User talk:Kwamikagami/Archive 8

Pronunciation of France
Hi Kwami. Just wanted to ask: in English, isn't "France" pronounced as /ˈfrænts/ rather than /ˈfræns/ ?  Balkan Fever  02:33, 5 April 2009 (UTC)


 * The two are generally equivalent. I don't know if anyone makes a distinction between prince and prints, but it's probably safer to stick with the dictionary pronunciation just in case. kwami (talk) 06:18, 5 April 2009 (UTC)


 * I actually did a spectrographic analysis of a whole range of these forms back in grad school: {tense/tents, chance/chants, etc.).  I had readers say the phrases "I said "chants" today", "I said "chance" today", etc. in random orders on tape.  I then had people listen to the sentences and circle what they thought they heard on an answer sheet.  Listeners got only 50% right--which means that there is no perceptual difference.  In looking at the spectrograms of the phrases, there was only an average of 10 milliseconds difference in the length of the release between the nasal-fricative forms and the nasal-stop-fricative forms.  So there was a tiny difference in production, but no difference in perception.  (Taivo (talk) 10:52, 7 April 2009 (UTC))


 * Yeah, that sounds about like how I pronounce them. The question then is whether people speaking other dialects make the distinction. kwami (talk) 10:57, 7 April 2009 (UTC)


 * You're right, there is no perceptible difference between "chance" and "chants". Unlike, say, "fax" and "facts", which are distinguished in careful speech. In any case, I wouldn't go with User:BalkanFever's suggestion of inserting an inaudible plosive. · ΚΕΚΡΩΨ · 15:00, 7 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Actually, for me, the plosive is quite audible. I can't easily pronounce [ns] after [æ], for some reason. kwami (talk) 15:03, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Thx
Thanks for your review of that French-language source re Esperanto. Gotta keep the Wikipedia honest. :-) -- 201.37.230.43 (talk) 19:51, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Talk:Classification of Japanese
I've replied. Licqua (talk) 09:04, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Abugida
"rather like the position of the /o/ vowel in the Indic abugidas, which is written before the consonant."

Why do I think it is a typo? Well, because in Hindi and Sanskrit and other nagari-based systems it is the short-i that is written before the consonant; the long-o vowel is written by a diacritic written above the line over a long-a vowel mark which is placed after the consonant. That's why.

Am I wrong?WikiLambo (talk) 10:31, 7 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Ah, yes, for Nagari of course you're right. I was thinking of Thai. We should have more precise wording. kwami (talk) 11:30, 7 April 2009 (UTC)


 * I see you changed it to Devanagari - that's cool, much better now. CheersWikiLambo (talk) 07:03, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

List of Basques
Kwami, could you keep an eye on the above page for a while? To give you the quickest of backgrounds: the list is supposed to list notable Basques but soon got swamped by people who added just about anyone who has a vaguely Basque looking surname. Several attempts were made to clean it up, lastly by LingNut before he retired. We eventually established criteria (listed on the talk page and at the top of the new page):

This is a list of famous Basque people. It includes people This list does not contain people outside the Basque Country who happen to have one or more Basque surnames. For people of Basque ancestry in general, please see People with Basque ancestors.
 * born or resident in the Basque Country, unless self-identifying as not Basque (e.g. Galician, French etc.)
 * people born outside the Basque Country of Basque ancestry that either speak Basque or self-identify as being of Basque stock.

For some - one user in particular - it apparently constitutes to "cultural extermination" (see page history) if you state the obvious, namely that having a Basque surname, especially in South America where surnames were often adopted en masse, does not make you ethnically Basque. We ended up with people like Isabel Allende and Che Guevara on the list... I tidied up the list following what we'd agreed and guess what, there's the beginnings of an edit war. Could you spare a minute and perhaps give an opinion (either way)? Cheers Akerbeltz (talk) 11:18, 7 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Yeah, ethnicity should at least be based on ancestry or self-identification. Either way, a claim for any individual needs to be justified. I'm not completely happy with your definition (if we don't demonstrate that people born in the Basque country do not identify as Basque, then they are Basque, even if they have no Basque ancestry), but it's a starting point. I'll take a look. kwami (talk) 11:35, 7 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks! I agree that the approach taken has its fallacies. The problem is that people can feel very strongly vis a vis Basque(ness). I realise its OR, well, not even that, hearsay, but from having travelled there a lot, I know that people who were born in the BC do not immediately equate that with Basque identity, such as descendents of Galician immigrants, the majority non-Basques in the Bayonne-Biarritz-Angelet area etc. We settled on those as a starting point which we can refine but at least it gets us away from the silly "Basque surname = Basque" concept.
 * I actually did what you said up there - I basically went by the Wiki articles and checked for claims/statements/refs about identity, including the Spanish and Basque Wikis. It meant a whole lot of people dropped out of the list that may rightfully belong there but just don't have a page yet but it's much more productive to cut it down first to something fairly reliable and then work up from there. But that's not your job! Thanks for having a look. Akerbeltz (talk) 12:08, 7 April 2009 (UTC)


 * He's at it again... Akerbeltz (talk) 14:58, 7 April 2009 (UTC)


 * This time he was deleting people. I blocked him anyway. kwami (talk) 15:04, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes, he was, though on what basis remains a mystery. Thanks again! Akerbeltz (talk) 15:35, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Hellenic languages
Hi, i'm not sure if you got the point i was trying to make in the edit summary. "Hellenic languages" refers mostly to the Greek language and its phases (ancient, medieval, modern, etc). The content you added has to do with a proposed linguistic group, one of many approaches dealing with the Macedonian language (the web source doesn't work in my browser, but i'm familiar with this proposal). Some linguists group it as inside the Greek language, some as separate along with Greek, or next to Greek, Illyrian and Thracian altogether, and so on. Hellenic languages should be a redirect or a dab page i believe. Ask for a third opinion if you're not sure about it, User:Dbachmann or User:Future_Perfect_at_Sunrise are two good choices. Thanks.--Δρακόλακκος (talk) 15:18, 7 April 2009 (UTC)


 * As a linguist, I must disagree with Drakolakkos. There are many small language families in Wikipedia and they deserve their own coverage whether they include only one "famous" or "well-documented" language or not.  Hellenic is a clearly defined small subgroup within Indo-European that consists of more than Greek and its historical phases.  It includes Tsakonian, for example, which is not a historical phase of Greek.  That alone is enough to warrant a separate language group page for Greek+Tsakonian.  We do not want to discuss Tsakonian in the article on Greek.  Anyone looking for information on Tsakonian would be drowned in a sea of information on Greek and might never find the information on Tsakonian.  I am continually frustrated in looking for information on Argobba, for example, because references on Semitic often discuss it as a final paragraph in an article on Amharic or as comments interspersed in a chapter on Amharic.  This information is very easily missed.  The Araucanian language family is another example of a family that consists of one well-documented member and one poorly documented member.  But the language family should be discussed separately from either of the daughters.  The Hellenic page also offers a very appropriate place to discuss issues relating to the possible inclusion, for example, of Macedonian and Illyrian and Thracian in the group.  These are totally separate issues from the issues surrounding the documented history of the Greek language.  (Taivo (talk) 15:29, 7 April 2009 (UTC))


 * Well put. Δρακόλακκος, I don't have any particular attachment to the version of the article I posted (I know essentially nothing about Hellenic), but I figured there should be something there for others to argue about, and maybe make a worthwhile article out of. kwami (talk) 15:48, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

[remainder of discussion deleted as it was turning into a fight and belongs on the article talk page]

I've copied all removed comments to Talk:Hellenic languages. Sorry, if i knew the issue would attract so much interest i would have opened it there from the start.--Δρακόλακκος (talk) 22:10, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Affricates
Thanks for letting me know. I've been blanket converting a few articles this hour. IMHO, the best thing to do is use ligatures like this:. there is a space between the ligature bar and the stop element, this seems to be important for some browsers. Mine is not one of them. — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 05:49, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Supervision requested
More trouble on Talk:Classification of Japanese, this time over inline citations. Please keep an eye on this. VikSol (talk) 02:32, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Hi
I saw that you created the page Albanian languages, but I wonder what will there be new from Albanian language. Whats the difference?Balkanian`s word (talk) 11:20, 9 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Albanian as a theoretical branch of Indoeuropean vs. the language itself. Also Albanian as more than a single language. kwami (talk) 11:23, 9 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Why shouldn`t it be explained in one page?Balkanian`s word (talk) 11:25, 9 April 2009 (UTC)


 * It could be. But then Gheg Albanian, Tosk Albanian, and Arvanitika could be merged as well. At a certain point the article becomes too broad to be useful. kwami (talk) 11:32, 9 April 2009 (UTC)


 * For anyone else reading this, IMO it depends on whether Albanian is a single language. I thought Gheg and Tosk were mutually unintelligible, and that both are literary standards, but Balkanian`s word informs me I am wrong. Without that, there's not much reason to have separate articles. kwami (talk) 00:46, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

60k
This is my 60,000th edit—not that I'm counting. kwami (talk) 11:46, 9 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Heh, congrats. :-) Fut.Perf. ☼ 11:48, 9 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Looking forward to another 60,000 ;)  Balkan Fever  11:51, 9 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Not tonight! kwami (talk) 11:52, 9 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Well, not with that attitude.  Balkan Fever  12:33, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Pronounciation
Question, do you know how Trombiculidae would be pronounce (using IPA) Buɡboy52.4 (talk) 13:37, 9 April 2009 (UTC)


 * I assume you looked online and noticed that Webster's and American Heritage contradict? AM is not a very good dictionary, so in general I'd go with Webster's. (And indeed in this case it turns out that AM doesn't understand the Latin etymology.) In general, with family names the stress goes on the syllable before the -idae. So here, the family is Trombicúlidae . The same happens with Latin diminutives ending is -ul-, as in molécular, sο a member of the family is a trombículid and the type genus is Trombícula . kwami (talk) 00:43, 10 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Well actually, I just wanted how it would simply be in IPA, for the family of harvest mites, and actually, my assumption was that it was pronounced -idæ, because of the old English ash or æsh, and I always pronounced Trombiculid as /trɒmˈbɪkuːlɪd/, never with a y-like sound(all of which are my pronunciation as English words). Well it seems that my Latin pronunciation of the dipthong ae(Amd many other letters also) has evolved from /æ/(From the letter ash), then I watch a video of someone speaking Latin, which then became /aɪ/, and now you tell me that it is /iː/? Buɡboy52.4 (talk) 03:22, 10 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Read the article I linked to on your talk page. That should answer your questions. Basically, Latin <æ> was pronounced [ai]. It has no more to do with Old English ash than Latin  (pronounced like an English y) has to do with English . But in English, Latin <æ> is pronounced "ee", as in encyclopædia. However, there are people who try for a more "authentic" pronunciation and pronounce <æ> like English long a, so that -idae sounds like day. As for u, yes, that didn't have a y sound in Latin, but it generally does in English, for example in the word molecule. kwami (talk) 04:37, 10 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks for all the help! Buɡboy52.4 (talk) 13:01, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

stem and root
Hi -- I responded to your comment at Talk:Affix. Joriki (talk) 09:33, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

Correction
in the images should the "Puyama" be changed into "Puyuma" Ayrenz (talk) 06:19, 11 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Yeah, thanks. I noticed that booboo after posting it, and just haven't gotten back to it. kwami (talk) 07:57, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

Beaconsfield, Tasmania
The stress for the name is BEAconsFIELD. (i.e. primary stress on the first syllable and secondary on the last). I have no idea how this is shown in IPA. Can you please fix? -- Mattinbgn\talk 07:18, 14 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Sure. (It's not nec. to write the 2ary stress; that's conveyed by the long vowel.) And hey, thanks for writing above my to-do list! kwami (talk) 07:19, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

query
Hi kwami. Why did you change this? cygnis insignis 14:26, 14 April 2009 (UTC)
 * I see that you mean a city in Georgia, USA, not sure where RP is though. It is my understanding, and personal experience, that people are surprised by the pronunciation; it is distinctive. I don't know enough about this to feel strongly about it, but I do have a couple of queries. When you say "... Australian pronunciation is notably distinct, we can always link directly to the Australian English phonology article.", do you mean that it cannot be accurately represented using pron-en? If it can't, why do you suppose it would only be a 'dozen or so cases'? If it can, why was pron-en-au created? Regards, cygnis insignis 00:32, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

Bosal
Hi Kwamikagami, I'm not an expert in the IPA pronounciation symbols, so just wanted to be sure that the tweaks you made to the Bosal article have the word "bosal" pronounced in English as "bow-SAHL" (long O, a pronounced as "ah" and accent on second syllable) with "BOW-sul" as the secondary alternate (though technically incorrect) pronunciation. Thanks! Montanabw (talk) 23:47, 14 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes. If you click on the link, you'll be taken to a guide. The middle choice is "boh-SALL". (Is that not used?) kwami (talk) 23:50, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

boh-SALL, bow-SAHL, probably the same thing. (Which is, I suppose, why IPA is used and not something else!) So, can you put that one first? Also, Mecate is correctly pronounced Meh-cah-TAY, not Meh-cah-TEE, not sure which way that one goes. Montanabw (talk) 23:53, 14 April 2009 (UTC)


 * The first is boh-SAHL, the second boh-SALL, and the third BOH-sul.


 * The fully anglicized pronunciation of 'mecate' has a final tee sound. This is sourced in the dictionaries, and is typical of words ending in historic unstressed "ay": saké, Tuesday, etc. kwami (talk) 23:56, 14 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Oh OK, I get it now. and the Bosal ones work  (I forgot about that nasal middle version, that one is sort of scary too, but I digress) Maybe, but that is not how it is pronounced in the horse world, which follows certain rules of its own!  (smile)  I don't know if it's modern Spanish either (been a long discussion on the topic of Spanish loanwords in the dialect of the American West in the past), but the point is that if you refer to the rope-rein-thingamajigs on a bosal, that is a me-cah-TAY!  (grin).  (though there are a few folks down south who call it a "McCarthy" (go figure...)).  I can live with both versions (Tay and Tee) placed there if that will settle the matter.   Montanabw (talk) 00:13, 15 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Well sure, if it's a specialized pronunciation, we should note that. We can move the general pron. to a footnote. So, is it meck-uh-TAY, muh-KAH-tay, or what? kwami (talk) 00:19, 15 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Sorry, was out of town yesterday meh-KAH-tay is about as close as I can get.  Stress on second syllable.   Montanabw (talk) 18:05, 16 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Okay, seems both pronunciations are used. I would guess it's "meh-KAH-tay" in areas with more Spanish influence. kwami (talk) 23:45, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Vanth
Please see my rather urgent note at Talk:90482_Orcus. Iridia (talk) 04:42, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

Aquitanian language
Kwami, Taskubilos is trying to weasel in his stuff on the Aquitanian page now... and if you have too much time, User talk:Rana Ammar Mazhar needs a slight rap over the knuckles, he keeps reverting to pre-cleanup versions for some reason and never discusses anything (see last comment on his talk page). Way out of your normal area though, so no probs if you want to stay out of this one. Akerbeltz (talk) 12:04, 15 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Let's see how they respond by tomorrow. kwami (talk) 13:13, 15 April 2009 (UTC)


 * So far one has continued, and one has not. I gave the former a block warning. kwami (talk) 23:53, 15 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks mate. Remind me to buy you a coffee some day ;) People behaving like that sometimes make me wonder if I should fish for adminship myself one day! Akerbeltz (talk) 23:59, 15 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I'd rather be doing something else than using admin tools, but it is nice to be able to put a stop to minor annoyances when I come across them. kwami (talk) 00:03, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

Yachats, Oregon
Do you think you could help us figure out the IPA for this article? See the talk page for discussion. Thanks! Katr67 (talk) 15:53, 15 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Done. kwami (talk) 16:03, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

Second-round characters
I recently found Second-round simplified Chinese character and have been working on both adding sources (it had none... not even a list of works consulted) and expanding it. Given your obvious background in linguistics, I was wondering if you could give it a look whenever you get a chance, possibly even recommend a source or two. I have access to a significant amount of hard-copy reference material and want to make this my first 'featured' article in time.

Asia's Orthographic Dilemma (with a forward by DeFrancis) is listed in the references because I have access to it but haven't had a chance to take a close look. I was going to deal with the question of whether and how much to mention it once the meat of the article - background, reasons for failure, economic costs, etc - is done. Recognizance (talk) 18:19, 15 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I have no sources to offer. I corrected a few typos, but I know almost nothing about the topic. kwami (talk) 22:58, 15 April 2009 (UTC)


 * DeFrancis in The Chinese Language Fact and Fantasy has a chapter on spelling reform and talks about the second round being dropped for being too radical on page261 (Hawaii Press1984). My best bet would be to punch 二简字 into Google Scholar and browse through the sources. Akerbeltz (talk) 23:10, 15 April 2009 (UTC)


 * That's too bad. Thanks anyway. Let me know if you need a second set of eyes or a copy edit anywhere. As for DeFrancis, I intentionally mentioned his name because I had him in mind already. :) I can give the other suggestion a shot but I'm unable to read Chinese characters.
 * I was going to look tomorrow for someone to help me translate the Chinese Wikipedia article about the second round because there (seems to be) a lot of good content - not to mention images! - over there. Recognizance (talk) 00:40, 16 April 2009 (UTC)


 * You're welcome and good luck, you picked a tough one to work on if you can't read characters! Incidentally, anyone know why there are two links to the Vietnamese Wiki from that page? One to vi:Tiêu bản:Hán tự and one to Phương án giản hoá chữ Hán lần thứ hai? Akerbeltz (talk) 00:51, 16 April 2009 (UTC)


 * I was hoping I would get lucky like I did with the table for Chinese pronouns (see my talk page) and find some really helpful people on the translation. Going to exhaust my English-language options first though. The double-link was an interwiki that was outside the area on Template:Table Hanzi. I had been wondering the same thing, but I'm inexperienced and the answer didn't occur to me until just now. Recognizance (talk) 03:01, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

Mistake in Block warning
I guess that your block warning is for Talskubilos instead for Tautintanes.

But just in case: All specialists in Aquitanian and Iberian overtly defend the relationship between several Aquitanian and several Iberian names. In particular Joaquín Gorrochategui (1993), main ancient Basque specialist, in his article "La onomástica aquitana y su relación con la ibérica", which is cited the bibliography and with a title that can’t be more clear--Tautintanes (talk) 18:45, 16 April 2009 (UTC)


 * This is not the place for that discussion so I'll respond on the Aquitanian page. Akerbeltz (talk) 19:59, 16 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Kwami is who made the block warning "You are carrying an edit war over to Aquitanian language. You need references to support your claims, especially since on the face of it they appear to be ridiculous. If you continue, I will block you. kwami (talk) 23:49, 15 April 2009 (UTC)"--Tautintanes (talk) 22:35, 16 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, you are right. I did get your names mixed up. My apologies!! kwami (talk) 22:47, 16 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Ok. --Tautintanes (talk) 22:59, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

What are you playing, kwami? You're censoring my edits without prior discussion. This in UNFAIR and contraty to Wikipedia's etiquette. Talskubilos (talk) 10:52, 19 April 2009 (UTC)


 * We have been discussing this till we're blue in the face. It's you who keeps ignoring any sort of solid argument and plough ahead with what you think is gospel. Akerbeltz (talk) 10:56, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Is Trask's argument about TAR a solid one? I doubt it.


 * I'd like to see some actual evidence. Quote one of your sources. Something like "Iberian ARS "bear" closely resembles the Basque word for bear". Sorry, but we're not going to just take your word for something as fringy as this. kwami (talk) 11:01, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

OK, then I'll keep only those items which are explicitly mentioned in the literature, leaving aside the others. I'm also partidary of keeping the Iberian-Aquitanian list (without Basque correspondences) in the Aquitanian article but properly documented. Talskubilos (talk) 11:42, 19 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Tals, that's exactly the problem, a linguistic correspondence refers to a specific concept where a meaningful relationship (lexical, historical etc) has been established. Linguistic corresponces cannot be based on the pure comparison of surface forms without going onto very thin ice. So dropping the Basque isn't changing anythig as the correspondence between Aquitanian and Basque is just about the only thing that *has* been proven in that table. Akerbeltz (talk) 11:38, 19 April 2009 (UTC)


 * If they're just look-alikes, then we need to be explicit about that. I have no problem with a list of look-alikes, as long as we give the %age of the total attested vocabulary they constitute (10% look-alikes would mean nothing with such simple phonologies) and are clear that there is no "correspondence" other than this. For that, we'd need to have known meanings that correspond. kwami (talk) 11:47, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

I'm affraid that the Aquitanian-Basque table is also a list of "look-alikes", because Aquitanian inscriptions don't contain actual texts with "known meanings" but just onomastic items (personal names and theonyms). So in essence there's no much difference between comparing Aquitanian HARS- and Iberian aŕs with Basque hartz. It's true than the match rate Aquitanian-Basque is much higher than than Iberian-Basque, so the conclusion is that Aquitanian and Basque must be close relatives while Iberian and Basque must not.

