User talk:Erutuon/2015

Ancient Greek stuff, continued
Since you're also working on the phonology article (and you're much much more an 'expert' on the relevant stuff than I am), one more comment: Thanatos|talk|contributions 09:17, 4 January 2015 (UTC)
 * 1. Note the cn tag I've added about interaspiration.
 * 2. Note the cn tag I've added about /w/ and /j/; i.e. the presentation of diphthongs in the article is missing what happens in prevocalic conditions.
 * 3. According to Vox Graeca or at least my understanding of it (pp 59, 71-75), ου = /o:/ (and = /o&#x35c;u/) pre-classically; in classical times ου = /u:/ (the article reads "During or soon after the classical period").
 * Good comments. I was aware that had probably already shifted to ; this should be noted in the article. Maybe the article uses the unshifted version partly because it makes the vowel system more symmetrical, at least in the area of mid vowels. For complete symmetry it would have to list upsilon as . But I know less about the other questions. — Eru·tuon 09:28, 4 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Well à propos, speaking about /u/ and symmetry, apart from /u:/ there is also /u/ as a second part of diphthongs, so shouldn't it be also included in the list, outside that is the diphthongs subsection? Thanatos|talk|contributions 15:45, 10 January 2015 (UTC)
 * You know, it occurs to me that probably υ in diphthongs changed to before becoming  and then  — this would explain why it developed differently from ordinary υ. However, this is unsourced, so never mind. But yes, it would be appropriate to include  as the second part of diphthongs in the vowels section, with a note that it only appears in diphthongs, and that it may represent a semivowel . (Although I would have to look at Allen to determine if this is precisely what he says.) — Eru·tuon 20:53, 10 January 2015 (UTC)
 * How it got to represent v/f in later Greek seems secondary, at least at the present stage of the article. But yes please do read Vox Graeca! Cause apart from all the stuff I've already mentioned it's also time to comment on something imo more important about which I'm less certain whether I've understood the book correctly, something less clear (due to e.g. Allen not using IPA), i.e. on ε and o being, according at least to my understading of it, mids and not close-mids as the article reads (and about which it also contradicts itself inside the relevant table); I need an experts opinion on this... There seems to be an otherwise accepted by some scholars view (the article reads: "It is apparent that short mid vowels were close-mid") with which Allen disagrees (V.Gr. reads: "The view that they were of a specially close mid quality...is probably mistaken"). So if V.Gr. is to be considered authoritative we must change what is being claimed or at least mention both views... PS Need I point to the the consequences on the IPA pronunciation of Greek words that have been added in countless articles based presumably in some part on this article and the Help:IPA for Greek one? PPS' Btw we probably have similar issues regarding modern Greek phonology... Thanatos|talk|contributions 22:19, 10 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I actually did read through Vox Graeca over the past few days; it inspired a revelation regarding Ancient Greek pitch accent and poetry for me. I think I read it before, and may have seen the assertion that epsilon and omicron were close-mid; I wonder if Allen earlier asserted that, and then revised his opinion in the newer edition of his book based on the evidence. I think his assertion that they were mid rather than close-mid is possible, although I do not find the picture of the mid vowels and diphthongs with mid starting points presented in his work to be entirely coherent. For instance, why were the digraphs used for the close-mid vowels; and why was only epsilon used before then? And precisely what was the pronunciation of the digraphs before vowels? And why were the short mid vowels lengthened to close-mid in Attic, but open-mid in Doric? However, that doesn't really matter — the page should be changed to reflect his view, unless there are sources that disagree with him, in which case the two points of view should be presented with their reasoning.
 * I think both Ancient Greek phonology and the IPA help page need significant revision; the simple picture presented in them is not at all accurate. And after the page is corrected, all the pronunciations of Ancient Greek words on Wikipedia will have to be revised to reflect the new more complex picture. This won't be too hard, just laborious, since a list of at least most of the pronunciations that need to be fixed can be compiled by finding all transclusions of IPA-grc. — Eru·tuon 22:34, 10 January 2015 (UTC)
 * "it inspired a revelation regarding Ancient Greek pitch accent and poetry for me". Although I suspect I won't understand a thing, do share it with us! :)
 * "I wonder if Allen...revised his opinion in the newer edition of his book based on the evidence". No access to newer edition(s); going by 1st ed., 1968.
 * " I think his assertion...is possible, although I do not find...to be entirely coherent". Had I, among other things, trained as a linguist...
 * "For instance, why were the digraphs used for the close-mid vowels". No idea. Would be wild guessing if I were to try to give an answer, so better not to.
 * "why was only epsilon used before then" A guess, this time I think I could provide a reasonable guess/answer provided, that is, I understand the question, would be perhaps due to the old attic aphabet, pre standardisation? Same thing about omicron.
 * "And precisely what was the pronunciation of the digraphs before vowels?" Assuming you're talking about EI (and ΟΥ) and the page 69 exception, and with the disclaimer that I'm guessing and conjecturing since there is no explicit explanation thereof in V.Gr., I would a. understand said exception as a different path to shifting to 'i' at later times, not as different values during the classical times prevocalically, and b. extend the prevocalic geminated semivowel pronunciation, asserted elsewhere, to them when they used to also have diphthongal values.
 * "And why were the short mid vowels lengthened to close-mid in Attic, but open-mid in Doric?" No idea. This kind of whys are way behond me...
 * Note: Although I've generally read stuff, I won't pretend to have a false sense of tapeinophrosyne, this is perhaps what consulting 'experts' is for... ;-) Thanatos|talk|contributions 11:11, 11 January 2015 (UTC)

The inspiration regarding poetry is not quite fully developed yet, and it has a long path to go on before it gets published, but I can give a few points. First, Allen's points about the falling pitch being important and the last syllable in a word having high pitch are true. Second, pitch, stress, and vowel length changed in Koine Greek; the accent marks reflect the Koine system, not the Ancient Greek system. Third, Classical Greek pitch and stress explain poetic meter, and I have found a pronunciation system that makes sense of the first parts of the Iliad, Odyssey, and Oedipus Rex. Now, these statements are rather cryptic, but regrettably I feel I can only give a "teaser trailer" version of my theory, until I am able to fully describe it and have it published or otherwise attached to my name. However, once I record some poetry with my pronunciation, I may make it available online and give you the link.

I realize the Ε Ο vs. ΕΙ ΟΥ thing represents an Old Attic vs. Ionic alphabet distinction, but I am kind of curious if there is not an explanation having to do with the structure of the language changing at the same time as the change in the alphabet. Maybe the monophthongization of diphthongs explains it, though. Similarly, I think the use of Η Ω for long vowels in Doric and Aeolic (I think it's used in both) must have an explanation in the structure of the language: maybe diphthongs were not monophthongized in Doric, or maybe the long mid vowels had a different quality, or maybe there were two long mid vowels? I think Allen does not try to figure this question out, when he could, by logically determining the alternatives and selecting one or leaving the question open.

So I guess Allen didn't revise his opinion, because I have the later edition, and he says the same thing in it. Maybe the other opinion originated in traditional Greek grammars. Smyth at least says that Ε Ο were less open than Η Ω, but that is ambiguous. — Eru·tuon 20:16, 11 January 2015 (UTC)

It seems Allen has developed the theory of pitch and stress in Ancient Greek in his book Accent and Rhythm: Prosodic Features of Latin and Greek, but I have to get ahold of this book and see how it compares to my theory. It may prove that he discovered it before me. In any case, the article could be updated based on information from it. — Eru·tuon 00:33, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

However, I am surprised that the second edition of Vox Graeca (1987), released after Accent and Rhythm (1973), does not seem to indicate a discovery of the recitation of Greek poetry, which my theory would involve. And at least none of the recitations available online seem to be like the system I have discovered. — Eru·tuon 00:37, 12 January 2015 (UTC)
 * So I'll be waiting for a copy of the paper, free of charge of course! The link to the audio file, the recording, would also be welcome but I have to say that my brain can't really process, among other things, tones or pitches; reading about them is one thing, actually hearing them... ;-) Thanatos|talk|contributions 09:17, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

AWB etc
I've autopatrolled you and given you AWB access at Commons. INeverCry  07:32, 5 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks! :) — Eru·tuon 07:34, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

