Ticuna is taught formally. Children in schools typically in areas of Catholic Missionaries are also taught either Portuguese or Spanish as well.

Linguistic structure
Ticuna is a fairly isolating language morphologically, meaning that most words consist of just one morpheme. However, Ticuna words usually have more than one syllable, unlike isolating languages such as Vietnamese.

Research has indicated isolated tonal languages with complex tones are more likely to occur in regions of higher humidity and higher mean average temperature because it is believed the vocal folds can produce less consistent tones in colder, drier air. Ticuna was one of the languages of focus in this study due to it's prevalence -- and complexity -- of tones.

Classification
Although some typological similarities exist with other languages ​​of the region, it is the majority opinion that Ticuna is in fact an isolated language. However, some have tentatively associated within the macro-arawakano or with macro-tukano, although most experts consider that this classification is highly speculative, given the lack of available. More recently Ticuna has been associated with the Saliban languages, the Hoti and the Andoque.

Ticuna is an unusually tonal language for South America, with five level tones and four contour tones. Tones are only indicated orthographically, with diacritics, when confusion is likely. The six vowels may be nasal or laryngealized; consonants may also be glottalized. Glottal stop is spelled x, and the sixth vowel ü.

Typologically, Ticuna word order is subject–verb–object (SVO), though unusually this can vary within the language.

Phonology
Vowels qualities are. There are diphthongs and  that carry a single tone, contrasting with vowel sequences  and  that carry two tones. There are no long vowels, but instead sequences of identical vowels (such as aa) that carry two tones. Vowels may be nasalized or "laryngealized" (creaky voiced? the tones are lowered) or both.

The consonants of Ticuna consist of the following phonemes : Ticuna has no lateral or uvular consonants.

(spelled "y") may be pronounced before the vowel. are found in Spanish loans.

Tones are. Tones in spoken Ticuna are not related to an absolute pitch, but rather by the relative difference in pitch. The Cori Language is said to have six tone registers and is the only language suspected to have more tones than Ticuna.

=== Common words === The counting words in Ticuna imply a base five system of counting as the word for five is the combination of "one five". Six through nine all contain the same beginning "naixmixwa rü" and then append the values for one through four respectively (such that six is "naixmixwa rü" and "wüxi" meaning one).

Examples of spoken language
An example of spoken Ticuna can be found here.