There're also a few Aquitanian items without clear Basque correspondence which are identical (or identical) to Iberian. Other items may also have parallels both in Basque and Iberian, so I think they should be 3 tables: 1)Aquitanian items with clear Basque correspondences, 2)Aquitanian items with clear Iberian correspondences (either with Basque correspondences or not) and 3)Iberian with clear Basque correspondences (either with Aquitanian correspondences or not). I remind you that the Iberian items on the table are onomastic compound elements extracted by specialists from personal names found in actual texts, the most famous of which was the Ascoli's Bronze, a relation of the members of the Turma Salluitana being granted Roman citizenship for their contribution to Pompeyan wars.

References to other parallels in non-onomastic items were deleted (IMHO inappropriately) by Akerbeltz. I think they should be restored, but documented if any. Talskubilos (talk) 13:08, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

But I understand your position as you only reference seems to be Trask. Talskubilos (talk) 13:30, 19 April 2009 (UTC)


 * My only reference isn't anybody in particular. Instead, it's the general consensus that Aquitanian has been shown to be Basque, but Iberian hasn't been shown to be anything. But if you want someone with more knowledge than me to evaluate your proposal, I'd suggest making a request at the linguistics noticeboard. It would help if you made an explicit proposal on the Iberian talk page you could direct them to: what the connections are, who says so, what their evidence is, and most importantly, how they're received in academia. It's difficult for me to evaluate the details when I don't know the subject.


 * I'm not picking on you, just the idea. Last month we had someone pushing the idea that Basque (or was it Iberian?) was spoken on the Canary Islands. When people started reverting him, he went so far as to add his idea to the article on *tuna*! After a while we just get tired of it. We don't want to go and check the refs to find, once again, that they're either crackpot or have been misrepresented. That's probably why Akerbeltz wants something more than just a ref or two. What you're doing may be entirely legitimate, but we've seen too much junk, and so aren't feeling very charitable. kwami (talk) 20:40, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Apart from totally agreeing with kwami - Aquitanian isn't just randomly associated with modern Basque. Vasconits, mostly Mitxelena, were working on reconstructing Early Basque through a method of internal reconstruction way befor the Aquitanian inscriptions were discovered to be related. Funnily enough, the forms they postulated for Early Basque were almost perfect matches for the forms found on Aquitanian. Aquitanian, once discovered, was found to match on many levels. It was Show that to any historical linguist, and they'll sign these two languages off as having some genetic relationship. Akerbeltz (talk) 21:30, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
 * found to match the independently reconstructed forms
 * found to match the morphology and word order of modern Basque (such as VMME SAHAR cf ume zahar, NESCATO cf Neska|to, AHER BELSTE cf Aker beltz etc etc)
 * most astonishingly, comprehensible even without much prior knowledge of Aquitanian or Early Basque
 * located in/near the area of the historic Basque speaking area
 * etc etc

I don't think Aquitanian is "randomly associated" with Basque. I only said that SOME random resemblances can occur even beetween close related languages, as in the case of -TAR. Have you evaluated my argument against Trask's claim, Akerbeltz? I'd better not.

And although most Aquitanian have direct correspondences with Basque, some of them do NOT. And a few of these match closely Iberian. Then some kind of relationship must have been existed, either genetic or by contact (more probably). Presenting the similarities between Iberian and Aquitanian/Basque already recognized in the academic literature is legitimate; to supress them, as Trask did, is not. Talskubilos (talk) 08:04, 20 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Tal, regardless of whether we've misrepresented what you've said before, what you say now displays a fundamental flaw in logic which makes me suspect this whole thing is OR. That is, suppose Aquitanian had a word "wawa" which does not have an obvious Basque counterpart. Now let's suppose that Iberian also has a word "wawa", or maybe a similar form such as "baba". You conclude from this that the words *must* be related. That is not so. If Aquitanian "wawa" means "water", and Iberian "wawa"/"baba" means "father", then there would of course be no reason to think the languages have anything to do with each other. It's not unreasonable to suppose that there would be similarities due to contact, and if we ever find a good bilingual, we may discover that Iberian is Vasconic after all. But meanwhile we shouldn't be basing the article on what "must" be true. kwami (talk) 08:19, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

I may also add that the phonological system of Iberian is similar to Proto-Basque's aand there's evidence of at least Iberian loanwords in modern Basque. BTW, the material referring to similarities to Basque of Iberian non-onomastic items by other contributors has been wiped out by Akerbeltz. Talskubilos (talk) 08:14, 20 April 2009 (UTC)


 * The solution is to present your evidence and the citations supporting it. kwami (talk) 08:19, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Kwami, you said "you aren't feeling very charitable these days". Well, I'm not either. I've other things to do besides wasting my time arguing with you. Talskubilos (talk) 08:17, 20 April 2009 (UTC) Talskubilos (talk) 08:17, 20 April 2009 (UTC)


 * If you can't be bothered to make the modest effort of basic scholarship then you're right, this is a waste of time. kwami (talk) 08:19, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Kwami, I don't want to look rough, but have you read the WHOLE article and not just my edits? Because some of the material I'm referring to is ALREADY in it, although written by other people. Are you asking me to ammend things I didn't written in teh frist place? Talskubilos (talk) 09:25, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

You said "It's not unreasonable to suppose that there would be similarities due to contact,". This is why I'm doing, show these similarities, nothing more. And indeed, some items in Aquitanian inscriptions are 100% Iberian after all. For example, the personal name VRCHATETEL from a funeraral inscription in Navarra is labelled as "clearly Iberian" by Gorrotxategi. Talskubilos (talk) 09:31, 20 April 2009 (UTC)


 * See comment on the Aquitanian page - yes, the name is stated to be clearly Iberian. However, even Gorrotxateg admits that we can't be certain it's actually Aquitanian, not just an Iberian inscription found on what we believe to be the Aquitanian area. Akerbeltz (talk) 09:41, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Don't be silly, Akerbeltz. This isn't an Iberian inscription, but a Latin one. In fact, all the Aquitanian inscriptions are actually Latin with Vasconic onomastic items. This personal name happen to be 100% Iberian, so vey likely the individual buried there was Iberian. Talskubilos (talk) 09:54, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Re: Dumyat
I'm not entirely sure what that means. It is pronounced du-MY-at. The "du" is like the start of "dumb". The "MY" is somewhere between the words "my" and may". The "at" is just like the word "at", or as in "hat". I dont know if any of those would be described as "reduced"? Regards, Jonathan Oldenbuck (talk) 14:28, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Template:Saturnian satellites
I see that no article uses Template:Saturnian satellites. I fixed it and it's ready for use. Debresser (talk) 07:17, 19 April 2009 (UTC)


 * I think the main problem was that it was inaccessible to casual editors, and therefore thought inappropriate. There was a long discussion about restricting encyclopedic content to mainspace. Sorry for all the work you just did, I think the template probably should've been deleted. Good AfD candidate. kwami (talk) 07:22, 19 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Whatever. Good luck. Debresser (talk) 08:22, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Your recent move and rename
Hi. After looking at the sitewide protection log, I noticed by chance that you have indefinitely protected after moving that article to the title. That protection makes it impossible for non-administrators to revert your move. I am concerned that this protection constitutes a misuse of administrator tools to further your own position in a content dispute, which is prohibited and can ultimately lead to desysopping by the Arbitration Committee. That is why I am asking you to please speedily undo that protection. (I have no opinion as to the dispute over the article title itself.) Best regards,  Sandstein   21:33, 19 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Okay. It's simply an inappropriate name. I don't care if someone thinks of something better than what we have. kwami (talk) 01:00, 20 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Thank you.  Sandstein   05:07, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Talk:Ainu languages and Talk:Hokkaidō Ainu language
Hello,

I raised an issue you'd probably be interested in. -- Lime tom 08:55, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Kardinal Offishall
I've provided a ref for the pronunciation of his name and put it into the article. Also, since YouTube videos aren't proper references, here's a link which contains a song by Kardinal. About 5 seconds into the video, he pronounces the name. Blackjays1 (talk) 17:34, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Korean grammar page
Well you did cover some advanced grammar tenses that I've never even heard of. I had to ask my fiends when to even use some of those cases so you must have some advanced knowledge. I'm not positive if those are wrong or not either since you knew the other advanced grammars. But as far as I know when you propose something formally in Korean, for example "let's go" you would say 갑시다 (Verb 가다 conjugated with the pattern (으)ㅂ시다) not "습시다." Also instead of "(시)습시오" I believe the pattern is (으)십시오, i.e. 가십시오("please go"). Also if you're interested, you could join my Korean wiki project at http://www.koreanwikiproject.com/wiki/ and contribute similar articles. I'd love to have you on board our project as well.

Take care --Bluesoju (talk) 01:23, 22 April 2009 (UTC) It's good you started the grammar page.


 * Korean's a really fun language, but I think I'll pass. With tens of millions of computer-savvy speakers, there are plenty of other people who could do this better than me. I just got frustrated that no-one was doing anything with the grammar. And if I screwed up (which I'm sure I did), maybe that will attract a few good editors to fix it up. I prefer obscure topics like the origin of Hangul, or minority languages that no-one else is going to work on.


 * Yes, -십시오 is the common polite form. However, a complete paradigm would include more obscure forms. I don't know if I messed up with -습시오. I have it in my notes, which I copied from grammars I no longer have access to. I may have mistranscribed or misunderstood it, or it may be obsolete, or perhaps a theoretical form found in verb charts but not actually used. If it's obsolete this should be noted; if purely theoretical, it should be deleted, or at the least put in a footnote saying it's not actually found. kwami (talk) 01:37, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Russian
I'm not sure if or  is better for <щ>. I imagine the latter would imply diminished force in between the two, but then I don't know what is true for Russian. What do you think? — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 20:02, 22 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Yeah, that was probably an error. would imply a sequence of two phonemes, whereas  would imply that gemination is phonemic. kwami (talk) 20:12, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

IPA for "Peirce"
In the "Pragmatism" article you changed the IPA rendition of "Peirce" from pɝs to pɜrs. I thought it would be with the "ɝ" (lengthened, "pɝːs"), "ɝ" instead of "ɜr" because it isn't followed by a vowel and so isn't necessarily pronounced with an r sound at all. (Peirce, of Boston Brahmin stock, probably didn't pronounce the r himself.) On the other hand, your version "pɜrs" has the advantage of looking more like a phonetic spelling than like Klingon, unlike my version "pɝːs" The Tetrast (talk) 22:16, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Up here it's considered good practice to write the /r/'s because there's still plenty of rhotic dialects of English, especially in Scotland. That might account for kwami changing it. Akerbeltz (talk) 22:51, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
 * As I understand it, the "ɝ" does cover the rhotic dialects and indicates that in some dialects the r-sound is dropped.The Tetrast (talk) 23:34, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Since it's a phonemic representation, not phonetic, it doesn't matter which symbol we choose. /ɜr/ is the standard chosen for the English IPA key, but /ɝː/ is listed as an alternate. A couple people have complained that we shouldn't have multiple representations, and should just stick to /ɜr/. That even seems to be acceptable in British names. kwami (talk) 22:55, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, /pɜrs/ is certainly more readable than /pɝːs/. The Tetrast (talk) 23:34, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

Flower articles
I see you have added references to quite some flower articles. While doing so, please check if the articles have a references section, and if not, please make one. I've had to do this for some 20 articles... Debresser (talk) 20:22, 25 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Hi Debresser,


 * Isn't this something a bot will take care of, like correcting double redirects? If I have to edit each article twice, I will only be able to get to half as many articles. kwami (talk) 21:14, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Plant genus pronunciations
Does your reference list the IPA, or are you deriving it from some other indication of pronunciation? I realize that these are phonemic rather than phonetic, but the only way I could imagine hearing /dʒuːˈnɪpərəs/ would be from someone whose first language was not English (Everyone I know says /dʒuˈnɪpəɹəs/. I understand that /r/ is a compromise usage that covers all English dialects (although it has the least frequency of use).

If your reference gives the IPA, I won't modify, but rather provide alternate pronunciations when the one given is not widespread.--Curtis Clark (talk) 15:21, 26 April 2009 (UTC)


 * That particular genus only has sound respellings. (Many others are in the OED in IPA.) There is no difference between /r/ and /ɹ/, so it would be misleading to give both as if they were separate pronunciations. Or do you mean the length in the /u/? If you want to, just change that. We make a 3-way distinction with [i], but occasions to use something similar with [u] are so uncommon that we haven't decided to go there (yet, anyway). If you mean alternate ways of anglicizing Latin, there are several, so best just to give the Latin, macrons and all, and let the reader decide. kwami (talk) 15:30, 26 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Do you mean "genus", or the Sunset reference? Although I disagree with the general use of /r/ as the consensus form (and the statement "There is no difference between /r/ and /ɹ/" I find bizarre unless you mean it in the strict phonemic sense), I was in fact referring specifically to the length of the /u/; in my experience, long vowels in unstressed syllables are unusual in spoken American English. As far as anglicizing Latin, Syllable stress of Botanical Latin and Traditional English pronunciation of Latin seem to have that covered, although there are genera that are routinely "mispronounced" relative to their classical syllable stress.--Curtis Clark (talk) 17:28, 26 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Both. I only have that genus attested in Sunset.
 * Not exactly phonemically. We're ignoring dialectical differences, which means the inventory might not be exactly what any one dialect has. But yeah, it wouldn't matter if we went with /r/ or /ɹ/. We went with /r/—like /oʊ/ instead of /əʊ/—to make it a little more accessible to readers not all that familiar with the IPA.
 * The problem with "i" and "u" is that it's impossible to know whether the editor means [iː uː] or [ɪ ʊ]. But in unstressed syllables there isn't much contrast, so it doesn't matter much. Change it to /u/ or /ʊ/ if you like. Unstressed /u/ is already inconsistently transcribed between articles. But this is intended to be for everyone, so if an American automatically switches to [ʊ], we won't need to spell that out. kwami (talk) 17:41, 26 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, it's worth mentioning that genera like Erica are "mis"pronounced. kwami (talk) 17:41, 26 April 2009 (UTC)
 * So if I'm reading you correctly, all the pronunciations in Sunset are respellings?--Curtis Clark (talk) 18:09, 26 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes. I check them with the OED or other dicts where possible when the orthography isn't sufficient to distinguish British vowels that Sunset doesn't cover. kwami (talk) 18:12, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

(undent) Hi there Kwamikagami! Can you make sure to check that the article has a references section when adding the IPA? I'm sweeping the broken references category and I've come across this problem numerous times. Cheers! Sillyfolkboy (talk) (edits) 13:17, 27 April 2009 (UTC)


 * I just entered in the last one, so there's an end to it. I have added some ref links, but isn't there a bot for that? I figured that's the kind of thing that should be automated, like repairing double redirects, so that we can spend our time on content. kwami (talk) 13:21, 27 April 2009 (UTC)
 * There is a bot but it doesn't run very often as these errors often signify vandalism, blanking, and a whole host of other problems, so they need editor reviewing. At least I think that's what the problem is... Sillyfolkboy (talk) (edits) 14:51, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Names for U.S. citizens
Hi. I've removed your request for a third opinion for this article on the grounds that there are more than two active editors on the page. 3Os are for articles where two authors have a disagreement, and a third person is needed to settle the dispute. In this case, I see four editors actively involved on the page. At this point, you're really beyond a 3O; try an WP:RFC. Or maybe find a WikiProject that the article falls under, and ask someone there to give an opinion. Thanks. &mdash;  Hello Annyong  (say whaaat?!) 04:24, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Plant articles
Hi I've noticed you are adding a reference (Sunset Garden Book) to many plant articles. Could you also add a  tag to the reference section to pages where there is none? Otherwise the page produces an ugly cite error (see red text at bottom of page). In case you don't know how to do this just add

to the page just above the categories. Cheers pablo hablo. 13:59, 27 April 2009 (UTC)


 * I left that for the bots. See above. kwami (talk) 22:43, 27 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Looks like they've all been taken care of. kwami (talk) 23:56, 27 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Yep! All done. That would be old "Sillyfolkbot" for you! Sillyfolkboy (talk) (edits) 02:22, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Pronunciation of Metrosideros
I saw that you added that pronunciation of Metrosideros from the same source noted above. Have you ever heard it pronounced that way? I've always heard it with a long O on the last syllable, not an ə, which is consistent with the spelling. KarlM (talk) 18:24, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
 * I've only ever heard it the way kwami has transcribed it and I did a lot of hanging around garden centres and botanic gardens in Australia. Not that that's a ref. Akerbeltz (talk) 19:19, 28 April 2009 (UTC)


 * I've never heard it pronounced. It could have a short final o, but not a long one, unless someone was trying to imitate Latin. Final vowels tend to go to schwa in English (though it is to some extent lexicalized). Generally IMO it's best to go with literary conventions for Latin, since people who like other approaches generally won't need our help. kwami (talk) 21:31, 28 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Why couldn't it be long? I mean, it is, in terms of how people actually say it in Hawaii (possibly Akerbeltz's comment above may be due to the difference between Australian and American accents). The Greek word sideron has a short O, but latinizing the last letter to s makes the O long, as with Sicyos. KarlM (talk) 09:08, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Greek words ending in 'os' are pronounced with a short 'o' by modern Greeks and by all English speaking people other than North Americans, which obviously includes Australians. Next time you visit Mykonos, hear for yourself. Mike Hayes (talk) 23:11, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

List of Latin digraphs
Dear Kwamikagami, regarding the article List of Latin digraphs I couldn't stop my bot or another to put an inappropriate wikilink. But perhaps for your understanding, I should explain how a bot work :
 * a bot scan a page on his home wiki (for my bot it's french) then he follow the interwikis links found on the first page.
 * for all second pages found, he search if interwikis match with the ones on the first page.
 * he then check if all the page linked with interwikis exist. If it's right, he add all new interwiki link on all languages pages. If a link is broken, he removed it on all pages, and if a page have been renamed or a link change to point another article, the new link is modify on all wikis.

In the case of a false link, a mystake made by a user that link with an incorrect page, the bot couldn't verify. He take it for a rename or an improvment not for a mystake. So he update all pages, also by error. The only solution to solve it is to remove all incorrrect link on all wikis. Sincerely --GdGourou - °o°  -  Talk to me  22:42, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
 * That's potentially several hundred links to remove, since the article was combined from over a hundred stubs. Can't you just put this page on an "exceptions/do not modify" list? kwami (talk) 22:50, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
 * I don't think so, because of the pywkipedia framework. But the list should be short, there's obly 10-15 digram on FR.WP. I check these pages and i think i will be ok --GdGourou - °o°  -  Talk to me  22:57, 28 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks. (There are a couple other bots doing the same thing, but one of them is also based at WP-fr.) kwami (talk) 22:59, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
 * I found the problem, it's on br.wikipedia.org. Could you remove with me all the link to List of Latin digraphs from the Digramoù lin ein the bottom navbox of br:Lizherenneg_latin ? --GdGourou - °o°  -  Talk to me  23:03, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
 * All correction are done for br. i hope there's not error on over wiki... Inform me if it's not the case. Sincerely--GdGourou - °o°  -  Talk to me  23:07, 28 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, looks like WP-br is taken care of. Thanks! kwami (talk) 23:10, 28 April 2009 (UTC)


 * My Dear Friend, Comrade « Gdgourou », tried to correct wrong iwiz, but « Vertigo12, who calls himself a « Redaktor » – pl.Wikipedia, as de.Wikipedia, has closed its articles, and some illiterate guys rule them –, is a stupid idiot ! --Budelberger (   ) 00:24, 29 April 2009 (UTC). (I don't want to correct articles where – de, pl – some bastards approve or not what I do… So, a bot soon will interwikify your article !)

AN/I
Hello,. This message is being sent to inform you that there currently is a discussion at Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding the ongoing problems at Names for U.S. citizens. Thank you. --Cúchullain t/ c 14:59, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

re: Korean phonotactics
Hi, ㄼ is only found in verb conjugation, where it is followed by a vowel or ㄷ, ㅈ, ㄱ, ㄴ.