Gallo-Italic
Hello That is not the problem. It is perfectly sourced with David Dalby, please, read before reverting.Nortmannus (talk) 00:48, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Actually, the source does not agree with either grouping in the article. The source only includes the groups Tuscan and Neapolitan and Sicilian (correction: also Corsican) within Italo-Romance; it does not include Venetian, Gallo-Italian, or Corsican within that group. So neither the grouping you prefer nor the other grouping is correct according to the source. I suppose these groupings must be based on another source besides the Linguasphere document. — Eru·tuon 01:05, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Weasel words in Punjab, Pakistan
You today restored the weasel word tab to Punjab, Pakistan. It would be helpful if, on the talk page for that article, you could indicate which sentences you consider contain the offending phrases, so that other editors could work to remove them. Apuldram (talk) 21:46, 9 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Done. — Eru·tuon 00:02, 10 January 2015 (UTC)

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Asterisk
No objection to your recent edit (as long as "ungrammatical" and "unacceptable" are not in quotation marks); my reason for separating the sources was that Quirk et al. (including Leech) explicitly eschew the term "ungrammatical" ("We sometimes contrast acceptable and unacceptable examples, marking the latter by placing an asterisk before them. ... The terms 'grammatical' and 'ungrammatical' are commonly used by nonspeciaists as synonyms of 'acceptable' and 'unacceptable'. We have avoided using the former terms in this book . . .".--Boson (talk) 15:57, 20 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the response. I'm curious what distinction they're making. Is it between ungrammatical in the sense of "breaking the prescriptive rules of formal written English" and unacceptable in the sense of "an utterance that sounds wrong to a native English speaker", or something else? The notion that non-specialists use grammatical in the sense of acceptable seems dated. In my class on syntactic theory, I recall the two being used interchangeably, perhaps even by Chomsky, who is surely a "specialist", but I could be misremembering. — Eru·tuon 16:41, 20 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Well, they do discuss "unacceptable" being wider:
 * "Acceptability is a concept that does not apply exclusively to grammar. Native speakers may find a particular sentence unacceptable because (for example) they consider it logically absurd or because they cannot find a plausible context for its use . . ."
 * but write that they are, in this context, "concerned only with the acceptability of forms of constructions on the grounds of morphology or syntax".
 * I think your change is perfectly OK because Quirk et al. make it clear that they are talking about the grammatical sort of unacceptability.
 * They say in a note that they avoid 'grammatical' and 'ungrammatical' because of "the various meanings which they have even among linguists". I suspect the main reason is that a non-linguist reader might understand "grammatical" in a prescriptive sense and they want to stress that the test is acceptability to a native speaker.
 * I presume Chomsky's "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" would be a case of something that is unacceptable for non-syntactic reasons, but I'm not sure how they would deal with things like "sleep" requiring an animate subject.
 * Chomsky distinguished between grammaticality, based on "competence", and acceptability, based on "performance" (which may depend on things like memory limitations):
 * "The notion 'acceptable' is not to be confused with 'grammatical'. Acceptability is a concept that belongs to the study of performance, whereas grammaticalness belongs to the study of competence." [Aspects of the Theory of Syntax]
 * So, I suppose, the following use of the asterisk would, strictly speaking, imply unacceptability rather than ungrammaticality:
 * The rat ate the malt.
 * The rat that the cat killed ate the malt.
 * ? The rat that the cat that the dog worried killed ate the malt.
 * * The rat that the cat that the dog that the cow tossed worried killed ate the malt.
 * --Boson (talk) 18:17, 20 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Hm, interesting examples — the syntactic equivalent of tongue-twisters. So, unacceptability and ungrammaticality are different in Quirk et al. and in Chomsky, but different in separate ways. Unacceptable in Chomsky seems to mean essentially a mistake in speech, which may include ungrammatical utterances and utterances that are incorrect for reasons other than ungrammaticality (like Chomsky's famous sentence, and like accidental substitutions of phonemes or words) — and unacceptable utterances may be made by competent or incompetent speakers.


 * I think the last example is more of an example of perception-related unacceptability than performance-related, since a speaker could probably never produce that utterance, even by accent — it's too hard to remember all those nested phrases! — Eru·tuon 19:53, 20 January 2015 (UTC)
 * The last example is meant to illustrate the difference between Chomskyan "competence", which refers to the (idealized) system of internalized "rules", and "performance", which is, for instance, also affected by limitations in the brain's ability to apply those rules correctly, in this case by severe limitations in humans' ability to process centre-embedding (as opposed to right-embedding, as found in the more normal form of the nursery rhyme. The internalized rule, which determines grammaticality, is assumed to permit (in principle unlimited) recursive application of embedding but the human brain has great difficulty with more than three levels. Use of the term "right-branching" rather than "right-embedding" might better reflect the difference in quality. I think of this as somewhat similar to the relative complexity of implementing recursion and iteration in software. --Boson (talk) 21:53, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

Ungrammatical
Something can be ungrammatical that most modern native speakers might find relatively acceptable, but that still is formally considered incorrect. Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 18:20, 22 January 2015 (UTC)
 * That sounds accurate, although I'm curious, are you thinking of "ungrammatical" or "formally incorrect" in the definition of traditional prescriptive grammar or modern linguistic descriptivism? For instance, ending a sentence or phrase with a preposition is considered incorrect traditionally, because it causes a preposition to not come before a noun or pronoun, but is considered grammatical in modern linguistics, because the offending fact can be explained by syntactic movement (which shows that the preposition, at some level of analysis, does have a noun or pronoun after it). — Eru·tuon 18:57, 22 January 2015 (UTC)
 * You would have to give me a different example, because that one is a bit iffy at least as far as I am concerned. For instance, I would find "To whom are you talking to/with?" to be a legitimate, grammatical sentence, as well as "That is where he came from", but not (save maybe one particular instance that I can't exactly describe) "You are talking to/with whom?", nor "Are you coming with?" Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 19:52, 22 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I think only the first two examples are what I'm thinking of. The second-to-last example could be uttered when the speaker is surprised. the last one has with as an adverb rather than as a preposition, like off in I'm jumping off as opposed to I'm jumping off a cliff, and this meaning only appears in Upper Midwest American English, as far as I know.


 * So the first two examples both have prepositions at the end, and the first could also be considered redundant, since it has to at the beginning and to/with at the end. Both would be forbidden by prescriptivist grammar, but I would only find the first unacceptable because of the redundancy. Yet, your judgement shows that not all speakers agree with me, and if their judgements are considered evidence of grammaticality, which they would be by some writers, then the first two examples are grammatical as well as acceptable.


 * But I'm getting sidetracked; what was the point you were originally making? That there is a distinction between acceptable and grammatical or correct? And this relates to my edit in Asterisk? — Eru·tuon 20:26, 22 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes to the first question and no to the latter. I only objected to your claim that there was no difference between the two. I didn't object to your actual edit. Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 20:57, 22 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Ah, I see. Well, you have convinced me (if I wasn't already convinced) and thanks for the correction. — Eru·tuon 21:36, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Minor edits
A random notice to anyone interested: I've realized I use minor edits too often, in situations where I delete or add significant amounts of text. I'll try to do better in future. If this has caused you any inconvenience, my apologies. — Eru·tuon 07:39, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the good editing work on the Phonology section of English language article
Hi, Erutuon,

Thanks for your thorough editing on the Phonology section of the article English language. I'll still be slogging through gathering up all the sources for quite a while yet, but I could tell that that section needed more coherency, and I'm glad you are providing that and checking doubtful statements along the way. Keep up the good work. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 02:51, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Glad to help. Do you mean sources for the Pronunciation section, or for the whole article? If you look at sources on pronunciation, I'd appreciate anything on the problematic vowels . — Eru·tuon 04:59, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

Yod-retention
My dialect distinguishes the pair, so I appreciate putting clarification on the matter into the page. Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 00:07, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Do you mean that you pronounce yew and you differently, as in Welsh English? If so, it would be wonderful if you could record an audio illustration of you yew in a single soundfile, which could then be put in the article. I think many readers, like me, won't know what the two sound like when they are distinguished.


 * The wording needs further clarification, since given the example of Welsh English, the change of yod-dropping was not actually yod-dropping per se (not the loss of a consonant), but loss of the first part of a diphthong. I'm not sure if sources are unclear on this fact, or if someone thought that saying that a yod was dropped would be more understandable than saying that a diphthong lost its first element.. — Eru·tuon 00:18, 22 February 2015 (UTC)


 * https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:You-YewDistinction.ogg
 * There you go.


