User talk:Jczhu/arapaho

Erin's Peer Review

 * It would be helpful if there were more gloss examples in the beginning of the article, so that the reader can follow along with the morphemes in each word
 * Great job including all of the information needed for the wikipedia page (lead, phonology, etc)
 * The included in-text links to relevant Wiki articles is super helpful to the reader!

Lead comments
 * If possible it would be great to include information on the estimate of the number of speakers of the language
 * The information about the different dialects of Arapaho was a really nice add
 * Not sure if this is possible, but it could be interesting to include examples of the dialect differences in other sections of the article

Phonology comments
 * Under vowels are the lengthened vowels included in the brackets? If they are pointing this out might further help the reader understand the difference between the vowels in brackets and those outside of brackets
 * Again under consonants an explanation as to why some of the consonants are in brackets would be helpful
 * The inclusion of different vowel partitioning gives a good look into differences in the language

Morphology comments
 * Log example is very good for understanding the concept of animation in Arapho
 * In the Obviation section having definitions inside the box rather than in the paragraph above would make things clearer
 * Adding a chart to the Initial Change section would help the reader visual things better
 * Including an example of concrete and abstract verbs would make the concept clearer
 * The formatting of the reduplication example is great, I would suggest using throughout your page
 * Obviation section is slightly confusing to follow, I would start off with a simple explanation and then get more detailed to make it easier to understand

Syntax comments
 * Explanation of the hierarchy is very clear!
 * Great job including examples for all word orders!
 * I would suggest including a new subheading for headedness so it doesn't get lumped in with word order

Awesome first draft! Your syntax section and lead are looking really good, I would suggest including more examples and reformatting the examples to make them easier for the reader to follow.

Lead
In general I thought your lead was very strong—I only had a couple of comments/suggestion with regards to the second paragraph. I thought the first sentence could be rephrased as “After World War 2, the Northern Arapaho tribe began to raise their children speaking English rather than Arapaho” just to put it in an active construction. In the sentence following that, I wanted a bit more context—what is the average age of these speakers? What’s the language’s endangerment level? Lastly, the wording of the final sentence in that paragraph was a bit confusing. Would it be accurate to phrase it “The Northern Arapaho have traditionally been relatively isolated from both other tribes and non-Native Americans, whereas the Southern Arapaho live amongst a mostly non-Native population” ?

Phonology
I had a couple of scattered specific corrections for this section. Under “Vowels,” I wasn’t sure what it meant that the diphthong /ie/ was marginal, so either explain or link that. You also mention that a “cluster of vowels” have falling pitch, and I was wondering if it was possible to list all of them since there weren’t a ton of vowels to begin with. Finally, I was confused about the presence of /h/ in Arapaho. You say originally that it is only pronounced before vowel-initial words, but then later it seems to precede a “final consonant” (which I assumed was a syllable coda?). Maybe explain this a bit more/include explicit examples of words.

Morphology
I thought the first sentence could be rephrased as “Arapaho is polysynthetic, with verbs in the language having a particularly complex morphology.” (Not sure if this is ideal, I just thought the use of the word “especially” was confusing). In the section on Animacy, consider bolding the suffix of the first example for “it fell on her.” In the “Obviation” section, I thought you could potentially link “proximate” in the first sentence. I also found the sentence “Examples are given in italics and parenthesized and following any relevant phonological processes such as vowel harmony” to be confusing—I think it’s just a parallelism issue? Consider linking to a definition of “initial change” in the section of that same name. I also thought your section on Inflectional Verbs could be longer in general, explaining things in more depth and including examples. Under “Derivational” morphemes, I wasn’t sure if “Nouns” was the best heading for that section, because the information seemed more specific than that. Finally, I would explain the function of reduplication (habitual action) before explaining how it works and giving an example.

Syntax
I thought your section on word order was very strong! Your format for showing free word order was very clear and well-linked, and I may use elements of it for my own Wikipedia page. I thought you might benefit from making headedness its own section, however, so that it felt less rushed at the end.

Holistic Comments
This seems like a very strong start to your Wikipedia page. You have a lot of layered sections, particularly in Morphology, to build upon and develop. In general, I would focus on clarity—you bring up a lot of concepts that could stand a bit more explanation/examples from your language. Obviously you don’t have to explain everything, and linking to other pages can be quite helpful, but in general pay attention to the readability of various blocks of text.

Scarolinebailey (talk) 16:25, 13 April 2019 (UTC)