Examples:
 * 떫어 - ㄹ+ㅂ
 * 떫다 떫지 떫고 - reduced to ㅂ
 * 떫네 - reduced to ㅁ (ㅂ has gone through assimilation due to ㄴ)

So it never occurs before b, p, pp, or m. Hope this helps. :) --Kjoonlee 17:50, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Oh, ㄺ is found in 흙 earth, soil, a common noun, as well as in verbs. 흙내음 earthy smell is pronounced like 흥내음, so you're right, it does get changed to the engma sound in front of ㄴ. --Kjoonlee 12:46, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

ㄳ is found in 몫 and 삯, both nouns. 몫 할인 (someone's share's discount) is 목 할인 -> 모카린, so the stop takes precedence. --Kjoonlee 13:45, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

흙과, 흙까지, 흙 캐기, 흙 하고 are like 흑꽈, 흑까지, 흑캐기, 흑카고 so yes, the last two are aspirated. --Kjoonlee 04:58, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
 * But the ㄹ is only realized when a vowel follows the ㄺ. 흙은 is 흘근 and 흙이 is 흘기. --Kjoonlee 05:05, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

떫다
For a very long time, I've been wondering how best to describe 떫다 in English; I believe I now have a solution. Put very simply, it's a descriptive verb which means to taste like tannin, like the last drop of tea in a tea pot or like unripe persimmons. --Kjoonlee 14:04, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Supriyya personal attacks/threats of real-life defamation
Ah, looks like you beat me to removing that comment. If Supriyya posts this again, I am also willing to revert it with impunity (just if you don't want to be the only one reverting). r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 09:14, 30 April 2009 (UTC)


 * She's bragging about being little more than a troll. I blocked the IP she was using, though it was probably a temp. kwami (talk) 09:16, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

re Minories
I'm happy to defer to you regarding IPA notation as this seems to be one of your areas of expertise: it's very far from mine. In fact you've previously helped me out on this very page, so this is a genuine request for enlightenment, and not point-scoring. Why, whenever I use /ɚ/, is it changed to /ər/ and whenever I use  /ər/, the opposite happens? Best. --Old Moonraker (talk) 18:11, 30 April 2009 (UTC)


 * (Answered on your talk page. Summary: to drive you mad.) kwami (talk) 18:35, 30 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Similar question really – quite a few of your edits insert /r/ into words which would never have them for a native Brit speaker. It seems to me that the /ɚ/ and equivalents are a good compromise, allowing rhotic speakers to see "their" /r/, but allowing non-rhotic speakers to ignore it.  For example, "heifer" is not pronounced /ˈhɛfər/ in standard Brit Eng, so that transcription is incorrect for us.  However, I'd avoid (and indeed in this case did avoid) writing /ˈhɛfə/, knowing that it would be equally wrong for rhotic speakers.  Surely /ˈhɛfɚ/ accommodates both?  It seems better than the alternatives, which I suppose are either a who-gets-there-first policy (as for spelling), or a clumsy and repetitive statement of both: "pronounced /ˈhɛfər/ or /ˈhɛfə/"...  (Actually, I've now lived in Hampshire long enough that I'm beginning to add a West Country /ər/ to my SE rural/RP accent, but that doesn't change the argument for standard Brit Eng speakers).  Richard New Forest (talk) 22:25, 30 April 2009 (UTC)


 * I answered that on OM's talk page, so I'll put it here this time. Actually, heifer *is* pronounced /ˈhɛfər/ in standard British English. The slashes mean that the /r/ is there in people's minds, not that it's necessarily always enunciated that way. You may not hear it if you say the word in isolation, but as soon as you say that heifer is, the ar pops out. (Okay, some people put in ars after any word ending in a schwa, but I don't believe that's considered standard.) I wouldn't want to transcribe it [ˈhɛfər] in brackets, because now we'd be saying the ar is explicitly enunciated when it is not necessrily so.


 * Doesn't pop out with me, even with my West Country influence. I use a small glottal stop, exactly as I would with "Offa is king"; I think that is how most standard Brit Eng speakers would say it.  You are right that some dialect speakers (Estuary, Cockney) would say "heifer ris", but those would also say "Offa ris" and indeed some would say "a horse" as "a rorse".  In any case, if a /r/ is only "there in people's minds" is it not better shown by /ɚ/?Richard New Forest (talk) 19:13, 1 May 2009 (UTC)


 * No, that's what the slashes mean: it's a theoretical construct. I realize many people do not have an ar at all, but that's predictable, and in any case in RP there is an ar. (Officially, at least.) Writing /ɚ/ is fine, but the only difference between it and /ər/ is graphic: one may look better, but they mean the same thing. kwami (talk) 19:22, 1 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I agree that <ɚ> seems better for a lot of British names, so I've been hesitant to follow the IPA key consistently here. But sometimes there is no choice—with the vowel /ɑr/, for example. kwami (talk) 22:35, 30 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Although /r/ is used for English "r", the sound represented by [r], the alveolar trill, although common in many other languages, is uncommon among English dialects. According to IPA chart for English dialects, it is found only in Welsh English.--Curtis Clark (talk) 04:01, 1 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, /r/ does not (necessarily) mean [r]. Anything between slashes is meaningless until it's defined, and we can define it any way we want. /r/ for is perhaps the most common convention when there's no reason to be more precise. kwami (talk) 12:03, 1 May 2009 (UTC)


 * When I was being taught correct RP by my RADA educated teacher, there were rules about when you pronounced the 'r' between words and when you didn't e.g in the phrase "Forever and ever and ever", it is not pronounced after the middle 'ever' but is after 'forever'. South African English speakers tend to drop all final 'r's even when the next word begins with a vowel. Mike Hayes (talk) 23:41, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Nepenthes
Kwami, we meet again! I hope you are well? I have just noticed your wholesale change of nəˈpɛnθiːz to nɨˈpɛnθiːz and wanted to question your reason for changing it when we agreed in 2007 to leave it as is? I've researched this genus for over 15 years, and have never heard anyone pronounce it this way, whether here in Europe, in southeast Asia where they predominantly occur, or in the United States where they are widely grown; the accepted pronunciation for the first vowel is mid-central: ə, so this alteration is both incorrect and misleading. If anything, it is sometimes mispronounced ɛ! Please save me the trouble of a manual reversion - I'm not familiar with the AWB! Many thanks, Attenboroughii (talk) 22:34, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Hi, alas not; manuscript editing calls! We discussed the name in the talk page of a species entry, but I can't for the life of me locate it, which is no help at all. I see your point, though it seems a shame to give in to committee-governed convention where, in practice, spoken convention would have it otherwise. Even I've found errors in the OED, though this is clearly more a case of subtlety ;) I'll leave it to your discretion.  Attenboroughii (talk) 09:18, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the prompt response. Going by my understanding of schwa and schwi - the Wikipedia definition sums schwa up perfectly for my accent, which is RP (British Home Counties), and highlights why schwi seems so inappropriate in this instance - yes, I'd pointedly use schwa. Where I've attended US conferences, the pronunciation of Nepenthes sometimes even errs towards r-coloured schwa (but not quite!). In terms of inter-dialectal interpretation of the phonetic alphabet, ə seems a little less ambiguous than ɪ and ɨ, particularly since most casual readers won't have the vaguest idea about current phonetic traditions. Does that make reasonable sense to you? Attenboroughii (talk) 09:18, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

I understand; I hadn't considered that GA interpretations might be the basis for your initial decision. Can I leave this in your hands, or should I go ahead and unravel the mysteries of the AWB? Have a pleasant weekend! Attenboroughii (talk) 14:23, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

TFA: Haumea
Today's featured article/May 6, 2009 Nergaal (talk) 17:05, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

IPA for "Shuswap"
Hi; it occurred to me while checking this regional-disambig page just now that our usual pronunciation of "Shuswap" should probably be given - "Shoe-shwap" - since that second 's' is really "sh". I think some people self-consciously pronounce it with a straight /s/ but it sounds artificial and tends towards "sh" anyway because of the following /w/. Granted, the first /sh/ is thicker than the second 'sh' sound a bit, again because of the /w/, but ..... also if it doesn't already have it, Secwepemc needs IPA, but ditto for various other First Nations tribe-names around BC. Shuswap's current in English, and "not obvious" in pronunciation.Skookum1 (talk) 13:31, 6 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Okay, thanks.


 * Is the Shuswap River etc. also pronounced this way, or does it take a straight ess? kwami (talk) 13:33, 6 May 2009 (UTC)


 * All of them are pronounced the same way., as it turns out (was on teh Secwepemc page, which has been updated since I last looked.  So found it anyway, and I'll double-check with someone I know who lived in the Shuswap River Country (which is not the same as the shsuwap Country) but I doubt very much there's any difference in the upper basin vs. around the lake.Skookum1 (talk) 13:38, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Saw you included both; I just wrote a note to my friend from the Shuswap River.....but wanted to note that the "sh" version is also the First Nations English one; it's a bit of a stereotype but it's a true one, and used in native orthography too which is why the S in Secwepemci is an "sh". There are all kinds of "shoozhie" jokes ("Susie" or "Suzy") and you'll often hear natives, particularly older ones, sace "Kamloopsh" and "Thompshon"....actually "Thompshn", as even in English, or BC English anywya, that's typically prononunced "Tompsn"....(i.e. no vowel, or doesn't sound like it though I know there's a formal neutral in there no doubt)Skookum1 (talk)
 * If there were any research on it, which I doubt, First Nations English could use an article, but I guess it's original research; surprising that nobody's every done academic work on it, as it's such a distinct thing in Canada; despite all the different language groups there's some continuity, I guess because of the rez schools....Skookum1 (talk) 13:47, 6 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Take out the /s/ alt if you think best. I wanted s.t. to show it wasn't a typo, otherwise s.o. will come along and "correct" it. But we could use a footnote for that. kwami (talk) 13:48, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

User 69.116.146.211
I have reverted all of this user's contributions for the last few days as all are either incredible ignorance or simply vandalism. Would you please consider blocking this user again. Thanks Gubernatoria (talk) 16:39, 6 May 2009 (UTC)


 * It doesn't look like vandalism, or at least some of it doesn't, but I blocked again cuz they're not responding on their talk page. kwami (talk) 16:46, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. All those edits on List of online encyclopedias would have to be vandalism. They're all complete nonsense. Gubernatoria (talk) 17:04, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Pinghua Chinese
As you are aware the Pinghua Chinese page has been repeatedly changed by those, or maybe just one person, using different names wishing to argue that Pinghua is just a part of Cantonese, and removing or changing references to different opinions, and some of this took place after adding a comment on the talk page asking for balanced contributions to the page. I have placed comments here since you have also expressed some concern about this issue.Johnkn63 (talk) 18:21, 6 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I don't know whether it is or it isn't, but there should be some discussion, I think. kwami (talk) 21:59, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

In short the situatuation is that now in mainland China, Pinghua is recognised as a separate dialect. and refered to as such in textbooks and survey's. There are also some who would argue that it is part of Cantonese, which BTW means literally Guang Dong language, whereas Pinghua is spoken in Guangxi. Whatever, the present status within mainland China is not a matter of debate, but a matter of fact. One may disagree with the mainland designation, but are present there are those who simply edit out or change any statements that mention mainland China having such a designation. Johnkn63 (talk) 02:49, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Change of letters
I have been wondering, and I thought you would be the guy for this, is there a chart of how letters interchange over time and between languages, cause I made a chart (I know, it is probably completely wrong):

t    n-m /|   /  ɹ-l d kʷ ɲ / / \ /            ð k - g            / /     \ θ ʔ      dʒ  z       v          /  |        \ / \     / \ w - ʍ - h - ʜ        ʒ   s - f   b                        \ /     \ / ʃ      p

An example of the v chain is the English word have - habban - hafain And the IE root of this word brought about the Latin capere

An example of the evolution of the Proto-IE word *bʰréh₂tēr seen here, Give me your opinion! Or suggestions & thoughts. Bugboy52.4 (talk) 02:12, 7 May 2009 (UTC)


 * It's fine as far as it goes, but it's necessarily incomplete. There's no n-l, for example, or f-h, b-m, v-w, p-kw, k-tʃ, t-θ-s, etc. etc. etc. And I don't get the t-kw connection. A couple of the more common chains are at lenition. kwami (talk) 06:29, 7 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure how well something like this can be presented in 2D... I agree with kwami on the t > kʷ, that's a tad weird. p <> kʷ yes, but with t? I'd be more inclined to link that t>ʔ Akerbeltz (talk) 16:13, 7 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Hey, I said it has mistakes, right? And I made it in English class when I got board, I don't really like shakespear anyway 0_o Bugboy52.4 (talk) 16:34, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

ð - θ tʃ g - ɲ - n - l                        |   |/ \ /        | / | d - t - k - kʷ   m - ɹ \  \   \   \                     (g) - dʒ - z   ʔ   p                         / \ / \     / \ (tʃ) ʒ   s - f - b                             \ /   / \ / ʃ   h  v                                  / \  \ ʜ ʍ - w

How about this? Bugboy52.4 (talk) 14:19, 10 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Like Akerbeltz said, you can't get them all. All stops go to ʔ, for example, and all frics to h. You're missing some common ones, like d & t to ɾ (as in GA), and rarer ones, like m to b. What might be useful would be a diagram where the thickness of the lines reflects how common that shift is, but that would be a hell of a lotta work. kwami (talk) 14:24, 10 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Can you give me an example for some of the ones you mentioned? Bugboy52.4 (talk) 19:17, 10 May 2009 (UTC)


 * GA English has [ɾ] in latter and ladder. Several languages round Puget Sound have shifted from [m] and [n] to [b] and [d]. (That's a rare areal feature.) In Cockney, bottle has ʔ, and th has become [f] or [v]. But w a French accent, th becomes [s] and [z]. Hawaiian historical *t is now [t]~[k]; in colloquial Samoan, /t/ and /n/ are [k] and [ŋ]. In Maori, [ʍ] varies with [ɸ] or AFAIK even [f]. In Polish rz is [ʒ]; I think historically it might've been [r]. But in Latin, [z] became [r]. In French, [k] has become [ʃ], presumably through [tʃ] (and in many French creoles, it's now [s]). In Slavic, [g] has become [ʒ], presumably through [dʒ]. In lots of languages, [h], [ŋ], and [r] become zero. In Spanish, [j] has become [h]: [j] > [dʒ] > [ʃ] > [x] > [h]. Practically every language you look at will have some new twist. kwami (talk) 19:34, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Even within just English and its history, [g] > [j] 'yellow'; [z] > [r/ɹ] 'lose/forlorn'; and [k] > [tʃ] 'chalk'. And then there's the hardening of semivowels: [j] > [dʒ] and [w] > [gw] that's not as uncommon as one might think (confer dialectal English [hj] > [ç] as in 'human').  Two dimensions just aren't enough.  (Taivo (talk) 20:04, 10 May 2009 (UTC))


 * Butting in: We often interchange tʃ and dʒ in Hungarian and we have a rule which tells (<--must have a better word for it) when we must and mustn't change them. Therefore I would like to ask why tʃ is in brackets. Or is it only for English? We have numerous consonant pairs which have the same replacing rule. If you wish I can tell them. Sincererly, Ferike333 (talk) 19:32, 7 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Ferike, I don't think this is going to go anywhere. It's too intricate to sum up in a 2-D plot like this. kwami (talk) 19:38, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Japanese language isolate
If Japanese is a family rather than a language then shouldn't it be taken off that list? Alex Klotz (talk) 15:36, 7 May 2009 (UTC)


 * You're right. I didn't see that. kwami (talk) 20:45, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Ennennennium
This has reappeared 4 minutes after your speedy. I have made a report to the vandalism watch Porturology (talk) 06:34, 9 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I protected the deletion. I seriously doubt there will ever be a need for such an article. kwami (talk) 07:06, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

pronoun. problems?
Hello, I noticed that you heavily and subsequently editing pronounced version of Žirmūnai. What are the problems (if any)? M.K. (talk) 00:30, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
 * It is possible that other cities has problems too, will investigate these issues in more detail in up comings weeks. In other hand you may place a message on the WP:LITH in order to receive more insight. Cheers, M.K. (talk) 10:02, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Regarding Akmenė, this city has a stress on e Akmẽnė. Hope it helps. M.K. (talk) 10:38, 10 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Okay, that's a good example of what it looks like if we only transcribe phonetic pitch (acute) and use stress for the rest: a stress mark before a length mark. I'm doing this for the debate, but I'm not sure it's a good system. (It's a very straightforward system, and will be perfectly clear with a Lith. IPA key, but I don't know if people will like it.) kwami (talk) 10:43, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Will see, how others respond on the Wp:LITH talk. M.K. (talk) 10:48, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

Undid your AWB edit to Joseph Beuys (IPA)
Hi, I reverted your edit to Joseph Beuys re. the IPA template - please see Talk:Joseph Beuys if needed. Kind regards. Enki H. (talk) 21:52, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

Check this out
User:Drew R. Smith/game

Mayonnaise
I've started a discussion on the article's talk page. Teh Rote (talk) 20:15, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Incorrect addition of templates
I'd like to bring to your attention that adding the pp-template to templates that are not protected serves no purpose other than to add these templates to an error category and me having to fix them. Debresser (talk) 19:49, 16 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Sorry! I'll take care of any you haven't. kwami (talk) 00:48, 17 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Looks like you took care of all of them. My bad. kwami (talk) 00:57, 17 May 2009 (UTC)


 * We try. :) BTW, I responded to your question on my talk page. Debresser (talk) 01:38, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

IPA for tropical pitcher plants
You seem to have made a wholesale change to the pronunciation of the genus name Nepenthes that really doesn't seem quite right. What was your basis for this? Best, Jeljen (talk) 21:15, 17 May 2009 (UTC)


 * The Oxford, Random House, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries (and there was a fourth, I forget which). kwami (talk) 21:44, 17 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I see that this issue has been brought up already further up. From what I can see, you seem to concede to Atenbroughii that the letter should be ə, which I also agree on. For the record, I come from CA. Thanks, Jeljen (talk) 09:47, 19 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Incidentally, Merriam Webster actually has it pronounced [| ə], which suggests that it goes both ways even in GA. ɨ vs ə is quite a big difference in other dialects of English; shouldn't the written suggested IPA (always open to interpretation besides) be more international than US-centric? The change you put in gives it more than a than a color shift for the majority of the English speaking world. I realize you're probably an expert, but it does do to question. Thanks! Jeljen (talk) 17:51, 19 May 2009 (UTC)


 * We've defined as the reduced vowel that tends to be  in the US and  in the UK ("schwi"). The OED, Random House, and American Heritage all have ; when the letter e is said to be pronounced, it's generally this high reduced vowel that they're referring to. My as-yet unanswered question to Atenbroughii was whether botanists who make the schwa-schwi distinction nonetheless pronounce Nepenthes with a schwa, and the OED and Random House therefore both wrong. (American Heritage does not specifically mention the plant.) kwami (talk) 18:01, 19 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Hi there, Jeljen kindly alerted me to the fact that this discussion is ongoing. I'm surprised that you feel that I did not answer your question; I thought I had done so in my last post further up the page, but I guess referring to myself might not have been as clear a response as you wanted - apologies if not. I've been involved in Nepenthes research mainly at Kew Herbarium, and in the Philippines and Malaysia, with botanists from the UK, Australia, Italy, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines - in these cases, individuals at the very least used ə schwa (RP), or, where accents were particularly strong, ɛ - the latter is true of most non-UK Europeans, and perhaps more reflective of Latin pronunciation. My OED from the 1970s writes it ə, but the online one contains ɨ, yet their iPod digital dictionary (which reads all words out in rather well-to-do RP, quite amusing really with the crass words) but does not provide the IPA very clearly reads it out as ə. My genuine feeling is that the panels of certain dictionaries have it very wrong, as even their sanctioned word recordists pronounce it as it is written. Of course, trying to battle a panel of dictionary experts seems like a futile exercise. Attenboroughii (talk) 10:07, 20 May 2009 (UTC)


 * A lighthearted diversion for you - Sir David Attenborough presenting Nepenthes on YouTube - he's a schwa user, but then he pronounces θ as t... tsk! Attenboroughii (talk) 10:20, 20 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I have a genuine problem with many of the edits you swept through the Nepenthes section - with all respect, you may be an expert on IPA, but some of your takes on pronunciation are way off - mine's a pretty standard Cali accent, and we never pronounce the suffix 'ata' as eɪtə, or 'ana' as ænə, except maybe as a joke. My husband is from GA - same opinion. More to the point, Wikipedia is an international resource - at least the original guide (nevermind the word Nepenthes) was closer to international consensus. Given that this group of plants is pretty well looked after by Mgiganteus1 and Atty, can you not maybe do some of these things under consultation? It would save people who actually care about these plants a whole bunch of time reverting introduced errors. Jeljen (talk) 20:01, 22 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Those are the normal English pronunciations of those suffixes. Check the OED, for example. I don't doubt I got some wrong, but I was attempting to correct pronunciations that in several cases were clearly wrong. kwami (talk) 20:11, 22 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Whilst perhaps a little more circumspect than JJ, as some of your edits have been spot-on, I have to agree in these selected cases; I checked the OED, and mine appears to disagree with yours. This illustrates the futility of quoting the OED for what is "normal" in specialist cases; OUP produces regional versions of the OED so as to be competitive in local markets; I can only assume that yours is a North American version.