 * The best way that I can describe it is the difference between "ooh" and "eww". Or are those not distinguished usually in many dialects?


 * Also, the reason that it is often called "yod-dropping" is because most British dialects have shifted /ɪu/ to /ju/, and then note that "certain dialects drop the /j/". Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 00:52, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the recording. Perhaps I should've made it clear that I meant something like En-us-bowed bout.ogg. Here I recorded a pair of words each with separate stress, which in English includes a full fall in pitch on each word separately, and with no verbal introduction, so that they can be easily compared. In this case, the idea is to yell out something like "You! Yew!"


 * I cut your recording a bit in Audacity so that I could hear the words next to each other. It's hard for me to hear the difference in your recording, but I guess it sounds like the front approximant or vowel in your second pronunciation is slightly longer than in the first pronunciation, which I guess indicates that you're saying.


 * Actually, I would pronounce ooh and eww differently: ooh is and eww is maybe  or . That's kind of similar to the distinction you're making, I guess, just minus the y . — Eru·tuon


 * That is how I analyse it as well. Words such as "do", "room", "roof", "hoof", "aloof", "goo", "ruth", "root", "to", "too", "shoo", "zoo", "boo", "route", "moot", "cool" and "choose" have [u(ː)], whilst words such as "dew", "due" "rue", "sue", "Lew", "Tue", "blue", "new" "blew", "shoes" and "chews" have [ɪʊ̯]. However, there is one thing that I must note: if the ew/ue is preceded by r, then something along the lines of [ɹɪ̯uw] is produced, rather than the expected [ɹɪʊ̯]. Frankly, I have no idea why this is. Does it have something to do with the nature of /ɹ/? Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 04:20, 22 February 2015 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure. Phonetically is usually a labialized postalveolar approximant . The labialization could cause vowel changes, like the development of a labialized velar approximant at the end of the diphthong. Though it's odd, because there's an unrounded vowel directly after the vowel in, which would maybe not usually be rounded. I guess the reason why would depend on the precise phonetic change: I'm not quite sure what it is, the change of  from nucleus to edge of the syllable, from full vowel to semivowel, the change of near-close  to close , or the development of final ? Hard question. — Eru·tuon 04:28, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Well then it's probably the change of [ɪ] from nucleus to edge of the syllable that is the root cause of the other changes. I think [ɹ̠ʷɪ] → [ɹɪ̯], and thus as a result [ʊ̯] changes to [uw], leading to [ɹɪ̯uw]. Sounds about right to me.
 * In any case, I hope my audio file was of use to you in some way. Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 05:04, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, the file was useful to me. But if it's not too much trouble, could you re-record it in the way mentioned above? (I highlighted the relevant text in teal.) And a filename more like the other files in c:Category:U.S. English pronunciation would be File:En-us-you yew.ogg. — Eru·tuon 05:15, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
 * If I have some time tomorrow, I'll try doing that. I do not like labelling audio files that I record with "US", however (if you have ever seen my Wiktionary pronunciations, they all for the most part say "en-ne-blahblahblah.ogg".) This is because, when I contribute audio files, they are usually giving my local New England pronunciation, not General Whosis manufactured dialect nonsense. In fact, I've only contributed audio to Wikitionary thus far if I recall correctly. Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 06:46, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Oh yes, I did see that you'd rather be called New Englander than American. I don't personally take en-us as implying General American. I label my files as en-us since I am from the United States, but my pronunciation is not General American exactly, but somewhat influenced by another dialect (which will remain nameless for now). But you may make your own choice. ne stands for Nepali, which causes no ambiguity, and might be used for Northern England English, though there aren't any soundfiles of that dialect on Wikimedia Commons that I have seen, so it should be fine — Eru·tuon 07:17, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
 * To be fair, since I have been uploading New England audio files for a long time now to Wiktionary via Wikimedia Commons, wouldn't the conflict actually be if someone from Northern England were to attempt to use "en-ne" in the future, rather than me continuing to use it as I have been for years?
 * Also: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:En-ne-you_yew.ogg Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 18:08, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Added to the article. Not totally sure if the distinction is that audible, so we'll see what others think. — Eru·tuon 20:47, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Well, forgive my frankness, but I don't really think that the distinction is audible much at all to people that don't make it in the first place. Nothing can be done about that; it can't be helped. /j/ and /ɪ/ are fairly close sounds, plus /u/ and /ɪu/ are merged in most dialects. I have heard very young people lacking /u/ entirely in their speech, and solely using /ɪu/. You shouldn't expect those without a discerning ear or those that merge /u/ and /ɪu/ to hear any distinction at all whatsoever. That's just how it is with this particular sound pair. Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 22:01, 22 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Naw, frankness is fine. I'm wondering, though, if you're not thinking of the fronting of rather than change to a diphthong. I don't think most speakers say, but they do say  or even  (if it's not near-close rather than close) — or at least that's true of me. I'll record my impression of the difference between the two for you. Actually, maybe if you recorded ooh and eww, that would provide a better comparison, since those would just have  and , without the initial , or so I assume.
 * It's certainly possible or even likely that I can't hear the difference, and that may be because in my pronunciation your two versions would be acceptable allophonic pronunciations of the diphthong, rather than phonemically distinctive pronunciations. However, I think the auditory difference might be greater if you emphasized it more. — Eru·tuon 22:25, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
 * I recorded "ooh" and "eww", and will soon upload it. The difference is a little softer than in the recording, but I exaggerated it a bit for clarity. Just keep that in mind.

I would still keep the audio file for "you" and "yew" there as well, in case someone else questions whether the distinction can still be made after /j/. In many British dialects that use /ju/ for /ɪu/, that would usually not be the case, from what I've heard. So having a pronunciation from a dialect that contrasts /u/ and /ɪu/ rather than /u/ and /ju/ would be quite useful for that purpose. Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 22:31, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
 * I won't delete the audio file unless someone objects.


 * Emphasizing would not be a bad thing. A similar example would be the difference between voiceless and voiced stops at the end of a word: nip versus nib has a relatively small phonetic difference, since sometimes the b is not fully voiced, but it's enough for a native speaker to usually figure out what the sound is. The small difference in the stop articulation would have another cue added to it: the length of the vowel, which is greater before a voiced sound. And if the words are emphasized, the voiced stop could be given full voicing rather than just partial voicing, or the voiceless stop could be given aspiration. Similarly, maybe the difference between can be emphasized in a way that is not unnatural for your speech. — Eru·tuon 22:39, 22 February 2015 (UTC)


 * There you go. Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 22:49, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Cool! Thanks! And here I have no problem hearing the difference. Phonetically, it sounds like the difference is between and, and the diphthong has a central beginning, rather than near-front. — Eru·tuon 22:57, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
 * How could that be? /ɨ/ is the vowel that I use in the word "roses". I hear no /ɨ/ in that sound clip. Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 23:01, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Well, I'm not sure. Actually, it is more accurate to say that the diphthong begins with a near-close central vowel: . If your -vowel is different from the first element of the diphthong, perhaps your is not phonetically  but rather something else. I'm not sure what, since I haven't heard it. The reason why I say  rather than  is because it seems to me that the starting vowel is clearly central rather than near-front. — Eru·tuon 23:09, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Yeah, the literal status of my vowels is far from what would usually be expected, as I describe on my userpage. This probably has something to do with my ancestors being a mixture of Irish, Polish, French, Portuguese and Algonquian (as well as perhaps a few other things due to one ancestor being unknown through my father's side), as well as the fact that, although I was born in the late '90s, my parents were born in the very early '60s. Plus, I am a New Englander, so that also plays a part in the makeup of my sound inventory. Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 23:24, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

That is certainly true in some cases (I listened to some of your soundfiles). However, I think your pronunciation of as  is quite widespread, since I have it too, and it's the pronunciation I usually hear. The IPA vowel symbols used for English are problematic in many ways, even for "General American" and RP.

Your pronunciation of burrow and similar words, and when, however, is pretty distinctive: a conservative feature. I realize you don't have a lot of time, but when you can get to it, could you also record hurry–furry and wine–whine for  and ? You needn't record all of these at once, but whenever you feel like it, since you are busier than I am. — Eru·tuon 00:00, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Sure thing. Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 00:17, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

Audio files
Here you go: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:En-ne-hurry_furry.ogg, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:En-ne-wine_whine.ogg Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 21:03, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Cropped them a little, and added them to the articles. Awesome! — Eru·tuon 23:16, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

Icelandic recordings
Yea, sure. Did you have any in mind? --Steinninn 17:50, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Language-population update project
Hi. The 18th edition of Ethnologue just came out, and if we divide up our language articles among us, it won't take long to update them. I would appreciate it if you could help out, even if it's just a few articles (5,000 articles is a lot for just me), but I won't be insulted if you delete this request.

A largely complete list of articles to be updated is at Category:Language articles citing Ethnologue 17. The priority articles are in Category:Language articles with old Ethnologue 17 speaker data. These are the 10% that have population figures at least 25 years old.

Probably 90% of the time, Ethnologue has not changed their figures between the 17th and 18th editions, so all we need to do is change "e17" to "e18" in the reference (ref) field of the language info box. That will change the citation for the artcle to the current edition. Please put the data in the proper fields, or the info box will flag it as needing editorial review. The other relevant fields are "speakers" (the number of native speakers in all countries), "date" (the date of the reference or census that Ethnologue uses, not the date of Ethnologue!), and sometimes "speakers2". Our convention has been to enter e.g. "1990 census" when a census is used, as other data can be much older than the publication date. Sometimes a citation elsewhere in the article depends on the e17 entry, in which case you will need to change "name=e17" to "name=e18" in the reference tag (assuming the 18th edition still supports the cited claim).

Remember, we want the *total* number of native speakers, which is often not the first figure given by Ethnologue. Sometimes the data is too incompatible to add together (e.g. a figure from the 1950s for one country, and a figure from 2006 for another), in which case it should be presented that way. That's one use for the "speakers2" field. If you're not sure, just ask, or skip that article.

Data should not be displayed with more than two, or at most three, significant figures. Sometimes it should be rounded off to just one significant figure, e.g. when some of the component data used by Ethnologue has been approximated with one figure (200,000, 3 million, etc.) and the other data has greater precision. For example, a figure of 200,000 for one country and 4,230 for another is really just 200,000 in total, as the 4,230 is within the margin of rounding off in the 200,000. If you want to retain the spurious precision of the number in Ethnologue, you might want to use the sigfig template. (First parameter in this template is for the data, second is for the number of figures to round it off to.)

Dates will often need to be a range of all the country data in the Ethnologue article. When entering the date range, I often ignore dates from countries that have only a few percent of the population, as often 10% or so of the population isn't even separately listed by Ethnologue and so is undated anyway.

If Ethnologue does not provide a date for the bulk of the population, just enter "no date" in the date field. But if the population figure is undated, and hasn't changed between the 17th & 18th editions of Ethnologue, please leave the ref field set to "e17", and maybe add a comment to keep it so that other editors don't change it. In cases like this, the edition of Ethnologue that the data first appeared in may be our only indication of how old it is. We still cite the 14th edition in a couple dozen articles, so our readers can see that the data is getting old.

The articles in the categories linked above are over 90% of the job. There are probably also articles that do not currently cite Ethnologue, but which we might want to update with the 18th edition. I'll need to generate another category to capture those, probably after most of the Ethnologue 17 citations are taken care of.

Jump in at the WP:LANG talk page if you have any comments or concerns. Thanks for any help you can give!

— kwami (talk) 02:44, 4 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the note. Looking at the category, there's certainly a lot of work to do. Till now I haven't become acquainted with Ethnologue, but doesn't look too hard to use. I'll help out a bit, though can't guarantee how much work I'll do, of course. — Eru·tuon 02:56, 4 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Hey, thanks. Every bit helps. If we got 50 volunteers at WP:LANG to help out, it would only be 100 articles each, which isn't too bad.  Though we're probably going to get more like 5.
 * BTW, with data like at Amoltepec Mixtec, I like to spell out that the ethnicity figure is undated, as most readers will otherwise assume it's the same as the date for the population figure. No biggie, though.  — kwami (talk) 03:26, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Oh, for Abaza language, the remaining 10k is spelled out. That's why there's a range of dates.  The top of an Ethn. article is just the info from the primary country, along with the total; details on other countries are collapsed at the bottom of the page.  I'm constantly forgetting to check the bottom and missing things.  — kwami (talk) 03:30, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the two notes! Both are helpful. I prefer not to confuse readers, so I'll make sure to spell out the lack of a date when applicable. And I didn't notice the collapsed data at the bottom. That makes sense of the number of significant figures in several of the articles I updated, and the dates. I'll try to pay attention to it in future. — Eru·tuon 03:51, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

Style
I am noting some systematic differences in our writing styles. I try to build sentences and paragraphs so that the main peace of information is introduced early in the sentence or paragraph and then further detail is added in the later part. You seem to do it the other way round so that you add background first and then the result or significant event towards the end. My rationale for writing the way I do is to make it easier for the reader to see the topic of each sentence and paragraph e.g. "Chancery English was developed" and then use that as a background for reading the subsequent sentences on what caused that event "because of the court and printing". This I think makes for effective and pithy writing when space is limited, and the reader needs to be guided through the piece by the hand. Your way of writing is in my opinion more apt for writing that allows for a greater degree of detail and allows the author to demand more from the reader. (i.e. yuo write "The court started using English. The printing press was introduced. This led to the chancery standard becoming widespread." whereas I write "Chancery standard became standard because of its use at the court and in printing.") In your example the reader doesnt know the significance of sentence 1 and 2 untill she has read sentence 3. In mine the significance is first, then the cause. I am not necessarily opposed to your kind of writing, I just would like you to take this difference into consideration - because I am not just doing it willyn illy, but have put some thought into it.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 23:08, 9 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Since I watch both of your user talk pages, I of course saw this discussion. Yes, I think it fits reader expectations on Wikipedia better for just about all paragraphs to begin with a topic sentence that gives the overall conclusion of the paragraph, followed by appropriate sentences that fill in the supporting details. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 23:21, 9 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Hmm, thanks for the note. I agree that main points should be first, and you're quite right that I've failed to do this, not only in the EME section, but also in the OE section, where I put Common Brittonic and Latin first. I've mostly rewritten with the goal of making sentence structure more direct, since I think many of your sentences have been overly circuitous. But I'll try to add the goal of putting main points first, and correct some of my earlier rewrites that have failed to do this. Thanks for letting me know, and if I continue making this mistake, by all means call it to my attention. — Eru·tuon 23:45, 9 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I don't consider it a mistake as long as you do it deliberately. And there may well be reasons to not follow my way of doing it in certain occasions, for example you are right that it may be come kind of circuitous when you have the topic sentence, then the causes and then underscore the result again. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know my own motivations, so that we can both be deliberate about the information packaging style in the paragraphs. ·maunus · snunɐɯ· 04:34, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Measure twice before cutting once
Hi, Erutuon,

This may not be your issue, so maybe I'm writing for onlookers here more than for you, but a few times already on the English language article I have carefully checked references at libraries, only to see the references get chopped out of article text without talk page discussion, while meanwhile huge sections of the article expand with no references at all. In general, at this stage of editing the article, it's great to continue refining and shortening article text, but please leave the references in place (perhaps this is already your habit), especially if they continue to support the article text after it is revised. I am checking the references throughout the article very exactly. A reference in named-reference form inline in the article has already been checked by me, and a reference in short-footnote form inline in the article has already been checked by Maunus, and will soon be rechecked by me. I will be deleting some references, soon replacing them with better references (including several books that Maunus told us about) in the Geographical distribution and Vocabulary and Writing sections, but that's only after making sure that I can replace those references with better references. The English language article, based on its history of edit-warring in the lede section even with semi-protection, will need suitably general references for the main statements in the lede (which of course should summarize sections in the article text). I'll keep looking for references relentlessly and verifying them. If you happen to alter article text near an inline reference, feel free to leave the reference in place. We can discuss any references that simply need to be thrown overboard on the article talk page as usual. Keep up the good work; see you on the wiki. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 14:05, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I think it would e beneficial to remove all unused refs. If you want to you make a subpage to the talkpage and stor the bibliography there, then in the article we only insert those references that are actually cited in the text. ·maunus · snunɐɯ· 15:20, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Alternatively, you could make a section called 'further reading' and copy-paste the unused refs there. — Peter238 (v̥ɪˑzɪʔ mɑˑɪ̯ tˢʰoˑk̚ pʰɛˑɪ̯d̥ʒ̊) 16:01, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I think right now there are way to many unused refs to make for a good further reading section. I still think it is unnecessary in the lead as that is not a particularly controversial statement at all and it is well sourced in the body of the article.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 16:19, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I actually didn't delete any refs in my rewriting of the second paragraph. It looks like accidentally did it in this edit. That said, I'll continue preserving refs in my edits. — Eru·tuon 16:40, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
 * It was on purpose actually.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 16:44, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Rhotic and non-rhotic accents: Revision history
Nope, not joking at all. My father's mother was born in Halifax, NC, in 1903. She and her siblings said the word "our" like "av-uh" their whole lives. Please consider restoring this good-faith edit. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.188.162.204 (talk) 02:56, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Okay, you're serious, and I believe you. But I'm still not sure if how relevant to the page. The presence of a v sound in the word our isn't related to rhoticity, as far as I can tell. — Eru·tuon 03:02, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

That's valid, although the point I was aiming for was that the ending r was not voiced.