 * Where Latin names are involved, people often err towards Romantic pronunciation, whether in the continental sense or the RP sense; this certainly occurs in N. America, as JJ illustrates (though I cannot speak for its consistency), and is certainly the case across much of the English speaking world (where it is more consistent), in which RP influence predominates. Attenboroughii (talk) 08:48, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

New user Tintagel67
Hello, Kwami. Wow, are you fast! I see you prompty bocked my new user, Tintagel67, and accused me (again) of sockpuppetry. In fact, I was in the process of blocking or deleting user Iberomesornix myself, but I'm not sure of how to do that. I see you regard me as some kind of enemy, but I am not. Could you please unblock Tintagel67 and get rid of Iberomesornix for me? I have had quite a bad experience with that user, and now that I have learned a bit about Wikipedia, I would like to make a brand new start (if you allow me). Thanx --Iberomesornix (talk) 12:21, 18 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Sure thing. kwami (talk) 19:52, 18 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Okay. Old account blocked and new account open. Hope this works out for you. Let me know if you need anything else. kwami (talk) 20:06, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Just wanting to check, but IP block? -- Ricky81682 (talk) 08:22, 19 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I screwed up. I unblocked Tintagel67 before blocking Iberomesornix, so Tintagel67 was auto-reblocked. I'm not used to doing this. Should be unblocked now. kwami (talk) 08:30, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Komodo Dragon
Those claims are not accepted by the scientific community, bring that to the talk page of the article, please.--Mike - Μολὼν λαβέ 23:36, 18 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I just did. This is the same research team whose 2006 study was already used as the principal reference for the section. I think you need to demonstrate that the recent study has been rejected. kwami (talk) 23:40, 18 May 2009 (UTC)


 * FYI, if it was only published today, it can't be refuted in print yet, can it? I have spent over 20 years of my life studying varanids, helodermids, venomous snakes, etc and I find it spurious.  How many years of your life have you devoted to the study of herpetology?  It's one thing to support what is just a theory, it is another to state it is an irrefutible fact.--Mike - Μολὼν λαβέ 05:43, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

A request
Hi Kwamikagami. I have a small request. I am working on an article; "-up". In the article there are some folk transcriptions for pronumciations of "oop" and "up". Would you be able to take a look at them for me and add IPA transcriptions please? Thanks, Mattinbgn\talk 22:15, 19 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Sure, but I don't see any folk transcriptions. What are you asking for exactly? The individual place articles? kwami (talk) 22:52, 19 May 2009 (UTC)
 * No, just the "up" and "oop" transcriptions. After I left this message I decided I should at least have a good faith attempt to use IPA myself, which seems to have been OK (at least you haven't modified them). Thanks for taking a look and tidying my use of the templates. Cheers, Mattinbgn\talk 04:55, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Basques
Kwami, I think I may have to ask for a minute of your time again, User:72.253.225.80 is back on the List of Basques and People with Basque ancestors again, up to his old fire and brimstone approach to people with a Basque surname. Akerbeltz (talk) 10:54, 20 May 2009 (UTC)
 * He's back to his old tricks, including his accusations of racism. I'm on the move at the moment and finding it hard to connect, could you look into this (again) please? Cheers. Akerbeltz (talk) 07:50, 6 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Sorry to bother you again but he's back and has now started an edit war at Spanish naming customs. Akerbeltz (talk) 13:00, 11 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Where do I sign a petition to block anonymous IP users from editing Basque topics? ;) Akerbeltz (talk) 18:06, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Karate Lead
Thanks for your elegant re-working of the clumsy first sentence of the Karate article! jmcw (talk) 12:04, 21 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Sure! kwami (talk) 14:40, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Sutton Cheney pronunciation
Hi, you asked which pronunciation of Sutton Cheney is correct however the two transcriptions are virtually identical. I think you may be confusing the IPA symbol /u/ (as in boot) with /ʊ/ (as in foot). Just to clarify, "Sutton" rhymes with "button". Hope that clears it up. Java13690 (talk) 14:24, 21 May 2009 (UTC)


 * But not with soot on, which is what we have now. kwami (talk) 14:28, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

IPA changes
Did you gather consensus before your sweeping changes to the pronunciation templates? ÷seresin 19:09, 21 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I didn't make changes to the templates, just the usage notes. (Changes were made last week with discussion. If those badly affected any articles, please let me know.) kwami (talk) 00:16, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Ringlestone
Have responded to your prompt at Ringlestone. Thx Dick G (talk) 01:23, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

re: in-laws
I don't know in detail, so I'll have to ask my parents about those. One thing worth mentioning, though, is that traditional Korean families are very male-centric, so terms related to the mother/wife side will probably be lacking. "A married daughter is out of the house and is a stranger," they used to say.

There's no word for co-grandparent per se, but your child's spouse's parents are called sadon. --Kjoonlee 23:43, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Dwarf planet
Hi there. "Planednano" doesn't sound too bad in my opinion, I'd actually go with that translation. Or might there be an entirely different term for it? On the other hand, the English and German name for the objects is misleading as well, so maybe "nanplanedo" can be okay for Esperanto too. What about "etplanedo"? I've seen "et-" used as a prefix sometimes, as in "etvortaro". — N-true (talk) 15:07, 25 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Ah, "preskaŭplanedo" sounds pretty good indeed. I was thinking of "pseŭdoplanedo" at some point, but that didn't sound right. I'd accept it, if you ask me. — N-true (talk) 16:21, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Re: Email threats on WP:AN
It has been resolved. Prodego <sup style="color:darkgreen;">talk  17:24, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

IPA goodie for you
Hi; I just made Pekw'Xe:yles, which is also spelled Peckquaylis; if you look in the BCGNIS reference on that page you'll see a anglo-phonetic spelling the government "recommends" but clearly it's missing that big /X/....and I still am not sure what a colon does in Halkomelem - in Sto:lo} it makes the /o/ into "ow"/"au"....this is a reinstated reserve, I think comprising the grounds of the old [[St. Mary's Indian Residential School and is shared by 21 different bands (it's an educational/cultural facility now).Skookum1 (talk) 01:47, 28 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Looks like that's for the English version of the name.


 * The colon in Halkomelem should be vowel length, for something like . But don't quote me on that. kwami (talk) 02:55, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

pronunciation of Melbourne and Thylacine.
I'm having trouble with a user who seems to be not listening to me, and keeps removing the general transcription in favour of *only* an Australian transcription (of sorts), what do I do for help in reasoning with him? – Marco79 05:07, 31 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I reverted 'Melbourne' to the consensus form. Since the new Thylacine pronunciation is distinct, I kept it, but converted it to a supported format. (The differences between internat. and Aus. English are trivial in this case, so I went with internat.) kwami (talk) 06:39, 31 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I think it would be best for now to just comment out the local pronunciation, until a proper external reference can be used or found, is there anythink wrong with that? – Marco79 07:04, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I suppose you're right, but my thoughts were to avoid a revert war or arguments, which I think (the arguments) has been lost anyway. – Marco79 07:15, 31 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Don't believe me? http://i638.photobucket.com/albums/uu105/Busabout/SDC19190.jpg and http://i638.photobucket.com/albums/uu105/Busabout/SDC19192.jpg (These will only be up for 15 minutes). Bidgee (talk) 06:41, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Seems to me there are two correct pronunciations of Thylacine, with "-een" preferred in Australia and "-ine" elsewhere. The article now reflects both so that seems reasonable - but I agree with Kwami that this is simply local dialect rather than requiring a need for a special AusEng IPA (an American could pronounce it the Australian way from this guide and it would be 100% intelligible in Australia). Orderinchaos 02:09, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Buddina
Does bəˈdiːnɑ correctly reflect the pronunciation at the very start of this video (about 10 words in)? Orderinchaos 02:06, 2 June 2009 (UTC)


 * I don't have an ear for Strine, but it sounds more like bəˈdiːnə to me. I don't hear a full [ɑ] vowel at the end. kwami (talk) 02:10, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Illyrians
Could you explain why did you reverted my edit at Illyrians. There was no mention of Albanians or any other non-illyrians population in the lead in the lead (wasn't this the dispute?!) the wrong expression "Illyrians proper" including all Illyrian tribes (not true read Wilkes and others) was corrected, the reference for a single Illyrian language (Cambridge) was added and the section of Greek mythology was created.(Wilkes, Appian). Then where do you see a problem in my edit? Aigest (talk) 09:35, 2 June 2009 (UTC)


 * You've been adding the same contentious POV for days now, and each time you're reverted. Do you really not understand that? kwami (talk) 09:40, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Which contentius POV in my last edit?! Aigest (talk) 09:47, 2 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Claiming that the Albanian people are "direct" descendants of the Illyrians, as if we knew that to be true. kwami (talk) 18:15, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

seeing that ou have correctly assessed the situation at Talk:Illyrians, I would tend to suggest blocking of the troublemaker accounts rather than locking down the article. Aigest is just stalling. When people resort to such tactics after they run out of points to make, the proper reaction is WP:DENY. --dab (𒁳) 09:24, 3 June 2009 (UTC)


 * That citation was from EB (someone put it there before me but not correctly using "certain amount" I think that was erroneus, either use correct citation or don't at all. You can see the EB reference in the article and edit history also. And since dab is here you can see what references I am trying to use in the article (maybe some are wrong but they can be discussed in the talk page like I did) and look at the same POV unsourced edits made by dab. Regards Aigest (talk) 09:58, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
 * why are you addressing me on kwami's talkpage? As for the "certain amount", that is a summary of the detailed content at origins of the Albanians. For the Albanians, a "likely identification seems to be with a Romanized population of Illyrian origin driven out by Slav settlements further north" (Wilkes, J. J. The Illyrians. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1992, ISBN 0631198075, p. 278.) "plausibly certain amount of continuity" seems to me an apt summary of "likely from a Romanized population of Illyrian origin". If you don't like the exact phrasing, you could make constructive suggestions. But of course, you are not here to improve articles, you are here to annoy people with your petty nationalism. --dab (𒁳) 10:55, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

I am sorry to bother kwami in his talk page, but I should remember you that you were the one who started complaining about me here and this brought you mention in my above comment. Secondly if you want to use Wilkes citation is fine for me, I never complained for a cited or referenced edit, I think they should be cited correctly, so if you want to use Wilkes words just put a ref to him (like you didn't) and not to EB (like you did) in the end of the sentences since this is misleading and erroneous. Solved the issue of citation (not my fault there) I can see that there are no discussions for the rest of my last version before being blocked. As for your continuous use in my direction of vocabolary as petty nationalism, Albanian patriot, moron, etc (as I see a pattern in your opinion for Albanian contributors here in wiki) while I never did offended or thought to offend you, well..I have nothing to say, others can judge that, we are what we act. Aigest (talk) 11:16, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

AWB edits
Recently, you edited the IPA template here. Can you provide me with the details on these edits. It seems to be colliding with a cleanup done by WP:WikiProject Check Wikipedia. -- User:Docu


 * Other than minor formatting, the only changes I made on that article were correcting the apostrophe shortcut to the IPA stress mark,, and splitting up the unofficial ligature to . (Actually, a less precise  might be good enough, but I had the conversion on autopilot.) kwami (talk) 18:23, 2 June 2009 (UTC)


 * That last change added a zero-width-space character as well. The question is if we could go with instead of . Following some problems with other templates, we eliminated most zero-width-spaces. -- User:Docu 21:53, 2 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Ah, I see. The zero-width space was not my idea, but that of another editor, whose user name escapes me right now. He's been making pedia-wide conversions of those ligatures. The space is a fix for a bug in some default IE fonts, which cannot display the IPA properly without it. kwami (talk) 22:01, 2 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Was it Kotniski? He complained today about removing them. Which IE fonts does it concern? Is it rare or not? -- User:Docu


 * I think it was User:Aeusoes1. I can't find the discussion. S/he's been replacing them mostly without the tie bar, but in some cases (Slavic, Pacific Northwest) the tie bar is phonemic. Not terribly common. It used to be a problem with nearly everyone using IE, unless they installed custom IPA fonts, but for all I know they've fixed it for newer versions. I don't use IE and don't know which fonts are defective. kwami (talk) 22:42, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Tartessian
Thank for reverting my error. I only thought it was an isolate because of the cat in Tartessian language. Wouldn't you like to go there and clarify things? Cheers! The Ogre (talk) 12:07, 2 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Done. kwami (talk) 18:14, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Thou and the IPA
Regarding thou, there most certainly is not an "r" in non-rhotic RP. I live a little south of Oxford (contrary to what the geolocate on my IP says: I think we're routed somewhere north of here) and have been brought up speaking RP; I'm very aware of its absence. And regarding the "r", I'm somewhat familiar with the IPA: r, ɹ. See how the symbols are different. 79.71.2.215 (talk) 17:18, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I thought I'd reference something, in case you decide to be stubborn: scroll to the heading "start", some third down the page. The nucleus is identical to that of "are", thus "are" should be transcribed as ɑː. Also, Wikipedia itself (Received Pronunciation, scroll to "Vowels") supports my point. 79.71.2.215 (talk) 17:32, 2 June 2009 (UTC)


 * You would be correct if the transcription were phonetic rather than phonemic, and then only with a narrow transcription and if there is not a vowel-initial word following the are. Start does not have an /r/ in it in RP, but are does (except for the many people who claim to speak RP but pronounce it .) Please follow the IPA link so you will understand the conventions being used here. kwami (talk) 17:55, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Another IPA 4 U
Hi. Please see Talk:Coquihalla_River.Skookum1 (talk) 13:02, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Template:IPAEng
You seems to have deleted the IPAEng. This is used in a lot of pages, for example Saturday article. This template shouldn't be deleted but redirected I suppose? Nsaa (talk) 18:19, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Deletion review for Template:IPAEng
An editor has asked for a deletion review of Template:IPAEng. Because you closed the deletion discussion for this page, speedily deleted it, or otherwise were interested in the page, you might want to participate in the deletion review. Nsaa (talk) 18:25, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Rongorongo
Why did you remove the category I added? Pergamino (talk)


 * Because it's redundant. cat:rongorongo is already included. Sorry, there is no option for edit summaries when changing cats. kwami (talk) 17:35, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
 * The Category:Rongorongo is great, but the scrip is undeciphered so it can be categorized as such. Pergamino (talk) 18:13, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes. It already is. As cat:rongorongo. kwami (talk) 18:18, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Non-standard Characters on Saanich
I've seen the question-mark display on pages using Devanagari, e.g. coolie, but this page is an example of where a line has to be drawn, I think, between native orthographic "authenticity" and "regular"/standard romanization/characters. Just wanted your thoughts, and maybe also if you can tell me what extra character set I have to load for my MacOSX to see these as anything but questionmarks..and I think things like W_ are actually underline-W and it's just my usage of Camino prevents me from seeing those as they're meant ot be in .... IE?? Skwxwu7mesh gets an underline-x that likewise I see as x_)..here's what I see on the Saanich page: All of those need IPA needless to say. There's a further problem with that page, as "Saanich" nowadays has a most common meaning referring to northern suburbs of Victoria (Saanich, North Saanich and Central Saanich which combined more or less are equivalent to the Saanich Peninsula, but not quite....Skookum1 (talk) 02:27, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
 * BOḰEĆEN – Pauquachin: bok'ec'en
 * MÁLEXEȽ – Malahat: ma'lexe l
 * SEMYOME – Semiahmoo: semyome
 * SXIMEȽEȽ – Esquimalt: sxime l e l
 * T’sou-ke – Sooke:
 * ȾÁ,UTW̱ – Tsawout: t a',ut w
 * W̱ĆIÁNEW̱ – Becher Bay: w c'ia'ne w
 * W̱JOȽEȽP – Tsartlip: w jo l e l p
 * W̱SÍKEM – Tseycum: w si'kem


 * How do they look now? kwami (talk) 06:19, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Still the same....I"m still getting the question marks, unless those are part of the orthography - as they somtimes are in BC, standing in for glottal stops. By their locations relative to the "regular anglicization" to their right, some appear to be meant as /tl/ or /lh/  - are those slash-l's or slash-t's?...and should those W's be underline? or are they always W-underscore i.e. "W_" rather than W ?Skookum1 (talk) 14:26, 8 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Okay, I converted what I see to html formatting w underlining & strikethrough, with acute accents replaced w apostrophes. kwami (talk) 17:31, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Denmark–Mexico relations
Your help could be used in Denmark–Mexico relations. The article needs help with sourcing and your skills could help, especially if you can help with Danish sources. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 13:52, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Central Asian Shepherd Dog
Please advice what exactly you suggest to fix in the article, will do my best to improve it. General dog breed related discussions may be endless, while there is a very limited number of English speaking breed experts and accordingly trustworthy materials. There are reliable materials in Russian, I am using as a source. Factual disputes (other than troll-related) are mostly about dog fights history, and no dog expert from WIKI project etc will possibly ever claim that he is an expert on the subject. If the issues are of linguistic nature, I need help and advice. Speaking of, both terms, Ovcharka and Ovtcharka were used in Englih for some time. Ovcharka seems a better match for Romanization rules. I prefer to use Ovtcharka as a better match for pronunciation and word’ origination. Thanks,--Afru (talk) 22:22, 8 June 2009 (UTC)


 * It's the pronunciation that I find dubious. The Russian looks okay, but the first transcription—I assume that's supposed to be English? If so, I would read it as "av-CHOR-kə", which I doubt you meant. Maybe "ov-CHAR-kə"?

kwami (talk) 23:09, 8 June 2009 (UTC)


 * The "av-CHOR-kə" was totally off, thank you! we did not look into IPA, whoever added the transcription, initially misspelled it. “ov-CHAR-ka” is correct, unstressed "a" is still rather “a” than “ə”. I’ll look for a link to voice file  --Afru (talk) 00:12, 9 June 2009 (UTC)


 * It's still an "a" even in English? That's difficult for me to say and maintain a native accent. kwami (talk) 00:18, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Opentail G
Hi. Do you happen to know why the opentail ɡ sometimes displays like a straight tail y? It looks so much like the symbol for the fricative ɣ that it could be mispronounced that way.

I found even a case where the same opentail ɡ displays in two ways (wrong and correct) in one word. See for example this version of Gheorghe Ţiţeica (first row). I noticed that if I delete the stress marker placed before ɡ, then that ɡ returns to its correct shape. I'm not sure what could cause that.

For the time being I replaced the opentail ɡ with the plain looptail g wherever I noticed the problem, because while the latter is accepted by the IPA, the wrong shape of the former could lead to confusion. — <font color="#048">Adi <font color="#37B">Japan 05:52, 9 June 2009 (UTC)


 * I assume you're using IE? That's a bug in one of the fonts that comes with MS. (Most of our IPA problems are bugs from MS.) I don't see it myself, and I'm not sure why we can't prevent that font from displaying using the IPA template.


 * BTW, the tie bar that you're adding (AFAIK it's not necessary for Romanian) causes a problem with other MS fonts. You can fix this by adding a non-breaking space, but that causes problems with still other MS fonts. kwami (talk) 06:12, 9 June 2009 (UTC)


 * No, I use Firefox. In my IE the opentail g looks fine and so does the tie bar.
 * I don't know about any problems with the tie bar. I've seen both versions, with and without the non-breaking space (and seen someone systematically removing the space too), but in my Firefox they both look the same. About the necessity of the tie bar in Romanian see Wikipedia talk:IPA for Romanian. — <font color="#048">Adi <font color="#37B">Japan 14:55, 9 June 2009 (UTC)


 * You might want to change your font preferences. Switching to Lucida Sans Unicode, Arial Unicode, Gentium, etc. should fix it. kwami (talk) 18:55, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Template naming suggestions
re this edit: you guys (or whoever is in charge of that template) might want to rename that 'pron' field - I nearly reverted it on the spot as 'pron' is a common misspelling of 'porn'. --Gwern (contribs) 13:30 9 June 2009 (GMT)


 * And if I'd seen that, I would've assumed it was vandalism! But there are a thousand pages that would need to be changed, and any new wording would likely be a common misspelling of s.t. else. kwami (talk) 18:22, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Jabo tones
Hi, Kwami,

I noticed that you recently tagged the item  in the article Jabo (ethnic group) as needing to be converted to IPA. The segmentals in the item appear unremarkable, so I gather that you are objecting to the use of numeric subscripts for the tones. (If that is not the case, what follows is not relevant.) Perhaps you have in mind the symbols you would like to see used instead.

If the point is to stick to canonical IPA, the use of the ("unofficial extension") diacritics "high-mid" <o̍> and "low-mid" <ō> is open to the same criticism as that of the subscript numerals. Also, FWIW, the visual appearance of the diacritics would reverse the convention employed by Herzog's tone glyphs.

The only kosher IPA letters available would be the "tone glyphs" <˥˦˧˨˩>, which seem ideographically to represent a quinary scale. How, then, would one propose mapping the quaternary register system described for Jabo by Sapir and Herzog (<´>, <¯>, <|> and <`>) into these quinary IPA symbols? Sapir called these four registers "high", "normal", "middle", and "low".

Now, in speaking of the closely related Kru language, Sapir had followed Herskovits in naming its three tones "high", "middle", and "low", implying that Kru "middle" is midway between Kru "low" and Kru "high". But what did Sapir mean with Jabo "middle"? Is it midway between Jabo "high" and Jabo "low" – or is it midway between Jabo "normal" and Jabo "low"?