Here's another edit I was contemplating for the paragraph which includes the phrase "in large part due to the influence of television". Although news anchors up to Tom Brokaw contributed greatly to changing the adult audience's perception of high American English, it was Jim Henson's extreme rhoticity which had the most profound effect upon several tens of millions of children born in the United States in the mid 1960s/early 1970s. That generation grew up taking vocal cues from Sesame Street nearly as much as from their family members. I accept that YouTube is a less than ideal source for citations, but the clip located at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5cuxG5KsIc beautifully illustrates several degrees of rhoticity: Kermit's/Henson's overemphasis on r, a New Englander's near absence of the lettuh ah, and finally a strong New York City accent (I'm not sure which borough; my people hail from south of Norfolk). I'll leave it up to you to decide whether it's worth adding that clip as an external reference. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.188.162.204 (talk) 04:52, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

Zeus
Just to say that whilst you may be right (for other reasons) on this edit,, the brackets AREN'T nested, nor adjacent. It's English name (eng pronounce) Greek name (gk pronounce in Attic etc.). I felt the second brackets were necessary, other the list of alternate names and pronounciations became confusing. I leave you to judge whether you or I was right.Pincrete (talk) 20:45, 19 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Actually, the brackets are malformed in my edit, which needs to be corrected. When corrected, the brackets would be nested as follows: (English pronunciation; Ancient Greek (pronounced []); Modern Greek; in Ancient Greek religion) is the god of sky.... Thus, there would be (([])), which is way too many brackets inside one another. — Eru·tuon 21:19, 19 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Agree. Pincrete (talk) 21:36, 19 March 2015 (UTC)


 * I fixed it up, and hope it looks good to you now. — Eru·tuon 21:38, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

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Romanian
I've responded on my talk page.--91.148.130.233 (talk) 22:08, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

Fonts and such
I moved our discussion on fonts from because other editors may prefer that we discuss it here. — Eru·tuon 00:19, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

I can't actually see the angle brackets in google chrome - is it also angle brackets produced by the Old English template? Cause I can't see those either.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 23:13, 16 March 2015 (UTC)
 * That's weird: I use Google Chrome and can see them. You may need to download a new font or add some CSS to your common.css (something like this: .Unicode { font-family: font-that-supports-angle-brackets; }). No, does not create angle brackets;  or  does. — Eru·tuon 23:22, 16 March 2015 (UTC)
 * What would be a good font family to add?·maunus · snunɐɯ· 23:29, 16 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I copied your common.css into mine, but I still can't see it.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 23:36, 16 March 2015 (UTC)
 * It could be that you don't have a font installed that supports angle brackets. Do you have Charis SIL, the font that my CSS code selects? — Eru·tuon 23:56, 16 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Probably not. I donøt know where or how to install it?·maunus · snunɐɯ· 00:01, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
 * You can download it here. Installing depends on your operating system. Mine is Windows, and I just open the file and click an Install button. Gentium is another good IPA font, more beautiful than Charis, in my opinion. — Eru·tuon 00:15, 17 March 2015 (UTC)


 * I have very good Unicode support in the fonts I use on my computer, and I am also not seeing the words and characters formatted with the Old English template formatted correctly. Rather, I see the boxes indicating undisplayable characters surrounding each Old English letter. It appears that the template is not very well implemented at present. We should look into whether direct display of the characters as Unicode characters, without using the template, might work better. I keep four (or is it five?) different browsers installed on my office computer with such Web design issues in mind, so I can test a lot of edge cases. I also need to review the English language article from top to bottom using my mobile device, as Wikipedia now has many users who view it with cell phones and the like. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 13:57, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

It sounds like angle brackets will be problematic for many users. This issue has been discussed on the Angle bracket template talk page, but because my computer displays the characters, I didn't realize it was still an issue. In that case, the template should be modified, or we should avoid using angle brackets. — Eru·tuon 16:09, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Or we can just make them like this < > ·maunus · snunɐɯ· 16:18, 17 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Maunus, were those keyboard characters (less than and greater than signs), or was that something else? Of course the clash is between HTML markup and linguistics markup, so we have to be careful about what we put between angle bracket-looking pairs of characters. We can escape the keyboard characters to make user-friendly visible markup. It's weird that this isn't fixed yet in modern browsers that claim to implement Unicode, but this probably is to avoid code-injection attacks on websites. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 23:02, 24 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Just plain keyboard characters.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 23:35, 24 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Lol, I just went back to look at the OE characters and suddenly I could see the angled brackets. I have no idea why or what changed, but now they show. They are not pretty but they're there.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 23:37, 24 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Hopefully that indicates that others can see them as well! It might be useful if we could find out if they don't display for others, who they don't display for, and why, and work around that problem, though.


 * Actually, and, could both of you go to Template talk:Angle bracket and look at the table there, and tell me which of the angle brackets display for you, giving the table row numbers? That would be helpful. — Eru·tuon 00:07, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I see all of them except 6.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 00:40, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

Ooh. Number 6 is actually the one used in angbr at the moment. — Eru·tuon 00:54, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
 * They are all ugly though, the plain keyboard one is much better. Could you take a look and see if you see double brackets the way I've done it now, which is like this: <> ·maunus · snunɐɯ· 00:56, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I can see them, but we have differing preferences regarding these things: I actually like the look of the taller and slenderer chevrons more than the wider less than and greater than signs. I think it took me a while to appreciate them, though; I may have started out like you. I think other linguistically minded editors will also object to using the less than and greater than signs; I recall a discussion like that sometime, somewhere... — Eru·tuon 01:10, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I have never seen the wide ones used in linguistic publications, and they stand out very much from the other surrounding characters breaking the flow of reading. I think they may work for math equations that are supposed to stand out from the text, but not for this purpose I dont think.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 01:59, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
 * You're misunderstanding me: the wide symbols are the less than and equal than signs < >. The chevrons, ⟨⟩, are the tall and slender symbols, at least in my browser (perhaps this is different in yours). I prefer the chevrons to the less than and equal signs, because their greater height makes them seem more graceful to me. — Eru·tuon 02:07, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
 * No I understood you, I just referred to the opening angle which is wider for the tall ones, although the ones with the narrow angle are wider in terms of the linear text. The open tall ones are the ones I dont like. It is their height that make them stand out from all the other characters.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 02:29, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

Oh, I see. I guess I don't see the height as a problem; it's the same height as the other brackets, and [], as well as // used for phonemic notation, and | | for archiphonemic, the height of a capital letter. It's actually good to have the chevrons high, if you're enclosing capitals in them (though we just have lowercase in English language). — Eru·tuon 02:32, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I edited the article text this evening with Unicode angle brackets 〈 and 〉 (dropping the Wikimedia template entirely for the brackets). Oddly, the template documentation looks fine on my mobile phone, but it displays stupid empty boxes on my desktop browser. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 03:46, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Another thing that makes thm look bad in my browser is that they are kind of pixelated, looking like old school 16 bit graphics.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 04:08, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Some of the angle brackets in the table (numbers 1 and 2) look pixellated on my browser, but not number 6, the one used in the template. Maybe you have keener eyes, or there's a difference in the renderings on our browsers. — Eru·tuon 04:34, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Well, the number 6 one is the one I cant see, so maybe that is indeed beautiful.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 05:06, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