One could, for example, propose representing as <˥˦˨˩>, but it is somewhat fraught to omit <˧> ("Mid"). Sapir's "normal" tone would be represented by IPA "High", which seems semantically anomalous. Also, while it may be irrelevant to phonetics qua phonetics, this IPA subset would also seem to imply that systematic tonal features [±low] and [±extra] are involved (not [±high] and [±mid]), as required by markedness conventions, so that the most common tone <2> "normal" could be unmarked (as [-low, -extra]), rather than doubly marked (as [+high, +mid]). Note also that "normal" was usually left unmarked as a default convention, except in glides.

Despite Sapir's phonetic fastidiousness and Herzog's musical ear, there is insufficient tonetic detail in any of those sources to motivate designating register <1> as <˥> ("Top") rather than <˦> ("High"), or <2> as <˦ ("High") rather than <˧> ("Mid"). Can it be decided whether the gamut of registers should run from "Top" to "Bottom", or from "High" to "Bottom", or from "Top" to "Low"? What is the decision procedure? It would seem to be a problem that the ideographic nature of the IPA glyphs conveys a precision or narrowness of pitch that cannot be accurately gleaned from published evidence. The result is then the unhappy one of taking a narrow symbol and arbitrarily broadening it, so as not to do violence to the actual systematic dynamics attending these relational entities.

Rather than to attempt to procrusteanize the reported data, perhaps it might be better simply to accept the non-standard subscripts, which are, after all, standard in Kru languages. (See the Africa subsection of Tonology). Perhaps simply utilizing the template instead of  would finesse the issue to the satisfaction of IPA purists. Or perhaps the most honest thing to do is to lose the square brackets and enclose the form in virgules, admitting that it is an abstraction after all.


 * —Ziusudra (talk) 03:08, 10 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, a four-level system certainly is a problem for the IPA. Personally, I like . Yes, it's an extension of the IPA, but a common one, and more importantly, it actually has a definition. "2", on the other hand, is undefined: it could be a high tone (some of Asia), low (some of Africa), or mid (some of America). There's no way to know from the transcription; rather, the reader has to know not only the language in question, but also the convention used by the particular author that the transcription was taken from. I've seen Asian-style numbers used for African languages, and vice versa.


 * I like your suggestion of 1245, avoiding the macron/3 altogether, since transcribing 2 as mid could easily cause confusion. Especially with the tone bars, 1245 is clear. That's probably the best solution. Generally, if one tone is the default (like mid tone in Dida, which is found on about half of lexical syllables), we might set that to mid, but again, it could be misinterpreted out of context. But any of those are clearer than numbers, and we could add a footnote to clarify. kwami (talk) 03:21, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Illyrians
The nonsense on Illyrians has started again, the minute the edit-protection expired. Best Regards. --Athenean (talk) 20:46, 10 June 2009 (UTC)


 * A day after it expired, actually. Also, there probably be something about the Albanian link in the lede. kwami (talk) 20:58, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Your request for editor assistance
Heya, Kwami. In case you didn't notice, your post at WP:EAR has been responded to, though I'm not sure if the responses address the question exactly. Though I would like to say if you go the route I suggested there, I'd definitely support a change. :-) &mdash;/M endaliv /2¢/Δ's/ 01:51, 11 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I'd appreciate your support. kwami (talk) 00:10, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Stikine River needs IPA
The lede currently has "Sti-KEEN", which as I recall is in the BCGNIS entry but of course needs "fixing" to IPA. "Sti" rhymes with "bit", i.e. "Stih". Other Stikine articles may need the same; if you'll do the IPA I'll transfer it around the other entries. Thankx.Skookum1 (talk) 23:53, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Quincy, Massachusetts
Hello, I am wondering about this edit. What is the purpose of removing the underscores from the filename? I understand that when MediaWiki serves the commons page for the image, the underscores are converted to spaces in the page title, but the actual filename has them, and would be the name given in a "Save as..." dialog by the browser if a reader clicked the image to go to the raw database URL, http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Quincy_MA_geography.png. I and hundreds of other editors save files with names using underscores, what are your reasons for making an unnecessary name change in the image link? Sswonk (talk) 13:59, 12 June 2009 (UTC)


 * That is an automated part of WP:AWB. I was making a different change, and the file change was added in for "free". I don't know the programmers' reasons for deleting the underscores, but it's something that's happened with every article I've edited with AWB for at least a year. kwami (talk) 19:27, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Samaritan
Hi Kwamikagami. May I know why did you removed this section «Today, it is used by the Samaritans for […] Samaritan Aramaic and even Arabic.» from the Samaritan alphabet? thank you!--Ω (talk) 13:46, 15 June 2009 (UTC)


 * I didn't. It's still there. I took out the comment on the tetragrammaton, since that was actually Paleo-Hebrew rather than modern Samaritan. kwami (talk) 19:56, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Oh, I bet you do, sorry Kwamikagami! If you allow me of one more request: is it possible for you to add a citation/source next to that section? I'll be thankful! Ω (talk) 11:47, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Revert
I'm terribly sorry about that, but reverting your edit as well was the only way to get the article, that had multiple egregious vandalism edits missed by subsequent editors, back to a stable state. I hope the article is ok now? T L Miles (talk) 13:15, 16 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, it's fine. The only problem is noticing the change, since their are too many articles to keep them on all my watch list, which has 2000 as it is. kwami (talk) 20:16, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Element audio
Hi kwami,

You are correct in pointing out that the official pronunciations do not sound like english but of course they aren't supposed to! The original idea was to have a system which mimicked the numbering system e.g 1-1-2-ium. I don't know why IUPAC thought 'un' should be pronounced 'oon'. However, I wouldn't trust the dictionary references because they are attempting to anglicize these names, which is not relevant. Ununbium should be pronounced une-une-bium (1-1-2), not yoo-nun-bium, which is the way many pronounce it, but it does not reflect the derivation (i.e 1-1-2). Personally, I have always pronounded it un-un-bium, which is more logical and copies the Latin pronunciation of 'un'. The reality is that the scientific community did not think much of the system and these systematic element names are never actually used - they are always referred to as element 1-1-2 etc.

As regards your second query, I know of some references which point to the end of the periodic at Z~138. However, the reality is that there probably is no definitive 'end'. An atom of an element is defined in terms of a minimum lifetime (~10exp-17 s?), which means that if such a short time frame can be measured, a whole range of new elements could be made. A limitation will be our ability to make them with extremely small yields. However, in theory, an element can be made as long as you run the experiment for long enough - in practice, a run > 2 months is not worth it. At very high Z values, we may well get to a point where only a specific isotope of an element exists for any notable length of time. So we don't end up with a second island of stability, but rather a single point? Where exactly, who knows? Theory will have to be much improved to be able to pinpoint such an isotope. Hope this helps.

--Drjezza (talk) 15:54, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Cheshirization
You might have seen this already, but just FYI a user has undone you edits to Cheshirisation and restored the redirect. He also left a comment at Template talk:Sound change. <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 21:19, 16 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks! kwami (talk) 21:22, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Haplogroup E (Y-DNA)
Hi Kwami, I know that admins aren't interested in the nitty gritty details of any controversy, but I'll try anyway. I think we were beginning to make some progress on this article. Andrew who is neutral in this dispute made this specific edit, that I was willing to accept as a compromise. I will briefly explain my side of the controversy. It might be complicated, but there is no simple way to explain a complicated subject and dispute. I question the validity of User:Small Victory's edits. I think he is only edit warring on the Haplogroup E article because we are involved in another dispute at Sub-Saharan DNA admixture in Europe. The user only recently started editing the article this month after the dispute erupted on Sub-Saharan DNA admixture in Europe. I have not seen Small Victory assess the evidence for the "Asian origin hypothesis" he has just taken sides. I believe this to be the case because I have not seen any of his postings on the talk pages of Talk:Haplogroup DE (Y-DNA) and Talk:Haplogroup E1b1b (Y-DNA) which are the more important articles in the dispute.

The reason why there has been a long standing dispute on Haplogroup E is because User:Causteau had introduced a study by Chandrasekar et al, that claimed to have new evidence supporting the Asian origin hypothesis. The problem was the article was on a subscription type website, so none of us could verify the content and the claims. Last week, I was able to access the Chandrasekar article and I have made the information available on Talk pages and to other users. Andrew Lancaster, who had earlier supported the inclusion of the Chandrasekar article, was able to independently assess the claims made in the article. His comments are posted here, in which he says that the Chandrasekar article does not present new arguments, in other words the Chandrasekar article is outdated because of new information from recent studies. My intent was to update Haplogroup E (Y-DNA) to reflect the new information that we now have. Unfortunately User:Small Victory doesn't appear to understand all this, and is of the opinion that I am just trying to spread some kind of ideology.

As you may know, the dispute resolution process, especially for scientific articles is almost non-existent. With 3 million articles, there are far too many articles for regular editors to deal with, so I don't see where we will get anyone to lead us through the debate. Andrew is the neutral editor in this dispute and I would take what he has written here as a best guide to what is closest to reality. If you need any clarification, I will be happy to provide it. Wapondaponda (talk) 15:30, 17 June 2009 (UTC)


 * I asked Andrew once for his side, as he did seem to be someone that everyone was willing to work with, but AFAIK he never gave it. I know full well the garbage that can get published, even in reviewed journals, but I don't have the background with the lit to tell heads from tales in this case. (Freudian typo.) I only have this article and one or two others on my watch list, so I haven't seen the dispute on the others. I'll try Andrew again. kwami (talk) 19:40, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Hi Kwami, I'll try to look again when I have time, but which link is not working?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 05:32, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, fixed. Just had too many "http"s.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:02, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Hi Kwami, as you may have noted Wapondaponda turned out to also be using multiple accounts, and presumably still is. So he is blocked. In the meantime his opposite number in the revert stakes on several articles, User:Causteau, has started a campaign of reverts using this as an excuse. I am interested to try to find any third party interested to look at his editing and discussion style. I think there is a real problem with it, and the rush he has from this blocking of Wapondaponda seems to be heading him for the same extremism he has shown in the past before - to be honest - Wapondaponda kept him under control for a while with his equal willingness to use reverts.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:29, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

This discussion is headed no place good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Haplogroup_E1b1b_(Y-DNA)#Sourced_Material http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Haplogroup_E1b1b_(Y-DNA)#Coffman-Levy_citation:_trying_one_more_time_to_discuss Regards --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:33, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

Now I have a tag team working. User:SOPHIAN is helping User:Causteau avoid reverts, and has just posted an unsigned vandalism warning on my talkpage. These people are definitely working in a way aimed at deliberately trying to get things implied into articles which do not appear in the literature. There is an absolutely consistent pattern that their controversial edits always argue against African origins for various different haplogroups, no matter what the literature says. It is truly silly.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:03, 22 June 2009 (UTC)
 * It was signed when I looked at it, and I've warned Sophian about it (nice that there is a Twinkle template for that). I've also commented on your talk page, but you are of course free to delete it. Dougweller (talk) 19:14, 22 June 2009 (UTC)


 * That is a blatant lie. I did not ask SOPHIAN to "buddy up" with me or anything of the sort. Please have a look at his talk page for what I said. I asked him to have look at our E1b1b discussion because I felt it was going in an unproductive direction, as Andrew himself admits. Since SOPHIAN had already edited the article recently and was one of the editors involved in a previous dispute surrounding this same issue, I naturally asked him for his input. I would also like to point out that Andrew has just copy and pasted select portions of a rather heated conversation he and I were having on the haplogroup DE article's talk page onto the haplogroup E1b1b article's talk page where a separate, unrelated conversation was talking place. On the haplogroup DE talk page, he wrote a nasty edit (the one dated 18:10, 22 June 2009) to which I naturally responded in kind (my post dated 18:37, 22 June 2009), but he then opportunistically only quoted on the haplogroup E1b1b talk page my response to his unprovoked personal attack as well as a deceptively "angelic" follow up to that on his part to try and make himself look as innocent as possible. And when I tried to expose what he was doing on the haplogroup E1b1b talk page, he reverted my edit there as well! How am I supposed to discuss let alone resolve things with this person if he even reverts my talk page posts? Causteau (talk) 21:07, 22 June 2009 (UTC)


 * That would be the edit where you called him a liar. Dougweller (talk) 20:47, 22 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Hi, you just reverted my edits, though no reason was given. Wapondaponda (talk) 20:47, 31 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, the same old edits. Get some consensus. This is tiresome. kwami (talk) 20:52, 31 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Well all the other editors aren't editing or responding on talk pages. So I have taken the liberty to add the information, which is quite accurate. If you like, I can compile some real simple information from the latest studies that show an African origin of E as the mainstream theory. Wapondaponda (talk) 21:03, 31 July 2009 (UTC)


 * That would probably be a good idea, and you may well be correct (I have no idea), but you have a history of arguing, not to include information, but to exclude it, as you have here, and it is this which other editors have found objectionable. Given how long you've been at this, they may be failing to respond because they've grown weary of it as I have. That doesn't mean that you are therefore the consensus view. kwami (talk) 21:09, 31 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I do argue quite a bit. But it takes two to have an argument. The I have included information below.Wapondaponda (talk) 18:53, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

Haplogroup E (Y-DNA) section break
The crux of this controversy concerns whether Haplogroup E originated in Africa or in Asia. The vast majority of studies reference an African origin. Causteau has been arguing that we include one outlier study, Chandrasekar et al 2007. I have argued that this outlier study is using information from studies done in 1998, which have become obsolete because of newer studies. I have been opposed to giving the impression that an outlier study is actually mainstream as this would violate WP:UNDUE. Andrew Lancaster, is in general agreement with me, though he prefers a softer more conciliatory approach than me. In the version I propose, both theories are discussed, with the mention that the Asian origin is now no longer supported. Here are some recent studies from 2007 onwards. Of course there are several others but I picked those that aren't very detailed. You could read the whole articles if you like, but it would be faster to go directly to the highlighted text or use the search feature or go directly the page number in the pdfs. Wapondaponda (talk) 18:53, 1 August 2009 (UTC)
 * 2008 publication The highlighted text
 * 2007 publication, Highlighted text
 * Shi et al 2008, in the Introduction (4th paragraph) The sub-haplogroup E (E-M40), defined by M40/SRY4064 and M96, was also suggested originated in Africa [3-6], and later dispersed to Middle East and Europe about 20,000 years ago [3,4]
 * 2008 dissertation page 30 pdf or page 22 actual document "HgE, which is believed to have an African origin".
 * 2008 study page 15 pdf/or page 53 text haplogroup E(African origin)

Antonio Arnaiz-Villena
Dear Kwami, as you see [|here], I've reverted an edit to the article, which is something I don't usually do. I do not want to engage in an edit war, but I am sure it will cause an outcry. Do you know any uninvolved admins with linguistic qualifications who could take a look at it? Trigaranus (talk) 20:03, 17 June 2009 (UTC)


 * I'll ask around. kwami (talk) 20:09, 17 June 2009 (UTC)


 * And did he really say Egyptian is Dene-Caucasian?? kwami (talk) 20:51, 17 June 2009 (UTC)


 * In my language, I would say he says a lot of things when the day is long. He seems to be a nice enough person, but I seriously cannot follow how he fails to see the flaws in his method. Trigaranus (talk) 20:55, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham
Ha, another one: &. It's working! --Old Moonraker (talk) 09:49, 18 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Was the Queen's English non-rhotic back in Elizabeth's day? kwami (talk) 10:16, 18 June 2009 (UTC)
 * No: your later change is better. I'm not speaking with any academic authority here, but from the fossil remains in the "moonraker" speech I grew up with. WP:NOR, in other words! --Old Moonraker (talk) 13:01, 18 June 2009 (UTC)


 * That's an interesting legend. kwami (talk) 09:53, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

OOK
You are invited to join WP:WPOOK.

The Transhumanist 23:49, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

IPA Cleanup
No, I don't mind you tidying up my tidy up of IPA at all. In fact, I much prefer your way (putting the incorrect versions as a footnote). Thanks!

Thank you for all this advice, too. I have a quick question - what do you recommend for the "respell" version of place names like "Loch" and "Dornoch"? The /x/ phoneme doesn't seem to be represented on the respelling key (not even under "special characters"). I notice that the schwa is used as a special character, but I'm can't use "x" in the respelling key as it's the same as... well... "x"! IndieSinger (talk) 08:39, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Template:IPA-fi
Hi Kwamikagami I noticed you've created Template:IPA-fi and included Estonian with it. just wanted to point out that there are still some differences, most notably the vowel õ [ɤ], please see Estonian_language FFI. Just in case you want to do something about the Template:IPA-fi subcategory et, either splitting up or linking the et section to Estonian_language instead of Finnish phonology or etc., up to you.--Termer (talk) 04:06, 20 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Are you saying that there should be WP:IPA for Estonian and Finnish like IPA for Czech and Slovak? And the wikilink from the template should be directed to WP:IPA page instead of Finnish phonology&Estonian_language? Putting together WP:IPA for Estonian and Finnish should be straight forward, I can take care of it ,and then if you could double check if it's put together according to the standards you have been after...--Termer (talk) 04:32, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

Pashto language
Hi. I think the section Pashto language needs expansion. Thanks. 202.163.91.1 (talk) 15:12, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

Yusof bin Ishak: Respelled pronunciation
Can you tweak the Respell template in "Yusof bin Ishak" so that the respelled pronunciation is "bin IS-haak" and not "bin-IS-haak"? I tried but failed. Or is there a reason why the pronunciation of the word bin is linked to Ishak? — Cheers, Jack Lee  –talk– 04:40, 22 June 2009 (UTC)


 * The hyphens between sections are automatic. It isn't a very sophisticated template. Only solution is to use it separately for each word. kwami (talk) 04:44, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

Oh, right. Anyway, thanks for fixing it. — Cheers, Jack Lee  –talk– 05:07, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

Psarolepis
Hi,

Etymology for psarolepis is: Latin psaro=speckled and greek lepis=scale. Liopleurodon93 ( talk ) 09:37, 22 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your help! Liopleurodon93  ( talk ) 10:23, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

"Briddish K'lumbya"
I really haven't looked at what's on the British Columbia page but thought I'd throw "Briddish K'lumbya" at you, since that's how we actually pronounce it; I suspect the "official" one does the Canadian-esque spitted-t (voiceless I guess); it's definitely a "d" sound, and the "Col" is almost always "k'l". This came to me whiel fixing up WikiProject_Outline_of_knowledge/Drafts/Outline_of_British_Columbia.Skookum1 (talk) 13:27, 22 June 2009 (UTC)


 * That's a typical (mid)western American (Canuck/Usonian) pronunciation, and predictable. If you think it's notable, it's fine to add it, but we wouldn't normally want that for the primary transcription. kwami (talk) 13:31, 22 June 2009 (UTC)


 * If you were looking for the actual IPA, that would be s.t. like . kwami (talk) 14:53, 22 June 2009 (UTC)
 * The British Columbia page has En-ca-BritishColumbia.ogg ˌ[brɪtɨʃ kəˈlʌmbiə]. I had to amplify that to hear it well, but other than that speaker does have a voiceless 't' it does sound like [kʰˈlɐmbiə], i.e. the 'o' is contracted almost to the point of not being there....to me that voicelsss 't' sounds contrived.  The "Briddish" thing is actually citable from certain local columnists and authors (including, I think, Malcolm Lowry in October Ferry to Gabriola, though in which chapter/page I can't check as I no longer have the book; I wouldnt' be surprised if it's in one of Timothy Findley's books, but I'll consult a reporter friend who may even have cited it himself, or may know of someone who does.  I know I use "Briddish"; I suppose it's a question of background; at one time British accents were so common in BC that even the 'r' might be rolled, Scots-style and the "lum" part rather pompously emphasized, likewise "bee-ya"; I'd guess that someone raised in households of one ethnic descent, though with a Canadian accent different from that of their parents, would be different from those from another; the Interior's accents, especially historically but even today in some areas, can be quite different, but there's never been proper dialect studies of British Columbia English and quite often there have been imposition of "Canadian norms" because of hte importation of broadcasters from other provinces/places......there is no real standard, in other words, but the "Briddish K'lumbya" thing is rather notorious.....to me the voicelss 't' smacks of Central Canadian English, like the self-conscious pronunciation of To-RON-To (emphasis on that last 'T', as opposed to the usual/casual "Toronno" or, infamously, "Trawna").Skookum1 (talk) 13:43, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Illyrians
Hiya kwami,

Does this strike you as the latest weasel-worded attempt by Interestedinfairness to have his way, or is it just me? He's also starting to get a bit nasty. --Athenean (talk) 00:46, 24 June 2009 (UTC)


 * "A widely researched theory" could simply be bad English. I would call it a hypothesis, and say it's widely assumed. A "widely accepted assumption", maybe? It has been widely researched (maybe), but without much in the way of results. The test is in the pudding: is he willing to accept more neutral / better English wording? kwami (talk) 02:23, 24 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Hey kwami, I think I need your help. Yesterday I removed some fringe nationalist gibberish from Illyrians and now the Albanian national team has ganged up on me and reported me to WP:AN3 in bad faith.  If you're not too busy with other things, your help would be greatly appreciated.  Best.  --Athenean (talk) 18:44, 24 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I didn't see this until just now. I'll take a look. kwami (talk) 06:37, 27 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Okay, I saw the response, and that they saw it as an attempt to get one's opponent blocked, so no harm done. kwami (talk) 06:41, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

editcountitis
I know quantity doesn't make up for quality, but hey, I must be a bean counter at heart. Just made top 100 by edit count. Now my life is complete—is that sad or what? kwami (talk) 08:58, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Opentail G, again
Regarding this, in certain browsers the opentail ɡ is displayed as a sort of y. I noticed this only happens if ɡ comes immediately after a stress marker. Could you please fix the AWB to exclude the replacement in that particular context?

While the difference between the two sorts of g is largely graphic (most people don't even notice it: ɡ g) and the "wrong" g is still accepted by IPA, the y it gets transformed into is not just slightly but totally different, and it certainly is not accepted by IPA.

You gave me the advice to change my font preferences in Firefox, but this is not a solution. I could do that, but you cannot have all affected readers change their font preferences. — <font color="#048">Adi <font color="#37B">Japan 09:53, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Macedonian vs Slavic
Kwami, I would appreciate some feedback. You complained that in one occasion I changed a word from "Macedonian" to "Slavic" in the article on Kastoria. Kastoria is a Macedonian city in the administrative republic of Macedonia in Greece. I am unfortunately not aware what the guidelines you are referring to are regarding the use of the word "Macedonian" and where to find them. I suppose you are a linguist and you are referring by "Macedonian" to the language of FYROM, which is not what in a Greek context such as this one refers to when one says Macedonian. Were one to speak generally about modern Macedonians in an academic context not dealing with a specific city in a specific province, taking the broadest possible interpretation, even then there are more Greek Macedonians than Slavic ones overall. This article refers to a Greek city located in the administrative district of Macedonia, even in the region of ancient Macedonia, hence a Macedonian city with the name Kastoria in the local (hence Macedonian) language. If there are rules regarding the definitions of languages or dialects, and the appropriate contexts, they should be immediately available to readers for clarification whenever a contentious situation arises. I find it difficult however to understand that one might say the Yorkshire name of York is "enter its Slavic equivalent". Secondly, if there are rules about providing multilingual information on place names, there should also be some guidance about which languages would be relevant. Especially in Greece the legitimacy of using the name Macedonian to denote non-Greek (actually a Slavic language) is disputed, and in this case very pointed, that is appreciated generally as well as within the context of Wikipedia. Lastly, I also understand the Slavic word for Kastoria is Kostur regardless of which specific Slavic language, thus saying Kostur is a Slavic word was correct and uncontentious. Skamnelis (talk) 23:33, 26 June 2009 (UTC)


 * You're right, Skamnelis, this is a very pointed debate! My only objection is that the only things an English speaker will understand by "Macedonian language" are Slavic Macedonian (too bad "Western Bulgarian" isn't acceptable, but that's another highly contentious point), and Ancient Macedonian. We wouldn't call the Greek dialect of Macedonia a "language". But calling it simply "Slavic" is misleading as well, unless it truly is a pan-Slavic name. Personally I prefer "Macedonian Slavic" or "Slavic Macedonian"; I don't know if there's a political difference between the two.


 * As for guidelines, they do get a bit contentious in situations like this. Pertinent articles would include Slavic-speakers of Greek Macedonia and Slavic dialects of Greece. Perhaps a link to the latter would work? While looking for the WP guidelines, I came across Centralized discussion/Macedonia/Greece-related, which may be a discussion you would like to contribute to. I think it would be valuable to have Greek input in that discussion from moderate editors like yourself. kwami (talk) 02:45, 27 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Hey, Skamnelis, how about calling it Greek Slavic? I made that suggestion on the debate page. kwami (talk) 19:27, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for reminding us of this language-naming debate over at the Macedonia RfC. Your input would be welcome here. (BTW, my own position is that in cases like the Kastoria placename, the Slavic version should be characterised as either "Macedonian Slavic" or as "Macedonian/Bulgarian". The first is a neutral periphrasis referring to the variants of South Slavic spoken in the region of Macedonia, without making a commitment to their national-language affiliation; the second refers to the two standard national languages under their standard names.) Fut.Perf. ☼ 06:44, 27 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Thank you all for your feedback and constructive responses. In my view, “Macedonian Slavic” is better than “Greek Slavic” in the same way that London French would be better than English French, should the situation arise. To call the Slavic name simply “Macedonian” in a context such as this is to deny the majority of the Greek population of Hellenic Macedonia to identify with their region, ethnic background and indeed with their own history (http://macedonia-evidence.org/obama-letter.html). Of the two varieties of Slavic idioms (languages), that of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and that of Hellenic Macedonia, I think there should be a distinction made where it matters, when relevant by qualifying it as the “local Macedonian Slavic” (Fut. Perf. choice 1). If the Bulgarian or FYROMacedonian name “Kostur” is being implied (Fut. Perf. choice 2), one wonders why. Will this be a practice for all place-names or is there some relevance here and where else would this practice apply? Having cited the link of the letter of the two hundred classical scholars (now over 300 academicians have signed it) regarding the name issue, I should think it is unfair to say that non-Greeks opt for Macedonia where Greeks alone opt for FYROM. In other uses (outside linguistics and mainstream journalism, or related) the distinction between Macedonia and FYROM is not simply a choice of Greeks vs non-Greeks. It is simply the case that the name “Macedonian” is habitually applied in linguistics, in a well-defined context understood amongst experts, to denote the language derived from Macedonian Bulgarian in contradistinction to Bulgarian proper. This language received an alphabet as recently as 1945 at the time of predatory cold war geopolitics aimed at Hellenic Macedonia. On the other hand, the Macedonians of Greece and their land were named after the mythological progenitor Macedon (Hesiod, c. 8th C BC - by the way, this could go into Macedon (disambiguation)) for reasons that had nothing to do with cold war politics, a use that remained up to our own day. Which of the two, the Greek or the Slav, might be offended most when not regarded as Macedonian? Skamnelis (talk) 22:55, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

ɵ
ɵ is your invention. ("I have seen /ɵ/, but for the life of me I can't remember where.") Please read WP:OR.--Confused monk (talk) 18:35, 28 June 2009 (UTC)


 * And your suspicions are your invention. You're getting a bit ridiculous: The OED is "not a public source", it doesn't contain words it clearly has, etc. The /ɵ/ convention was used on Wikipedia before I got here. Webster's describes reduced o as being a schwa with lip rounding, which is what the IPA defines [ɵ] as. It's a useful convention for sometimes-[oʊ], sometimes-[ə], and that's what the key is meant to be: useful. If you don't like it, take it up on the talk page of the key, but attacking individual articles and making them inconsistent is not an answer. kwami (talk) 18:43, 28 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Bolinger (1989) speaks of a reduced vowel schwa, a second reduced vowel with "palatal color" (our /ɨ/), and a third with "labial color" (our /ɵ/). Rhodes (1996) describes the reduced o of autograph, automate, monograph as ranging from [ə] to [ʊ], though he doesn't distinguish it from / ʊ /. Yavas (2005) points out that, besides plain [ə], English has [ə~i], [ə~u], and [ə~o] variations, which we're transcribing ɨ, ʊ, ɵ. The symbols we choose are unimportant, but if you prefer something else, you can bring it up on the talk page. kwami (talk) 19:30, 28 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Actually, Bolinger does use <ɵ>. I'd been going on 2ary sources, which didn't use his symbols. kwami (talk) 21:05, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

Tzara IPA
Hi! I appreciate the IPA info you added to Tristan Tzara, only there may be a couple of issues with it. It's possible that the French pronunciation ("tsa-RAH") should take the cake - he probably intended it to seem French even in Romania, although the name starts with a Romanian expression. In any case, the French form is now the norm, even in Romania: I have never heard anyone in Romania (in the media, in education etc.) opt for anything other than the French accent, for both "Tzara" and "Tristan". That said, I do not object to the IPA you added, but I think it be best if it were the second of two versions. I am however unsure about how to spell that other version in IPA... Dahn (talk) 09:42, 29 June 2009 (UTC)


 * We should ask Adi-Japan. I only wanted to capture that the tz is pronounced as an affricate despite its spelling. I'll change it to French; see what you think. (You might want to add a ref, if you have one, since the article is so well sourced.) kwami (talk) 09:44, 29 June 2009 (UTC)


 * No problem. I found a source, but I'm gonna have to move the details into the section on name, for several editing reasons that will become apparent once I'm done (one of them is that the reference also backs some more info in other parts of the article). Let me know what you think once I'm done. Dahn (talk) 10:07, 29 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Done. Dahn (talk) 10:23, 29 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Yeah, it's better there.
 * If we're gonna say the tz is equivalent to ţ, shouldn't we also say that the final a is equivalent to ă? kwami (talk) 10:29, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Hm, yes, I struggled with that. The problem is that, as such, the name is pronounced with a final a - many people are unaware of the pun, and this inside joke was probably within the scope of Tzara's intentions. It's also that, for those who know the pun, it's still apparent in the name with a final a, particularly since it was probably intended from the very beginning to look like something nonsensical in French which happens to have an approximate meaning in Romanian. Then again, and technically, it is not entirely sure that the pun was intended - while it is unlikely to have been otherwise, it's just one account who says it for sure, and we do know that Tzara used several versions of "Tristan and something" before sticking with "Tzara". I don't think anyone has ever pronounced the name (as opposed to the pun) with a final ă. Romanian will naturally read something with an a as an a: note that ţară is "land" or "country", and ţara "the land" or "the country", a nuance I tried to suggest with my edit. Dahn (talk) 10:42, 29 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Makes sense. kwami (talk) 10:50, 29 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Two points:
 * The French pronunciation is, with affricate d͡z instead of t͡s, or at least this is how it is pronounced in this documentary, at position 0:23. The narator is very probably a native speaker. The affricate d͡z is rare in French (it's not even mentioned in French phonology), but does exist in foreign loans such as tzar (English czar).
 * I'm sure I have heard, in Romanian, the non-French pronunciation . The source cited in the article for a French pronunciation by Romanians is an interview where Andrei Codrescu mentions how he was nicknamed Tristan Tzara in his high-school years, so the pronunciation might have been intentionally unnatural. We need a better source for the present-day pronunciation in Romanian.
 * Other than that, I'm not sure which pronunciation should go first, Romanian or French. I would prefer the Romanian one, because that's the original, that's where this adopted name has a meaning, and chronologically that's the first. The French pronunciation is just an attempt at pronouncing the original. — <font color="#048">Adi <font color="#37B">Japan 13:02, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
 * The IPA stuff, I wouldn't know...
 * For Tzara: I think the reference at least verifies that Romanians have been known to use the French rendition (which I still believe, purely based on my own observations, is prevalent nowadays). The sentence in front of that reference could be accordingly tweaked (it's till the best source we have), but I have trouble finding a better version. The problem with the original is that it really doesn't exist: Tzara did use "Tristan Ţara", and probably used "Tristan Tzara" before 1917 (see the text - there is much uncertainty and contradiction about who did what in that period). But bear in mind that, even if he did, he was addressing one of the most Frenchified countries in the world, where basically everyone who could count to 11 also claimed to be bilingual. What's more, the name surfaced only after he was in Switzerland, which coincided with his own adoption of French as his exclusive language of artistic expression- and that's also when he stopped using Ţ in the spelling altogether - presumably meaning that, at least since then, the name was well and truly Francized. Incidentally, it may also imply that the natural Romanian version only applies to his name with a diacritic, which he used only briefly and never in French. That is why I think there's grounds for not using the (real or presumed) Ur-Tzara pronunciation as Ţara in the lead, at all - or at least for using it after the French.
 * If there's any reason for "TZA-rah" over "tza-RAH", I think it comes not with the necessity of a Romanian version, but rather with that of a German version, on account of his time among German-speakers. This even though the language of choice for the Zurich Dada salons was still apparently French.
 * These are by no means arguments I "hold on" to. There's very little to go on at the moment, and you gentlemen should not hesitate to let me know if my perspective makes sense. Dahn (talk) 20:50, 29 June 2009 (UTC)


 * I think it does, but then I'm speaking from a position of ignorance. There are plenty of cases where we give a pronunciation that does not accord with the national language of a country: plenty of Americans with the ancestral pronunciation of their names, or cultural figures who choose a non-native name or pronunciation. As long as we specify the language, I think we're okay, but if Tzara used French, then I think so should we, especially if that's still prevalent in Romania. kwami (talk) 20:56, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

self reference in template
Hi Kwamikagami. I notice that Template:IPA-en contains a link to the Wikipedia:namespace, this is a self reference to avoid. cygnis insignis 14:29, 29 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Why is that? What about Help:namespace? kwami (talk) 17:40, 29 June 2009 (UTC)


 * We are not a reliable source. cygnis insignis 12:57, 30 June 2009 (UTC)


 * That would appear to be irrelevant. I have no idea what you're talking about. kwami (talk) 18:25, 30 June 2009 (UTC)


 * There does seem to be a misunderstanding somewhere, perhaps I am overlooking something.
 * What about Help:namespace? cygnis insignis 09:05, 1 July 2009 (UTC)


 * You said the template should not refer to WPspace. I took that to mean that templates should not refer to WPspace, and wondered if it would be solved by moving the key to helpspace. kwami (talk) 09:08, 1 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Why not link to mainspace? cygnis insignis 09:19, 1 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Because the key isn't an article, and therefore does not belong in mainspace. kwami (talk) 09:20, 1 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Just so. Why not link to existing articles, with their various keys and explanations? cygnis insignis 10:16, 1 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Then why did you ask? What do you mean by an "existing" article? kwami (talk) 10:21, 1 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Are you arguing that the IPA key needs to meet RS criteria? If so, it no more needs to than the MOS, since it is merely an in-house convention for transcribing pronunciations obtained elsewhere. kwami (talk) 10:39, 1 July 2009 (UTC)


 * No, but that is a reason to avoid linking it. I just looked at the article IPA, which I had assumed was the appropriate link, the header of the article contains the same sort of links in another template
 * If I add this type of content to an article, it would be because a secondary source thought it notable. I would give it as presented in the reference and link an article that explained. Thanks for the replies. cygnis insignis 12:46, 1 July 2009 (UTC)


 * That isn't workable. There are scores of different methods of transcribing English, and if we used whichever method our sources happened to use, then our readers, many of whom are already confused by the IPA, would be at a total loss. It's a bit like arguing that if a sentence uses two sources, one British and one American, then the words from the British source should have British spelling, while the words from the American source should have American spelling. You could use the same logic to argue that we should mix AD and CE dating in the same article, or metric and imperial units, or lightyears and parsecs, or conflicting transcriptions for Greek or Hebrew. It's considered good style to use a consistent system of spelling, dating, measurement, or transcription in an article, and I don't see why we should make pronunciations an exception. Anyway, this would affect 50,000+ articles (since it wouldn't just be English), and so should be brought up at the IPA template talk page. kwami (talk) 19:41, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Edaphosaurus
Hi, kwami

could you please check the pronounciation of Edaphosaurus to see if its correct? Liopleurodon93 ( talk ) 11:50, 1 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Done. We can't pronounce all of those as full vowels in English. The 2ary stress is on the e, since the a is short. kwami (talk) 19:32, 1 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Ok, thanks! Liopleurodon93  ( talk ) 21:17, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Chinese classifier
I recently nominated Chinese classifier for FAC, here; I'm hoping to get some input from people with a linguistics background (even if you don't speak Chinese; I'm pretty sure Japanese classifiers, and maybe Korean classifiers, have a lot in common with Chinese ones), so if you have free time and would like to offer some comments or constructive criticism you're welcome to check it out. Thanks, <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 19:01, 1 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Gave it a start. There isn't very much to criticize. Will try to get back to it later. kwami (talk) 21:08, 1 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your comments so far. I think I've finished just about everything I can do so far, and left two last questions near the bottom of the FAC page, for things that I can get working on soon but wanted to wait for your input about first. No hurry with going through the rest of the article; it's still pretty early in the FAC (even Truco's tech review hasn't been posted yet!), so we still have plenty of time. Thanks, <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 23:22, 4 July 2009 (UTC)

Comment
Kwami,

You seem to have been making a lot of minor changes to your pronunciation system. I'm curious as to what sorts of arguments convinced you to make these changes. Any comments you could make on your thinking would be appreciated.

I'm sure you did not intend this: 	ˈmæriː ˌæmfɨˈtraɪtizː

I believe you were trying to lengthen the i in the last syllable, not the z.

The pronunciation of mare indicated is wrong; it should sound like "Mary", not like "marry", as a consequence of the general rule by which penultimate stressed vowels in open syllables were lengthened. I suppose you would write [ˈmɛəriː], unless you've changed your system in that regard. RandomCritic (talk) 15:00, 2 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, quite right on both counts. Thank you. kwami (talk) 02:03, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

Kiev
Kwami, we've got an anonymous IP (actually several of them in the last few days) who keep changing the common English spelling of Kiev to Kyiv. While someday that may be the common English spelling, it isn't yet. Can you semi-protect the page? Thanks. (Taivo (talk) 03:29, 4 July 2009 (UTC))


 * Done. Let's try a week. Please let me know if it starts up again. kwami (talk) 06:59, 4 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I appreciate it.  These nationalistic issues are really tricky.  I lived in Ukraine for a year so I sympathize with the desire to rid the country of the "Russian yoke".  Lots of Ukrainian cities are already "Ukrainian" in their Wikipedia articles (Rivne, Uzhhorod, etc.), but these are not well-known cities to English speakers even under their Russian or Polish names (Rovno, Uzhgorod).  Kiev and Odessa are different and they especially irk the nationalists to see the Russian spellings.  Odessa is especially troublesome for them because the city's official web site still uses the Russian spelling in its banner even on the Ukrainian version of the page.  Thanks again.  Cheers.  (Taivo (talk) 11:49, 4 July 2009 (UTC))

Ethnologue
Were you aware that all the language links in Ethnologue are right now returning "XXX code does not exist in the 15th edition of Ethnologue"? I've sent an email to the Ethnologue webmaster, but haven't heard back yet. Do you know anything about what is going on? I suspect it might have something to do with the publication of the 16th edition, but if the Ethnologue database is being "turned off", that's going to affect one hell of a lot of links in Wikipedia. If I hear anything I'll let you know, but for now I'm reverting anyone who is deleting Ethnologue links. (Taivo (talk) 01:01, 5 July 2009 (UTC))
 * Hopefully it's only temporary. In the meantime, it seems that if you replace the ISO code in the url with the old capital-letter one (for example, typing http://www.ethnologue.com/14/show_language.asp?code=OTW instead of http://www.ethnologue.com/14/show_language.asp?code=otw ) you get the page for 14th edition...of course, we shouldn't change all the links or anything, but at least it's a way to check things if you need to look at something while the 15th edition is still down. <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 01:32, 5 July 2009 (UTC)


 * I was wondering when the changeover would hit. Since that's a problem with support from Ethnologue, I'd leave it alone for now. Once we know how to link to the 16th edition, we can hopefully redirect the ISO template, rather than messing with any of the articles, except of course in cases where the ISO code has changed. kwami (talk) 03:38, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

FYI, I just got this from SIL: Dear John,  The Ethnologue website is being updated so these pages will be unavailable until the update is completed. I wasn’t told when that will be, so you’ll just have to keep checking. I’m sorry for the inconvenience.