English language
I would appreciate if you would not rewrite sections that I am actively working on. It makes for edit conflicts and makes it hard for me to have an overview of what I am doing. Please let me finish up a section and let it rest a bit before you start working on it. Otherwise, I do appreciate your involvement, greatly and we seem to have generally similar ideas about how to advance. ·maunus · snunɐɯ· 20:57, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Quite right, my apologies. I'll put my changes in a subpage User:Erutuon/English language, and you can look and see if you like my rewrite, and we can figure out how it can be merged into the current form of the article. — Eru·tuon 21:01, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
 * The talkpage is also a fine place to share drafts of sections. Generally I think we're on the same page in terms of though. I am thinking about adding an example of each stage of English to the sections. Ideally we would have the same sentence in OD, ME and Modern versions, illustrating the changes in grammar syntax and souns but we'd have to find a source for that.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 21:07, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
 * In the meantime, go ahead and revert the changes to the Old English section if it helps your editing process; I'll save the rewritten form in the subpage. — Eru·tuon 21:05, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Nah, Ive just continued working on it from your changes, the only thing I disliked was breaking out too many short paragraphs (I always try to avoid single sentence paragraphs) and removing the year span from Roman Britain. And I think you reintroduced some of my inconsistent italization.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 21:07, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Also not, because it conflicts with anything you've done, but my ambition in terms of style is to be brief and concise, but also clear and give explanation of concepts and processes in a way that a non-linguist can actually understand it. This means that sometimes I have to give simple explanations of linguistic processes like language change in order to help the lay reader. So sometimes I make simple statements that may seem uninformative such as "Though a direct ancestor of Modern English, Old English is not readily intelligible to speakers of contemporary English. This is because significant changes both in the sound system and the grammar of the language have occurred since then". If you feel that I forget to explain some concept or that I use linguistic vocabulary or jargon that could benefit from being parsed for the reader - don't hesitate to do that. I think it is important for language articles like this to be intelligible to everyone. Also you are more than welcome to correct my L2 mistakes and sloppy typoes. ·maunus · snunɐɯ· 21:15, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Actually, I think I will take a break from this and go do some real work for a couple of hours, feel free to continue meanwhile also.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 21:16, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

I like the idea of including examples, and the year span is certainly needed. I frequently am frustrated because I can't find the exact years for a language form, since it isn't mentioned prominently in an article. I was thinking of adding more on dialects, but only if there are well-known examples of literature in, say, Mercian and Kentish, and maybe that would make the dialect paragraph longer and require it to be split off. — Eru·tuon 21:20, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I was thinking about mentioning Mercian, Kentish and Northumbrian OE as well, it could be mentioned briefly together with West-Saxon without taking too much space. Generally we need a solid section on Modern English dialects (and accents) - and someone will have to do dialect maps of British and North American dialects. There are no useful maps of this on commons, weirdly enough.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 22:11, 2 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Btw, I have nominated the article as my bid in the Core Contest, bu given that we will clearly be working conjointly on this I think I will add you as co-nominator unless you object, that way we will both be sharing credit in case it wins.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 22:30, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I'd be honored to be included as co-nominator. Hopefully I will continue working; if not, then it may be appropriate to drop me as a credit-taker. — Eru·tuon 22:48, 2 March 2015 (UTC)


 * I have been looking at the phonology section and I think it could use some condensation, and some phonology. As it is now it is mostly phonetics, nothing about syllable structure, phonotactics, and a lot of detailed pronunciation information. Do you think that you might be able to work on that aspect, then I will deal with grammar simultaneously and then when we are both t a stage where we feel it is well developed we can switch and have a look at each others sections?·maunus · snunɐɯ· 05:26, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
 * You're right about the deficiencies of the Phonology section. I'm not sure if I can pull off the rewrite myself, since I don't know that much about phonotactics, but it is my area of interest, so I'll try to read up on it and see what I can do. I suppose appropriate sources are listed in the References section. — Eru·tuon 23:05, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I think the right thing to do is to find an authoritative work on English phonology and structure the subsection so that it fits with the content of that book. Both in terms of contents and in terms of how different kinds of content is weighted. An apt work would be: McMahon, A. M. (2002). An introduction to English phonology. Edinburgh University Press. The section as it stands now is entirely without citations, which is of course not acceptable for the level of quality we are aiming for. You might also want to see if you can squeeze a couple of citations to Chomsky and HAlle's "Sound Patterns of English" in there, since that is a hugely influential book. ·maunus · snunɐɯ· 17:50, 16 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the suggestions. I was actually going to ask, since I've had trouble finding books. I'll take a look at those. — Eru·tuon 18:39, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

Do you have any additional suggestions for good overviews of English phonology? — Eru·tuon 00:29, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
 * - Roca & Johnson - A Course in Phonology (especially chapter 7 - The Vowels of English)
 * - (Too many to list) - A Handbook of Varieties of English. 1: Phonology (very long, so maybe "overview" isn't the best term for it. Still - it's worth your time. It's more or less like updated "Accents of English")
 * - Collins & Mees - The Phonetics of English and Dutch (deals mainly with more traditional RP)
 * - Illustrations of the IPA: Received Pronunciation / American English (you have the Handbook of the IPA - it's there) / Australian English (but you're probably aware of these) — Peter238 (v̥ɪˑzɪʔ mɑˑɪ̯ tˢʰoˑk̚ pʰɛˑɪ̯d̥ʒ̊) 02:00, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
 * , thanks for the refs! I just took a look at Collins and Mees, and they had a great overview of fortis and lenis stops, which I really needed as a source. — Eru·tuon 19:12, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
 * No problem. Here's some more:
 * - Felicity Cox - Australian English Pronunciation and Transcription (Google Books has an extremely high quality preview of it)
 * - An Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology (mostly about Australian English)
 * These are also worth checking out, of course unless you haven't done that already:
 * - Peter Roach - English Phonetics and Phonology (2009, 4th edition)
 * - Alan Cruttenden - Gimson's Pronunciation of English (2014, 8th edition) — Peter238 (v̥ɪˑzɪʔ mɑˑɪ̯ tˢʰoˑk̚ pʰɛˑɪ̯d̥ʒ̊) 19:43, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

The Art of Grammar
It'll take me a while to put down the details at the article's talk page, but i think way is clear to realizing what we discussed. I'll describe there, and ask what you think. --Jerzy•t 04:14, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

Now awaiting your views, before doing deletion and move. --Jerzy•t 02:49, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Phonology section
I will start working on the phonology section tomorrow, probably shortening it quite a bit by removing unsourced information. I think it would make sense to rethink what is the most important information for that section and then make sure that it includes that and not much else. I have Peter Roach's book on English Phonology and a couple of works by April MacMahon and others, that I will be basing it on. My wish is that the article can be fully sourced and ready for a GA review by thursday.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 05:05, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I just had to revert an edit of yours. Being intelligible is good, but we cant set the bar so low that the article becomes inaccurate. You cant exchange phone for sound. That is simply not correct. We can expect readers to have heard about phonemes, and if not they can follow the link. Any other technical terms can be explained on the first use. Also note that the text you revised was actually written by Dr. Peter Roach himself earlier today.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 05:09, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I'm aware that Roach himself wrote the paragraph, but (with proper respect to him for his greater knowledge of the topic) that doesn't make it not need rewriting. I don't think the question of phonemic analysis of phones is useful to readers, who will be more concerned with, say, the actual sounds that a Scottish or West Midlands speaker will be making. Whether the sound is a separate phoneme  or theoretically, not phonetically, a cluster  is quite irrelevant, and so is the question of whether  is phonemically  or . I don't think readers can be expected to have heard of phones, phonemes, and allophones, because linguistics is not a topic taught to the general public in elementary schools (or the non-US equivalents), as far as I know, and I think they will be more interested in phones than phonemes.