Jane Pappenhagen

SIL Information (Taivo (talk) 15:39, 6 July 2009 (UTC))
 * The links are working again now, but it's still 15th edition. No upgrade to 16th yet.  (Taivo (talk) 16:31, 6 July 2009 (UTC))

Algae
I only noticed the problem on this one page, but your assisted edits left a left-hand parenthesis without a right-hand partner. I've corrected this the way I think you meant to do, and (as I said) I didn't spot this problem on any other pages you edited today. --EncycloPetey (talk) 03:23, 6 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks! kwami (talk) 05:15, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

User:Lion879
Kwami, hate to bother you, but there's a problem with User:Lion879 as evidenced at this. Check out his contribs and it's entirely composed of replacing Ethiopia with Somalia throughout. I reverted everything he did yesterday, but it's consistent vandalism. (Taivo (talk) 05:16, 6 July 2009 (UTC))


 * Got it. kwami (talk) 05:19, 6 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks :) (Taivo (talk) 05:20, 6 July 2009 (UTC))


 * I found this as his prize creation. I blanked it, but it probably should be deleted as well.  (Taivo (talk) 05:23, 6 July 2009 (UTC))

Table Hiragana
Please discuss with us at Hiragana and ask people who could be interested as well. Thanks whatever your view is 79.192.239.79 (talk) 00:22, 7 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Hey! Say could you please have a word with Nihonjoe about the blocking of Hiragana and further development? I feel like the guy wants to block the whole situation until no one cares anymore (see User_talk:Dngnta ... The IP is not me ^_^') and argues about the same "traditional view" over and over without covering the users angle. I really have stated my case well and argued from a impersonal perspective. As far as I know Wikipedia agrees with me that it should be as easy as possible for the user. Make_technical_articles_accessible is about technical articles but could easily be for linguistic ones as well. And I think there was some rule about "no edits for personal preference if something is already present" (I know that from a color-vs-colour debate I read ^^). Please read over the whole situation and speed things up if you can. Many Regards! BTW: While discussing I think the old table should be reinstated since he has no majority for the current table at Hiragana (even if the old data in the table was outdated) (beware that he made edits after the table so do not revert). 79.192.229.189 (talk) 00:45, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Pronunciation of Sergio Aguero
Why was this removed? I thought you were converting it to Spanish IPA like you did with Messi. I'm guessing it might be a mistake. Spiderone (talk) 09:22, 7 July 2009 (UTC)


 * It was supposedly an English pronunciation, but wasn't, and in any case I seriously doubt "Sergio" is pronounced with a /k/. I couldn't correct it without guessing. You're welcome to add the Spanish, of course. kwami (talk) 09:41, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Urgent: Interestedinfairness
As this edit shows, has changed the description of Kosovo to a country, despite the fact that there was NO consensus about it in previous discussions and that people were already getting tired of his continuous POV pushing. Since there is zero tolerance on this article, I propose a permanent Kosovo-related topic ban to the above mentioned user. There is just no use discussing with someone who refuses to take all different POVs into account and, in the end, just edits how he wants on this article that is under probation. -- Cin é ma C 02:45, 8 July 2009 (UTC)


 * I've already blocked him for edit warring at Illyrians. Let me know if he continues after the block expires.


 * PS. That diff doesn't show what you say it does. kwami (talk) 03:59, 8 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Oops, I gave you the wrong diff :P It's this one. -- Cin é ma C 18:52, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

removal of pron-en's leading to content loss?
You've been making frequent appearances in my watchlist recently, switching Pron-en's to IPA-en's. I'm not taking issue with that — it's great that you've taken on a major role in the WP pronunciation templates. However I worry about your recent edit to Heorot, where the pronunciation guide (which had been in Pron-en) was lost completely. Don't know if this is symptomatic of AWB (I've never used it), if it was a choice, if it was an accident, or if there is some other motivation. I see that the template was being used far from idealy, and wonder if maybe that interfered with its being turned into an IPA-en? — eitch 05:37, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Re: merging page histories
Hi Quami,

I merge page histories like this, where page A is the original title and page B is where the old edits are:
 * Move page A to page B. Answer "yes" when it asks me to delete page B.
 * Undelete all content revisions from page B.
 * Move page B back to page A.
 * Undelete the remaining revisions from Page B.

The method is also described here. I added the method to the history merge instructions, and I almost always use it because I find it more intuitive than the other methods described on that page. Graham 87 16:44, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

possible sock
I have a sneaking suspicion that is in fact a sock of Interestedinfairness. The account is created only hours after IIF's most recent edit, yet immediately jumps in the fray and seems thoroughly familiar with wikipedia. He shares the same interests as IIF, namely the obsesseion with Kosovo as a country. The tone and writing style are similar, and even the username is similar. Lastly, the removal of your block notice and my warning from IIF's page is suspiscious to say the least. Do you think this warrants a checkuser request, or is it just me? --Athenean (talk) 18:22, 8 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Most definitely. It looks like he even gave himself a barnstar. Do you want to do the honors? kwami (talk) 18:43, 8 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Sure :) --Athenean (talk) 19:02, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Possible new sock
Jacob Brickston yet another Sock of Muntuwandi The Count of Monte Cristo (talk) 01:28, 10 July 2009 (UTC Gilbert Griffin yet another Sock of Muntuwandi The Count of Monte Cristo (talk) 04:11, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

Why is AWB replacing /g/ with [ɡ]
In the article Organum the AutoWikiBrowser replaced /ˈɔrgənəm/ with /ˈɔrɡənəm/. There are several problems with this. First, Wikipedia policy favors a broad phonemic, rather than a narrow allophonic transcription. Second, I know of no respected linguistic research that argues that /ɡ/ is a phoneme in Standard English. In this word, /g/ is the correct phoneme. Third, I can think of very few environments in which [ɡ] would even be an allophone in English. If this bot is replacing /g/ with [ɡ], I think it needs to be fixed. What is your opinion on this? Do you have any evidence that /ɡ/ is a phoneme in English? If not, what can we do to fix this bot? Thanks, <font style="background: #08E8DE " face="Ariel" color="#000000">Inter <font style="background: #000000" face="Ariel" color="#08E8DE ">lingua 03:31, 10 July 2009 (UTC)


 * They are the same phoneme. is just the IPA version of "g", like the way the IPA uses  rather than a simple apostrophe. Check the IPA help key linked to the transcription: you may have a problem with your browser or default font. kwami (talk) 06:36, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Irano Afghans
Original title in American litterature is Nordic-Iranian or Irano-afghan and Irano-Nordid you moved an American title to a German one, if you like to use that title use it in a Deutch lang art. You added lots of your own reasoning and asumed it for others,

your reasoning: this is fringe racism, and obsolete at that because of Coons:

The Irano-Afghan race prominent since Sumerian times in Mesopotamia is the chief population element in the entire highland territory from the western border of Iran to northern India.

and instead your personal adding .........cousin of the Nordic race is not enyclopedic. and does not make sense.

Removement of Coons book as source because of you say "its 70 years old" wont hold water, If I write an art. about Da vinci then I will use his 600 year old book as source. There is more recent from Coon and other sources as well you just kept mod. text deleting sources texts from renowed scientist and Antropologist as if it were your own writing. Please respect the art. as well as renam the art. to its American version!Cyrus111 (talk) 15:30, 10 July 2009 (UTC)


 * My edit consisted of several changes. If you look at the article history, you'll see the overall effect is not as you described. For instance, the Coons book was still there, so it's a little odd to berate me for removing it. The word "cousin" is not used, so it's odd that you would question its use.


 * Secondly, per WP:Fringe, you have a choice between making it clear that this is fringe science (that is, nonsense), or deleting the article altogether. We do not present such "theories" as fact, as you have consistently worded it. We also do not present obsolete findings (such as skull measurements taken in the 1930s) as current evidence. For example, at the Flat Earth article, we would not begin the introduction with the statement that the Earth *is* flat, only that some people have believed it to be flat. I am reverting your edits, and it you continue, I will protect the article.


 * As for the name of the article, I reverted it to where it was before your numerous page moves. If you think it belongs elsewhere, please explain where and why on the talk page, and we can see what other editors think. The problem I have with "Irano-Afghan" is that it sounds confusingly like Irano-Afghan people, such as the Dari, and the inadvertent links from other articles made it clear that this it how other editors had used the term. IMO we need a title that makes it clear that this is the name of an obsolete racist concept, not a modern ethnographic one. kwami (talk) 18:18, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Here is your own edit related to your:

'so it's a little odd to berate me for removing it. The word "cousin" is not used, so it's odd that you would question its use.'

Why is it fringe science when studies continously continue to present day from a century + years back observe the same results?(science=obs.via meth. math. given from God of course)

Why is it "obsolete finding" when math made on old studies is used in present day? (Duda et al 2001) (keep in mind Iran had a pop. of a 9 mil. only a cent. ago)

Your change of article name is wrong, cause its name is Dutch!German lang! This is American English section! And studies and scholars use Irano-Afghan and Irano-Nordid, not Iranid!

What is this: people,such as the Dari, and the inadvertent links from other articles made it clear that this it how other editors had used the term.?

It´s an encyc! based on science and studies! Not some conf. editors opinion!

'IMO we need a title that makes it clear that this is the name of an obsolete racist concept, not a modern ethnographic one. ' my pres. on the studie is based on scholars work etc.

No this is your statement not American science and studies (some from Harvard) Coon, J. Angel and other Ant. Arcs. etc, were not "racists" etc as is disresp. ind. read their works. Its Geo. formation advance! Not value of life!

Rev. to real Ed. version or Time will Sure show.Cyrus111 (talk) 14:11, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

IPA Suggestion
Hi, See Talk:Belton_Knapp ElsieWright (talk) 16:06, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

AutoWikiBrowser error
Just to let you know your use of AutoWikiBrowser messed up the info box of Cadair Idris. I've fixed it now.--Mongreilf (talk) 05:32, 13 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I think that was a one-off: that article was formatted a bit idiosyncratically. kwami (talk) 06:51, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Crossed messages in Roundedness
Hi, Kwami: This evening I was doing a quite large edit on Roundedness, and when I'd posted it I found that you'd just responded at length to my Big Crit in the article's discussion page. So my edits don't take account of what you wrote. I'll give it some thought, and perhaps we can continue the discussion in a day or so. It would be nice to get some other voices in as well. WellsTribute (talk) 19:08, 13 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Okay. There were other voices a few months ago, but apparently not at this article—probly on one of the rounded vowel articles. The main bones of contention was which terms mean which, and which languages had which. kwami (talk) 19:29, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Re: old edit
That's the IPA, or International Phonetic Alphabet. My edit was a rough transcription of the previous "yaaga-shaala". Per Wikipedia's policies, pronunciations are supposed to be written using the IPA whenever and wherever possible. Not being a speaker of Sindhi, I based my IPA transcription off of the previous rather English-based phonetic one. ベリット 話せます 05:40, 14 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Why I put the implosive there is beyond my knowledge. I dunno, maybe something just told me to do it. =P ベリット 話せます 10:27, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

Morphosyntactic alignment
In article Austronesian alignment, is the "direct" case you mean there is PIVOT ?

Ayrenz (talk) 11:40, 14 July 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm not familiar with how the term 'pivot' is used in Austronesian languages. (It's not a term I use for any language.) It probably varies greatly in the literature, since Austronesian case systems are frequently forced into one of the other categories, accusative or ergative, but I would assume that if we do speak of a pivot, it would have to be the direct case. My question then would be whether it is helpful to postulate a pivot. (It may well be; I simply do not know. It isn't helpful to postulate a subject, for example.) I expect that Ross covers the question, but it's been years since I've read him. If not, you'd need to contact s.o. who's familiar with Philippine languages to see whether direct case satisfies the features of a pivot, or if perhaps the definition is meaningfully adjusted to accommodate Philippine languages. Going on your link, there is no verbal agreement, so feature #2 does not apply. The so-called "passive" does not reduce the clause to a single argument, so #1 may not be able to decide the issue. It would then come down to #3, but, besides the question of whether the word "pivot" can be meaningfully used if the direct case only fits one of three defining characteristics, I'd be cautious in accepting claims about it, given the history of forcing Austronesian languages into the mold of either accusative or ergative languages. kwami (talk) 17:58, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

User contributions
Quick question - is there a procedure you know of when you come across a user who seems to have produced a rather impressive string of copyvios? User talk:Atuschman seems to have lifted most of the Unesco archives and put them on there. I tidied up the page I happened to land on (Sheikh Mukhtar-Vali Complex) before spotting it's a persistent problem. Short of checking each single page, any idea what normally happens? Akerbeltz (talk) 14:54, 15 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I really don't. You should probably say what you just told me at Copyright problems. kwami (talk) 18:40, 15 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Ok, that's helpful, thank you! Akerbeltz (talk) 20:44, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

Spotlight - Marco Polo and sheep
Hiya. Thanks for helping out with spotlight. Your name isn't on the 'spam-list' on that page, so I haven't sent you the newsletter; but I just wanted to let you know a couple of things. Following over 500 edits from the spotlight project, Marco Polo has attained good article status. We've now started on the next article, Marco Polo sheep. Please join the IRC channel some time (quick link), or add your name to the Participants list at WP:SPOT. Cheers, --&mdash; Deon<sup style="color:purple;">talk I'm BACK! 03:36, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

Roundedness in vowels
Kwami,

You'll see I've reverted your edit about exolabial vowels where endolabial would be expected - reaons on the Discussion page.WellsTribute (talk) 23:43, 16 July 2009 (UTC)


 * See if this is better. It would be very confusing to follow a citation that they are ubiquitous with a claim that they are rare; also, there are certainly more than three cases (Norwegian, for instance). I'm also suspicious that the cases which have been attested (Swedish, Norwegian, and Japanese that I know of) are all in national languages. That's unlikely to be coincidence. kwami (talk) 23:52, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

IPA for Serbian and Croatian
Hi Kwami. Since you created this page, what would you think of an expansion to WP:IPA for South Slavic to include Macedonian, Bulgarian and Slovenian? Most consonants and vowels are shared between all the languages, and I think any anomalies could adequately be explained in notes, much like WP:IPA for Turkish and Azeri.  Balkan <font color="#008">Fever  08:23, 17 July 2009 (UTC)


 * That might be useful, and there are a lot of Bulgarian transcriptions. Could you outline the diffs on the talk page? kwami (talk) 08:27, 17 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Done :)  Balkan <font color="#008">Fever  08:46, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Afro-Asiatic and Proto-Afro-Asiatic
I noticed you got involved in the above two articles when User:SOPHIAN and User:Wapondaponda (and sockpuppets) were edit warring on them. Both these users have been in discussion with admins for various reasons and I have been looking at places needing to be fixed. I have interacted with both concerning genetics articles. I started working on both the above-mentioned articles this evening. By all means please tell me if you think I am going about it wrongly. I have written a relevant review article but I have avoided citing it myself, so I've not put in anything about possible genetics links to Afroasiatic.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 21:14, 17 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Okay, I'll take a look when I feel up to it. You might want to check with Taivo about your review; it is generally a good idea to not cite yourself, at least not when people are fighting over the article, but there'd be no problem with Taivo or myself doing so. kwami (talk) 22:52, 17 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Hi Kwami, I did not cite myself, but another user did eventually. It was not really what I had in mind as being most difficult. I would like you (and/or another admin or moderator of any sort likely to help break some stalemates) to look at some of the Wikipedia policy related debates that have now arisen on both articles. In particular we have:
 * Demands that mention of Martin Bernal be removed from all related articles, based on various different discussions, most recently apparently a fairly nasty accusation that I am simply lieing about what a Lionel Bender article says. (I think behind the moving arguments and personal attacks, this is really a debate about how to do "neutrality" of course.)
 * Demands that the articles should only mention "linguists" and that for example the Proto Afro Asiatic article should only be about phonology and grammar. (Effectively to me this seems like it SHOULD be a discussion about when to split articles, although Taivo's approach to discussion makes it look a little like an article "ownership" discussion.)--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:55, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

Concerns about use of Ross paper
Hi Kwamikagami, I've been concerned by stubs such as Momuna_languages, based solely upon Ross (2005). You're a quality contribtuor, and I don't doubt your good faith here, but a few problems pop up again and again.

For example, “They were placed in the Central and South New Guinea branch of the Trans–New Guinea family by Wurm” - is that true? Actually it was Voorhoeve who postulated the Central and South New Guinea phylum, later joining it with McElhanon’s Finisterre-Huon and others to form the first incarnation of Trans-New Guinea.(Voorhoeve 1968, McElhanon & Voorhoeve 1970) Wurm (1982) merely compiled this and other work, most notably that of Laycock, Z’graggen, McElhanon and Dutton, along with Wurm’s own; nearly all of the Irian Jaya classification found in Wurm’s book follows Voorhoeve. We also have, “but Malcolm Ross could not locate enough evidence to classify them,” which is somewhat opinionated in favor of Ross (granted, he’s often right.)

Now take a look at Bosavi languages and East Strickland languages: “The Bosavi/East Strickland languages are a family of the Trans–New Guinea languages in the classification of Malcolm Ross.” True, but only trivially so: Ross had nothing to do with the discovery or classification of the either of these subgroups, which date to Shaw ( 1968 1986).

It strikes me that all of this resulted from you helpfully uploading the findings of Ross’ seminal paper, so I mean no personal criticism; I only observe that the results are misleading, and unfair to the people whose work is being misattributed.

Obviously, it would take a lot of work to remedy these oversights; I just wanted to make you aware of them, and give you something to think about.24.22.141.252 (talk) 06:08, 18 July 2009 (UTC)


 * By all means please expand the attributions. I rarely said that an author 'discovered' or 'conceived' of a connection, for precisely these concerns. Trivially true was still true; I generally did not have the history of these proposals at hand, and I figured incomplete info was better than none at all. I would hope that more knowledgeable people such as yourself could fill in the gaps.


 * I don't even want to add the info you provided here: if Bosavi was identified by Shaw, we still need to know who first proposed they were TNG. &c. Since I don't know myself (I no longer even have Wurm handy), I'm not sure it would be helpful for me to add further info.


 * As for too much credit to Ross, the outline of Papuan language classification on WP mostly follows Ross, as the latest complete classification. Therefore I thought it notable how the families fit in that classification. —kwami (talk) 06:49, 18 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I agree that Ross' take is notable (and I noticed today that the Ethnologue has been updated to follow Ross.) As for fixing it myself, for a variety of reasons, I'm not willing to fork over years of hard work to Wikipedia for nothing (not even acknowledgment) at this time, though I appreciate the invitation.
 * Re Shaw, my apologies, "1968" above should have read 1986 (there is also a 1973 paper); Trans-New Guinea had already been proposed.
 * I should also mention that these same problems are found in other internet projects for basically the same reasons, including Linguist Lists' multitree, and (even more so) Ethnologue which systemically fails to cite its sources.24.22.141.252 (talk) 08:54, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Chinese classifier (2)
Hey kwami, sorry to be a bother, just wanted to drop by to let you know that Featured article candidates/Chinese classifier/archive1 is starting to get semi-close to the end of the list on WP:FAC. It's still probably got at least a week before any of the FAC reviewers do anything on it, but I just figured I'd give you a nudge so that if you have any more comments or anything you can drop by. If you're busy, I understand. Thanks, <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 02:31, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

your deletions
Kwami, you seem to feel you have the right to revert in toto anything that you disagree with in any respect, without discussion. IMO this is rather anti-social behavior -- and if the person you are undoing behaves in a similarly anti-social manner, an edit war is likely to ensue.

Keep in mind that I almost certainly have at least as much experience as you do in historical linguistics, and linguistics in general. Also keep in mind that any time I add something, I've thought carefully about what to add, why to add it, and how to phrase it, and hence it has taken significant time on my part to do this. If you disagree with something I add, please do not revert without discussion; instead, discuss it on the talk page. If you want to change something, try to find a solution that will satisfy both of us, and make sure to preserve any additions that you don't disagree with.

This is not the first time I've encountered this behavior on your part. It's also not the first time that I've asked you to use the talk page rather than the revert button for discussions. I really hope we can get along better. I don't want to constantly be bashing heads against you; nor do I want to have to lodge a formal complaint.

BTW as for Shanghainese, the statement that it consists of a two-tone system analogous to Japanese is misleading in a number of ways. One is that the Japanese pitch-accent system has a tone difference on only one syllable, not on each syllable in the word. (It's possible that tone sandhi effects may move the tone system in the direction of Japanese; I don't know for sure but I still think the comparison is somewhat misguided.) But furthermore, the statement that it has only two tones is misleading in that it implies a much-reduced system from a typical four- or six-tone system, whereas this is not the case at all; rather, it is only reduced from the three-tone system of Middle Chinese, and compared to e.g. the four-tone (traditional "six-tone") system of Hakka, there are three tones (or 5 by traditional reckoning). It happens in Shanghainese that some of these tonal differences are accompanied by voicing differences on the initial consonant, which have vanished in Hakka, allowing a phonemic interpretation with only two tones. But it is still the case that the four distinct syllables of Hakka map onto three distinct syllables in Shanghainese, not two. In fact, it is quite possible to analyze the tone distinction as phonemic and the voicing distinction as allophonic rather than the other way around.

As for Shanghainese vs. Wu, yes Shanghainese is simpler, but that is not what the text is referring to.