 * However, your opinion regarding this question is more relevant than mine given how much work you've been putting into the article. Perhaps the article review will settle the question of whether the Phonology section is too technical. I apologize I haven't put as much work into the Phonology section as I (somewhat vaguely) promised to. I took a look at McMahon's and Roach's books and wasn't sure what information from them was relevant, partly because they're primarily describing phonology and not the fine details of English phonology and phonetics. One of the books Peter gave me, on English and Dutch, seemed to have more useful information. — Eru·tuon 05:38, 31 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Regarding inaccuracy, in my edit I made sure to use slashes and square brackets correctly, so there wasn't any improper confusion between phones and phonemes going on. Just saying. Let me know if you're still adamant about giving the full gory details of phonemes versus phones with regard to the examples in the paragraph. — Eru·tuon 05:46, 31 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Saying that English has x number of "sounds" instead of phonemes is wildly inaccurate, yes. And no, the fact that Roach wrote it does not mean it shouldn't be rewritten - but it means it shouldnt be rewritten lightly. Your stance on what readers can be expected to know is noted, but not accepted. Have you ever read an article on a science or medicine topic? They are not written for lay readers, they are written at an early college level. And they should be. Linguistics is a science, and we can't just dumb down the science because most readers may not have heard of the basic concepts. What we can do is write clearly, and explain concepts when we use them and use the wiki-links to allow them to read more about concepts they dont know. But we cannot sacrifice accuracy for ease of reading. What the article needs is more on phonology, and less on specific pronunciation. The point of the article is to summarize what the English language is, not give a crash course in how to distinguish different accents. The English language is characterized by a set of phonological rules for how syllables are put together from phonemes. And that should be the meat of the phonology section. Not details on pronunciations in different regions. ·maunus · snunɐɯ· 06:09, 31 March 2015 (UTC)


 * What I would do would be to remove all the material that is now located in the "regional variation" subsections. Then I would add a subsection on phonological processes, describing major allophonic (dark l, voicing and devoicing, etc.) and morphophonemic processes. A subsection on syllables and stress that includes what is now in the phonotactics section. And finally write a new section on regional variation from scratch giving only the most superficial outline of regional variation in pronunciation, basically just introducing the main processes yod-dropping and coalescence, h-dropping, etc. That would be more like an actual phonology section. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Maunus (talk • contribs) 06:18, March 31, 2015
 * I see what you mean, since "sounds" did not clearly imply either "phonemes" or "phones". As you say, it was ambiguous and hence inaccurate.


 * However, after further thought, I disagree on excluding pronunciation or phonetics information from the Phonology section. Actually, English phonology describes phones and phonetics along with phonology and phonemes, so we have to do the same in the summary section. There's no other place in the article for phonetics, and it's an important subtopic that shouldn't be omitted. The fact that the section is called Phonology doesn't imply that it is supposed to exclusively list phonemes, rather that it's supposed to present phones and explain what phonemes they're allophones of. It's unfortunate that I didn't realize this earlier... — Eru·tuon 20:52, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I did not mean to argue that it should be excluded. Just that it should be much less prominent relative to phonology and relative to the current amount of phonetic detail. Since the literature on the topic of the subsection is enormous, the main challenge is to write something that is superficial while also including the necessary information and pointing towards the articles where the details are located. It is a really delicate balance, but one I have some experience in trying to achieve in this articles on very broad topics. Listing phones and then explaining the phonemes that they represent would be a nice approach analytically but practically imporssible since it would take much more space than we have. Rather we should do as we generally do in articles on languages, i.e. provide a superficial overview of phoneme inventory, many allophonic processes, phonotactics and prosody. Then since this is English a subsection on regional variation is warranted. You can take a look at what I have done with the section now. I dont think it should be much longer, but the regional variation section could be somewhat longer, and there is room for a paragraph or two about vowel allophony after the vowel chart. ·maunus · snunɐɯ· 20:57, 31 March 2015 (UTC)


 * I actually like how it looks now; it's much neater. The previous state was a bit hard to navigate. I think common allophones should be included in the table, enclosed in parentheses, so that readers can see that they exist in English, even though they are not phonemic. Including as well would be nice, even though they are analyzed as consonant clusters, and do not occur in all dialects. Dialectal phones can be marked with an asterisk. I think including all notable phones is the best, since it allows readers to see the full phonetic inventory and compare it with that of other languages. However, perhaps the sources don't typically do this, and perhaps it would make the table too hard to read.


 * Also, maybe the description of fortis and lenis realizations should be moved to a table. Might make it easier to read, I don't know.


 * I don't think the description of clear and dark l is accurate for General American; as I understand it, the dark allophone occurs even before vowels, except perhaps before the higher front vowels . Not sure if the sources mention this or not. There are other small problems that can be fixed individually. — Eru·tuon 21:34, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I don't think allophones should be included in the phoneme inventory table, because then it wouldnt be that anymore. All language articles have a phoneme inventory - not an inventory of phones. That is also likely to bring problems because that is where it gets really difficult to make decisions about what to include and exclude. The beauty of what we have now is that we have two sources with the same inventory for both GA and Rp. But a table of allophones of some of the major phonemes might work in the allophony section?·maunus · snunɐɯ· 05:48, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
 * We don't currently have an allophony section. Having one phone-and-phoneme table would be simpler and easier to read than having separate phoneme and allophone tables in different sections.


 * If you look at the table of phones I just created, you can decide which categories of allophones to add (dark l, intervocalic-tapped t and d, voiceless nasals and liquids, voiceless w and j, aspirated stops) and exclude others. If you want to test out additions and removals, I can do that for you and let you see what it looks like. Maybe I'll create a few options now; check the page for them. — Eru·tuon 07:17, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

I made a phone table with notes at User:Erutuon/English language. It's pretty messy, so maybe not appropriate for English language. I'm getting exhausted with how much brain power I'm spending on this, so I might not help much before Thursday, regrettably. — Eru·tuon 05:43, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
 * I dont think it is a good format, a good table of allophones show the phonemes by environment and then gives the realization. But honestly I dont see the need to have a table with the aspirated and devoiced allophones and dark l. Much easier to just have it in prose as we already do (true it is not in an allophony section, but there is allophony described after each table). ·maunus · snunɐɯ· 17:07, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
 * The value of it is to show what sounds English has, so that a speaker of another language can look and see, "Okay, English has aspirated stops too, but they only occur in certain cases, not as separate phonemes", rather than looking at the table and thinking, "Oh, English just has tenuis and voiced stops, no aspirated stops like in my language", which is not true. (I'm thinking of a speaker of Mandarin Chinese here, and we may have a lot of them reading the article.) Similarly with the other allophones and dialectal phonemes. Displaying phones prominently in a table is better than simply discussing them in the text, since pictures are clearer than words. — Eru·tuon 18:08, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

Celandine phenology
"It was said" by whom?? The first part of the OED's claim is approximately correct - celandines do flower in April/May, about the time the swallows arrive, but the second claim, that they fade when the swallows depart is nonsense. The duration of flowering is about 35 days, done by end of May, while the swallows remain all summer, not departing until September/October. Wikipedia is obliged to use sourced material, but is not obliged to quote sources which are clearly in error. OED are specialists in English language but not in biological science. Plant surfer 09:35, 10 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Hmm, I see you also posted on Talk:Lesser celandine, and I'll move my response there. — Eru·tuon 01:19, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

Good job on the English language article
Hi, Erutuon, thanks for fixing the spelling in the English language article overnight. (I've noted on the GA review page that you deserve credit for that.) I've given the article a week off from editing, and now I'll try to respond to GA review concerns as they come up. I suppose after all the looking up you have been doing, you'll have a lot of sources to incorporate into the subarticles and related articles for English language. Correspondingly, I'll be trying to improve all of the subarticles and related articles that pertain to geographical spread of English and English as a global language. It has been a delight working with you and I look forward to seeing you often here on the wiki. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 17:23, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

Congratulations on earning the Million Award by improving the English language article
It was fun working with you on this article. Keep up the good work. See you on the wiki. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 17:44, 14 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Yay! I'm glad we succeeded! And I'll continue to look for ways the article can be further improved. — Eru·tuon 19:20, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

Quebec French phonology
Hello Erutuon, when the word pêche is pronounced [paɪ̯ʃ], can I say it that it's not pronounced as written or it's not a spelling pronunciation ? 138.229.16.126 (talk) 12:52, 7 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Hmm, slightly confused by your question, but I'll attempt an answer. "Spelling pronunciation" means an incorrect pronunciation that is derived from spelling: for instance, when a letter that has become silent is pronounced, like if someone pronounced temps as . Here p and s have been lost by historical sound changes, so pronouncing them is incorrect, and is a "spelling pronunciation". Pronouncing pêche as does not count as a spelling pronunciation, because ê would naturally, from spelling, be pronounced as a monophthong, not as a diphthong.


 * Hard to answer whether pêche pronounced as is "not pronounced as written". Basically what has happened is a historical sound change has shifted a long  to a diphthong . This is similar to English out being pronounced with a diphthong, when historically in Middle and Old English it had a monophthong . I suppose you could say it is "not pronounced as written", because the way to represent the pronunciation  would be with the letters ai rather than ê. — Eru·tuon 05:51, 8 April 2015 (UTC)


 * So, pronouncing the word better as [ˈbɛɾɚ], I can say it is "not pronounced as written", because of the [ɾ] sound. 138.229.16.126 (talk) 21:12, 8 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Perhaps, perhaps not. Saying that better is "not pronounced as written" implies that the letters t and d are supposed to represent the stops and, but not the flap . But there's no other letter in English for the flap  (r represents the approximant  or ), so one could argue t and d represent both stops and the flap in American English, depending on phonological environment. And if so, then better is pronounced as written. — Eru·tuon 00:17, 9 April 2015 (UTC)


 * It's similar to pêche, ê represents to [aɪ̯] ~ [æɪ̯] in the last syllable in Quebec French. 138.229.16.126 (talk) 01:42, 9 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Pronouncing the word mètre as [maɪ̯tʁ], I can certainly say it is not pronounced as written, because in Quebec French, è is pronounced [ɛ], mètre is an exception. 138.229.16.126 (talk) 13:22, 11 April 2015 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure. The question is if the historical phoneme is always distinguished in Quebec French from, by lack of diphthongization in  but diphthongization in , or whether  is lengthened in certain cases in Quebec French, yielding the diphthong. — Eru·tuon 19:31, 11 April 2015 (UTC)


 * lève ~ rêve : [[File:Qc-lève rêve.ogg]]

Here you are. 雞雞 replaced Fête, because Fête is blocked. 雞雞 (talk) 00:11, 14 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Yeah, sounds like there's a distinction. In your comment above, were you saying that mètre is pronounced in QF, or not? — Eru·tuon 03:33, 15 April 2015 (UTC)


 * un kilomètre : [[File:FRQC-kilomètre.oga]]

In Quebec French, it's pronounced [maɪ̯tʁ], because it was pronounced [mɛːtʁ] in traditional French. 雞雞 (talk) 10:52, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

Prosody: work in progress
Hello, I have been doing some draft changes to Prosody, as I proposed. Although there is still a lot to do, I thought I would ask your views on what I have got so far in my Sandbox. I have kept as much as I could of the existing article; where I have written new stuff, I have not yet added the refs and WP cross-refs (I am away from my home base at the moment). I'd be glad of any suggestions for improvement. RoachPeter (talk) 10:33, 20 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I'm not an expert on prosody, but I'll offer some comments based on my degree of linguistic knowledge and Wikipedia expertise.


 * Your draft seems to have much better coverage of the topic. In organization, I don't see a clear distinction between the sections on Phonology and Psychological aspects. Phonology describes some of the psychological aspects, mentioning that intonation conveys emotion. The organization needs to be clearer.


 * I would suggest creating separate headings under Attributes for the basic acoustic variables: pitch, duration, and intensity. Voice quality and pausing could be added as well. Some basics regarding these variables should be given: how much pitch varies, how it is measured by phoneticians, and how it interacts with vowel formants; the interaction between phonemic and prosodic duration (involving vowel length, vowel reduction, and consonant duration and tenseness); how intensity is produced articulatorily (greater or lesser air pressure) and perhaps how it interacts with duration and with segmental features like aspiration.


 * Then, the Phonology section can describe Stress, and what acoustic variables it involves; similarly with Intonation and Rhythm. Focus on describing English stress, intonation, and rhythm and the acoustic variables relevant for English, mentioning other languages when relevant for comparison: for instance, English, which has pitch accent on stressed syllables, can be compared with Japanese, which has a iambic rhythm (if I remember correctly) and a pitch accent independent of rhythm.


 * Making a distinction between acoustic variables and how they are used in English will help organization, I think. Hope these suggestions are helpful. — Eru·tuon 00:58, 21 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Hi, I lost forward motion on the Prosody article for a while, but I have done some more work and feel that what I now have in my sandbox is about as far as I can get without seriously duplicating other articles. I'd be glad of your opinion. RoachPeter (talk) 17:20, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

lève/rêve

 * [[File:Qc-lève rêve.ogg]]

Here you go. 雞雞 (talk) 23:30, 14 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Hey, you already posted this in the section above. I noticed your earlier message, and will respond there. — Eru·tuon 01:04, 15 April 2015 (UTC)
 * I thought you didn't see it. 雞雞 (talk) 01:33, 15 April 2015 (UTC)


 * une fête: [[File:FR QC une fête.ogg]]

Hello, is there a diphthong here? Probably [ʏn ˈfæɪ̯t]? 198.99.29.213 (talk) 01:10, 17 April 2015 (UTC)
 * It's a very narrow diphthong. I think it's more like, actually. — Eru·tuon 17:47, 17 April 2015 (UTC)


 * [[File:Enquête Qc.oga]]

[ˈɑ̃kʲɛɪ̯t] or [ˈɑ̃kʲæɪ̯t]? 198.99.29.213 (talk) 01:56, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

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Old English
Hi, your revert to the IP's edit in the above may not be correct. The sentence begins: The only remnants of this system in Modern English are in a few pronouns (the meanings of I (nominative) my (genitive) and me (accusative/dative) in the first person provide an example).... However, the word my is an adjective, not a pronoun and the IP's change to mine is correct as it is a pronoun. Denisarona (talk) 07:14, 28 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Hey, I'm moving this conversation to Old English, because others will need to see it. — Eru·tuon 16:19, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

Nice Work on Canadian raising
Wonderful work on the Canadian raising page: I was the one who initially added the technical/jargon template, and just wanted to fist-bump you for rewriting the intro and removing that flag. You're good people! :) Eunomiac (talk) 05:29, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the feedback! I'm glad my work has been helpful. That's what I like to do, make things easier to understand. — Eru·tuon 02:31, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Help:IPA for Greek
Hi, I've seen you're a main contributor to Help:IPA for Greek and I was wondering if these two details are correct or not, so I haven't touched them. Thanks for your time and effort, if you read this, and just discard if everything is correct. --idleloop (talk) 20:33, 23 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Monophthongs table, "ει" under AG has different pronunciation under Diphthongs "ει"; maybe the note "4" could be longer in this case: it is not clear if [jj, ww] is an exemplification of diphthong or two double semivowel sequences.
 * Consonants table, "w" is approximated with English word "take", but it doesn't seem a correct example of the IPA [w] phoneme.
 * I appreciate the comment. Both your questions are good ones, and I'll do my best to answer. I'm not academically qualified, but I have read a lot about this stuff.


 * The letters ει represent a diphthong in some words, and a monophthong  in others. Regarding the, I don't know of a reliable source that answers the question of phonemic analysis. All that W. Sidney Allen says is a diphthong before another vowel counts as a heavy syllable, and therefore at least phonetically there must have been a doubled semivowel. He mentions the question of phonemic analysis (whether the semivowels are phonemes or not), but doesn't try to answer it.


 * Hope this makes sense. If you think the note should be rewritten based on this information, you can go ahead and do it. I haven't been doing much work on Wikipedia lately and won't be for a while. — Eru·tuon 03:32, 27 June 2015 (UTC)

Core Contest

 * Congratulations on your prize. I'm sorting out the prizes from Wikimedia UK. As it's in the form of an Amazon voucher, could you please email me at richard.nevell@undefinedwikimedia.org.uk so that I can send it to your email address. Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 12:55, 15 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Hi Erutuon, if you let me know your email address I can send you the prize. Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 10:33, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

troll

 * [[File:En-us-troll.ogg]]

Hello Erutuon, this pronunciation is wrong, please rerecord it. 162.247.123.201 (talk) 17:43, 16 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes, I can see that someone recorded troll wrong as a joke. But it's not my responsibility to re-record it, and I don't want to do it, so you must ask someone else. — Eru·tuon 20:19, 16 May 2015 (UTC)
 * You can vote for deletion of that file here. Peter238 (talk) 22:39, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
 * I replaced that recording yesterday, so the problem is solved. Peter238 (talk) 09:46, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

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