Benwing (talk) 02:58, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

Also, please don't talk down to me if you can avoid it -- the tone of your first paragraph in the comment on my talk page is quite arrogant. Thanks. Benwing (talk) 03:02, 19 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Some valid points, and the info you added on allotony (which you'll notice I did not revert, and even added to another article) was valuable. As for talking down to you, my apologies, but since I don't know you personally, I only have your edits to judge you on. But you don't seem to understand Japanese tone, which was a primary point you were addressing. ("the Japanese pitch-accent system has a tone difference on only one syllable, not on each syllable in the word"--true, phonemically, but then Shanghainese only has a phonemic tone difference on one syllable, not on each syllable of the word; if you're considering allotony to claim a tone on each syllable, then of course Japanese also has a tone on each syllable. The basic difference is one of position of the high-to-low drop in Japanese, vs. a choice of high vs. low on the first syllable in Shanghainese, but the level of complexity is comparable, and in both cases much different than Hakka.) As for Shanghainese vs. Wu, you were making points that were supposedly about Shanghainese, but were actually about Wu, so your argument was wrong for the article. (You had said Shanghainese had a simple system compared to other varieties because it lacked the full voicing tone split, but that's what defines Wu, not Shanghainese within Wu.) kwami (talk) 06:22, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

obvious Supriyya sock is obvious
You might want to check out User:TroubledTraveler. Currently edit warring on Linguistics, and left a message at User talk:Maunus (as well as the Ling. talk page) that is classic Supriyya. Angr and I have already reverted him, so you're probably the next uninvolved linguistic admin on the list :) <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 20:24, 19 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Already blocked by the time I got there. Bluffing with threats suggests not emotionally stable. kwami (talk) 20:54, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

Chu & Tenjiku lions
Hi, Mr George Hodges himself answered the question for me, in an e-mail he sent me last February, quoting the Middle Shogi Manual.

I hope Roger Hare's page works as a source: http://www.shogi.net/rjhare/chu-shogi/chu-intro.html OneWeirdDude (talk) 17:40, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

Muntuwandi
I reported Muntuwandi @ socks copyright violations here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#Muntuwandi The Count of Monte Cristo (talk) 18:53, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

use of the term "stem"
Hi -- you participated in a discussion at Talk:Affix -- I added a comment on a change I've made to the article on word stem; your feedback would be much appreciated. Joriki (talk) 21:38, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

IPA template questions
Hi Kwamikagami. Thanks for your widespread IPA corrections, which I've noticed in many articles. Since the lead sentence of Taoism continually gets revised over pronunciation questions, I'm going to move them into a new section. However, I first wanted to ask your help with two problems using the IPA templates. Can pron-en show alternate pronunciations? How can I display something like "Taoism /ˈtaʊ.ɪzəm/ or /ˈdaʊ.ɪzəm/"? Is there an easy way to standardize the virgule // and bracket [] difference between the English IPA templates and foreign {{IPA- templates? Thanks, Keahapana (talk) 21:06, 23 July 2009 (UTC)


 * You can use {{tl|IPA-en}} for the alternate. If you add a pipe at the end, it will cancel the lede text:
 * {{pron-en|ˈtaʊ.ɪzəm}} or {{IPA-en|ˈdaʊ.ɪzəm|}} &rarr; {{tld|pron-en|ˈtaʊ.ɪzəm}} or {{IPA-en|ˈdaʊ.ɪzəm|}}


 * I'm not following the second question. The English templates (pron-en and IPA-en) insert virgules, while all the other language templates, as well as generic (pronounced and IPA-all) insert brackets. That's because the IPA keys they link to are phonetic rather than phonemic: the point is to provide a pronunciation guide to an English speaker, not to make theoretical claims about the phonology of the word. In an article on the phonology, we wouldn't need such links at all. The English IPA key, on the other hand, is highly abstract; the point is not to indicate pronunciation to the non-speaker, but to English speakers who already understand (if perhaps not consciously) the phonology of their language, and to gloss over regular dialectical differences. For a specific English dialectal or individual pronunciation, we'd use the generic (pron & IPA-all) templates, just as we would for French or German dialectal pronunciations that the IPA-fr or IPA-de keys would not adequately cover. kwami (talk) 23:20, 23 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Thank you very much. Your suggestion to use a | pipe solves the problem. My second (admittedly unclear) question concerned internal uniformity for WP transcriptions. I was unaware of the convention to phonemically represent English IPA and phonetically represent foreign language IPA, which seems inconsistent and likely to confuse non-linguist Anglophones. Thanks again for your expertise and help. Keahapana (talk) 20:31, 24 July 2009 (UTC)


 * The idea is that anglophones already know how to speak English, but they're not likely to know how to speak Bulgarian, so different approaches are called for. "Sounds like car" works fine for the former, but not very well for the latter. kwami (talk) 20:46, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Iraqi Arabic
Got a User:Izzedine who is running through Iraq with a nationalist agenda. He moved Iraqi Arabic and North Mesopotamian Arabic to "Iraqi language" and "North Iraqi language" without discussion or consensus. I was able to revert the moves of both the article and talk page of North Mesopotamian Arabic without problem (after filing a move request), as well as the Talk page of Iraqi Arabic, but was unable to revert the move of Iraqi Arabic. Could you help with this? Thanks. (Taivo (talk) 10:04, 24 July 2009 (UTC))


 * Done. kwami (talk) 10:07, 24 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Sorry to bother you again, but User:Izzedine is at war now, blanking pages, etc. (Taivo (talk) 10:15, 24 July 2009 (UTC))


 * Thanks, Kwami. (Taivo (talk) 10:19, 24 July 2009 (UTC))

Pronunciation of Conchobar
If you have a problem with the given pronunciations of Conchobar, discuss it. If you know better, change it. --Nicknack009 (talk) 19:42, 24 July 2009 (UTC)


 * And if you don't know what you're talking about, don't remove warning tags. kwami (talk) 19:44, 24 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Stop this. What is your problem with the pronunciations given? To my knowledge of Old and Modern Irish (Donegall dialect) the pronunciations are accurate. Other pronunciations may be possible according to different dialects. The tag you've put on it says "discuss" but you refuse to do so. You are casting aspersions on the work of others without offering alternatives, which is not constructive, and your snide comments are completely unnecessary. --Nicknack009 (talk) 19:48, 24 July 2009 (UTC)


 * We're talking over each other. Follow the link to the IPA key; if those conventions aren't appropriate, then perhaps we can work something else out.


 * As for being "snide", in-your-face tags sometimes get reactions from people, whereas meek comments on the talk page may sit ignored for a year. Actually, the tags often sit ignored too, but their batting average is better. kwami (talk) 19:53, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Small request
Kwami, someone unilaterally moved the Salazarese (common English name) to Zaraitzuera (common Basque name) - I can't undo that.

And if you're totally bored - could you look at Special:Contributions/Contraryy? This user comes back and vandalises more or less the same pages twice a month, especially Massoud Barzani, it's getting a bit tedious reverting him/her.

...sometimes I wonder if I should try for adminship myself LOL! Cheers. Akerbeltz (talk) 00:17, 25 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks! Akerbeltz (talk) 13:08, 25 July 2009 (UTC)


 * He's at it again... Akerbeltz (talk) 00:44, 8 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks again Akerbeltz (talk) 17:12, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

IPA in Shva
Hi Kwamikagami, could you explain your changes →  and  → ? Thanks, Dan <span style="font-size:large; line-height:.7em; font-family:'Arial Unicode MS,' Code2000, Code2001, 'Free Serif'">☺ 10:56, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

IPA changes to Standard Mandarin
Why did you change [ʈʂ] and [ʈʂʰ] to [tʂ] and [tʂʰ]? Why did you change [z̩] and [ʐ̩] to [ɨ]?97.117.68.139 (talk) 16:11, 25 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Partly to keep in line with the WP:IPA for Mandarin key, partly because it's more consistant, since we don't transcribe j as [ʈɕ], when that plosive is also homorganic with the following fricative; as for the vowel [ɨ], it isn't really a syllabic fricative. Try pronouncing 'four' as [sz] and you end up nothing like Mandarin. kwami (talk) 19:49, 25 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Although [z̩] and [ʐ̩] are not quite accurate, [ɨ] is no better, or perhaps worse as it makes them look the same. Also, [z̩] and [ʐ̩] (or their nonstandard representatives [ɿ] and [ʅ]) are commonly used elsewhere. I'll change [ɨ] back to [z̩] and [ʐ̩]. Asoer (talk) 00:58, 26 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Actually, how about this? If you can differentiate the final after an alveolar sibilant initial and a retroflex sibilant initial, then we can leave it. [ɨ] for both doesn't work. Asoer (talk) 05:14, 26 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Actually it works just fine. The only difference is due to assimilation with the preceding consonant. Not everything we transcribe as [ə] is the same either—that's merely a question of how precise it's useful to be. kwami (talk) 05:19, 26 July 2009 (UTC)


 * BTW, I changed the initial-final outline to consonant-vowel. Chinese is just like any other language; the initial-final setup is an artifact of the writing system, not of the language itself. kwami (talk) 06:31, 26 July 2009 (UTC)


 * When using narrow transcription, I prefer to be as close as possible while using standard symbols. If [ə] is as close as possible, then so be it. I think what is represented by [ɿ] and [ʅ] are closer to [z̩] and [ʐ̩] than [ɨ]. By using [ɨ] with the brackets, one practically indicates that [ɿ] and [ʅ] are the same. Asoer (talk) 18:35, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

AWB IPA changes
While it's neat that you're going through and touching up articles that use IPA, I strongly disagree with your automated merging of footnote citations in a number of cases. When the footnote itself uses the Harvcol series of templates to link to the actual citation, merging individual citations that happen to thave the same number of pages can be more confusing. To illustrate: at Spanish phonology, if someone clicks on the superscript 47 to see the citation, they'll be unable to know which superscript letter refers to where they left off in the article, a b c or d. It also doesn't make sense, as it makes it seems to imply that a reference with page 515 is a different source from a reference with page 517. I'm not saying that you shouldn't do it at all, but perhaps take note of my concern as you edit. Otherwise, I'll be undoing a few of your edits— Æµ§œš¹ <span title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" class="IPA"> [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 19:46, 25 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Please go ahead and revert whatever you need to (though I would appreciate it if you could retain the IPA corrections). I am not intentionally altering the footnotes; that is part of default AWB programming, just as it reorders the 'see also' vs. 'references' sections, the IW and category links, moves various tags around, etc; and as such I assumed there was consensus behind it based on WP policy and style guides. My apologies for the inconvenience. Also, if you know if that option can be turned off, maybe that would be the way to go. And here I thought I was helping with routine maintenance and thus lessening the burden to our servers. kwami (talk) 19:53, 25 July 2009 (UTC)
 * It shouldn't work that way. Basically, to undo your undesirable edits while maintaining the IPA corrections I have to manually change them.  Thus, in an attempt to make things easier, you're only making it harder for someone else.  If you can't figure out how to turn off this feature, I recommend you not use AWB to edit these pages.  — Æµ§œš¹ <span title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" class="IPA"> [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  16:53, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Modern Irish tag
Yes, thank you for adding this tag. The Conchubhar article is better now. I was worried that another user would continue trying to insert incorrect pronunciations into that article... —Preceding unsigned comment added by Djwebb1969 (talk • contribs) 22:18, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Chinese classifier FAC
Hey kwami, sorry, I was away for a couple days and Featured article candidates/Chinese classifier/archive1 was closed before I was able to respond to your latest round of comments. I will continue working on the article and, if you like, we can finish up the review on the article's talk page. I'm thinking I will re-nominate it for FAC once I finish addressing all your concerns (I probably should have just asked you to comment on the PR a couple months ago, rather than waiting until FAC to notify you; lesson learned!); I have made a second attempt to get my hands on the Chinese-language classifier book I mentioned there, so if I can find that I might be able to answer some of the questions you raised at FAC. Thanks, <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 12:01, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Oowekyala dialect
I daresay that the Owekeeno and Heiltsuk peoples do not refer to their dialects of their unnamed mutual language as "dialects"; while true it's stilted/artificial-sounding and certainly not most common usage. There's other dual languages like this around, North Straits Salish is pretty much an agglomeration of them. Then there's the three-way division of Halkomelem. "Oowekyala language" and "Oowekyala language" are both, so far as I understand, redundancies; which is why Kwak'wala is not titled Kwak'wala language. Also the native preference of late, from what I see on various pages, is Wuikyala; the corresponding ethno article is Wuikinuxv, so perhaps the language title should conform to that orthography; "Rivers Inlet language" or "Rivers Inlet dialect", fine, "Owikeeno language"="Oowekyala/Wuikyala".Skookum1 (talk) 04:19, 29 July 2009 (UTC)


 * No problem for Oowekyala. What about Heiltsuk? kwami (talk) 06:42, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
 * trickier because while there might be a name within Heiltsuk for the Heiltsuk language, it's not common in English; but re language v. dialect I think "language" is the most common usage, and again certainly how the Heiltsuk see it themselves. Who knows maybe there's a term "Heiltsukiala" or something like that; the "cure" for Secwepemctsin and Nlaka'pamuctsin, respectively, has been to use "Shuswap language" and "Thompson language", ditto "Okanagan language" for Sylixt'sn; I think the same has been done for Chilcotin language.  The over-use of ethnographically-correct language/people names is, to me, problematic because of the special characters needed/used in some cases Skwxwu7mesh, St'at'imc, Sto:lo (which I've typed, as need be, without the special characters).  Similarly there might be a separate term for Nuu-chah-nulth language within that language; but it's not in common use; ditto with Comox etc.  But the language/dialect issue applies, as noted to North Straits Salish, so whether Lummi language or Klallam language or their British Columbia counterparts are actually dialects of NSS they're usually referred to as languages.  A bit different with the three Halkomelem dialects, but I'm leaning towards thinking each of those should have their own separate articles; but again, titled as languages rather than dialects because that's the most common usage.  You might want to consult User:Billposer about this...though his specialties are Northern Interior languages, but again the same issue arises there with Witsuwit'in and Dakelh and their cousin languages/dialects of Dene language (which is what they really are - see Talk:Dene btw)..Skookum1 (talk) 14:19, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Zaraitzu Basque
Hi Kwami, could you move Salazarese to Zaraitzu Basque. I think there are enough reasons for it. Thanks.--Ardoila (talk) 05:12, 29 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Someone already objected to that once. Why don't you take it up on the talk page? kwami (talk) 06:38, 29 July 2009 (UTC)


 * OK! I wrote it in the talk page. Anyway, I don't understand how is this working, for changing from Zaraitzuera to Salazarese writing a comment here was enough, for changing from Salazarese to Zaraitzu Basque I have to write it in a talk page? I hope somebody is reading that talk page...--Ardoila (talk) 06:58, 29 July 2009 (UTC)


 * The article was originally at Salazarese, where you created it, and someone objected when you later moved it to its Basque name. Since that was a valid objection (we normally use English names), I moved it back with the request that you discuss the issue on the talk page, but you didn't do that until now. Okay, it's maybe a little harsh for me to revert you when you move an article you yourself created, but naming can be a very emotional issue, so it's better to try to build consensus ahead of time. kwami (talk) 07:08, 29 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, I see that some people is especially emotional...me too. One Basque poet (Gabriel Aresti wrote: Pentsatzen dut nire izena nire izana dela, eta ez naizela ezer ezpada nire izena. (I believe that my name is my being, and I'm nothing else but my name). So, I understand the situation. But I'm Basque and I don't like to see how we are not taken in account even for writing the names of our language. Maybe I should be citizen of the UK for changing it;)--Ardoila (talk) 15:32, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Let's have this conversation on the talk page? That aside, I have to re-iterate that Wikipedia is not about pushing personal agendas, that includes names of places, people etc. It's Wiki policy and has nothing to do with your passport. You might find it interesting to have a look at the talk pages of pages like San Sebastián where there have been endless debates about this sort of thing. It all boils down to what's most commonly used in English on the English wikipedia. Akerbeltz (talk) 16:21, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

IPA changes for Kazakh and Kyrgyz
It's good that you're doing some IPA clean-up, but I'd like to ask that you don't change any Kazakh or Kyrgyz transcriptions I've added (and if possible, revert such changes). You've changed the pitch accent (e.g. [ɑ́]) to a stress accent (e.g. [ˈɑ]), which is incorrect for most analyses of these languages. Also, you seem to have changed Kazakh [ɘ] to [ə]—these are distinct phonemes in Kazakh. —Firespeaker (talk) 13:26, 29 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Ah, sorry about that. I asked somewhere about pitch, and never got an answer. Do you have these pages on your watchlist, or should I compare my page history with the Kazakh & Kyrgyz language templates to determine which they were, in order to undo the changes? (Most people who use have simply mistaken it for [ə].) Did you consistently use lang-kk and lang-ky? That would make the search easier.


 * The phonology sections of the Kazakh and Kyrgyz language articles say nothing about pitch accent. Could you add a blurb to each? (And any other languages you're aware of where pitch accent might be relevant.)


 * One thing I find puzzling: why use the symbols, which are all central vowels, for what are labeled as front and back vowels? If they are all actually central, should we relabel them ±ATR? Is Kazakh an example of a vertical vowel system? kwami (talk) 18:43, 29 July 2009 (UTC)


 * I did consistently use lang-kk and lang-ky. Also, I think all the pages should have a Wiki Project Central Asia template on their talk page.


 * I'll dig up some references and add what I can about pitch accent, though it might be a little while.


 * And yes, Kazakh has been analysed as having a ±ATR system (in contrast to Mongolian's somewhat similar ±RTR system, by Svantesson's analysis iirc). I'd say it has a vertical vowel system if it relied more on height and less on dipthongisation; as it stands, the vowel system of Kazakh is something I'll probably be researching in more depth in the next few years.


 * Oh, also, could you change the over-tied and  back to  and  for Kyrgyz?  I guess this isn't as big a deal as the other two problems, but over-ties are ugly (and in Kyrgyz these are very much single phonemes). —Firespeaker (talk) 19:03, 29 July 2009 (UTC)


 * What Firespeaker meant to say is that the overties look ugly and are in contravention of the principle of the IPA that says you should avoid using unnecessary diacritics (you would almost never write [ä] or [a̠] for Spanish /a/, for instance). He's asked me (by IM) to argue in favor of the ligated forms, but I can't; as far as I'm concerned /tʃ/ and /ʧ/ are both adequate. But, considering that the meaning of /ʧ/ is crystal clear, even if you have a dodgy (i.e., normal) font renderer, but /t͡ʃ/ can be hard to read (and it's hard to make sense of in this fixed width environment I'm typing in), and considering you don't go around changing /g/ into /ɡ/ I [just] think the use of /ʧ/ can be justified. —Felix the Cassowary 19:17, 29 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Firespeaker, even if you could just add a quick statement about pitch accent for now, that would be helpful. It would be good to have your name on it, so that people don't come to me with questions and get a lame "I'unno" for an answer.


 * There's been a WP-wide effort to remove non-IPA symbols like and  from IPA transcriptions, and I've added them to my AWB fix list. I agree the tie bars are ugly. I presume it wouldn't make any difference if we simply deleted them? They don't contrast with stop-fric sequences, do they?


 * I've found two dozen pages with lang-kk & lang-ky tags on them in my page history. I'll be reverting them in the next couple hours. kwami (talk) 19:21, 29 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Sorry Kwami, apparently you have been changing the g's. I just couldn't tell because they look the same in the font I use. I've made an edit to my comment above to note that. —Felix the Cassowary 20:30, 29 July 2009 (UTC)


 * In Kyrgyz /tʃ/ contrasts with /ʧ/. I can't think of any perfect minimal pairs right off, but there're near minimal pairs like патша Padshah versus ача open-CNV.  My intuition is that the dynamics of /ʃ/ and the last part of /ʧ/ are different too—I'd say the latter has higher frequency hiss noise. —Firespeaker (talk) 20:34, 29 July 2009 (UTC)


 * If either of you wish to argue for ligatures, I'd suggest bringing it up at MOS pronunciation or WP:IPA. There are other editors converting these, so if I don't, s.o. else will eventually get around to them. kwami (talk) 20:40, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Articles to review : Ak Jol Boortsog Chalap Cholpon-Ata Chorba Eurasia Flag of Kyrgyzstan Jalal-Abad Jengish Chokusu Jeti-Oguz District Kalpak Kazakhs Kazakhstan Kazan (cookware) Kökjanggak Kumis Kyrgyzstan Kyzyl-Jar Manti (dumpling) Pilaf Piyāla< Shagai Uch-Kurgan Wooden jaw harp Yurt Zhetysu [done]

Firespeaker, you might want to review Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. It looks like the Kazakh & Kyrgyz was wrong when I got there. Also Kazakhs, if qazaqtar has pitch accent. At pilaf, were you maintaining Dari has a pitch accent? (I didn't revert that.) At Wooden jaw harp, I took the liberty of adding pitch where you'd had stress--please correct if need be. The pitch and schwas should be fixed now, in those 26 articles. I didn't bother with the ligatures. kwami (talk) 21:18, 29 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Okay, with a few last changes, that should be taken care of—thanks. The /ʤ/s and /ʧ/s are still crappy, but as you pointed out, that's part of a bigger issue. —Firespeaker (talk) 23:16, 29 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I personally prefer the ligatures. We do get into problems though with languages that have both these and lateral or velar affricatives, because then we need tie bars for some but not for others—and these include languages where both are phonemically distinct from /PF/ sequences. kwami (talk) 01:00, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

Iranid race
You seem to confuse a good art. with racism point it out rather than accuse, please respec the articles advancement rather than it looks like something from the 1700:s debate me then Cyrus111 (talk) 13:25, 30 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Racist pseudoscience from the 1930s is hardly reliable sourcing. If you want to contest it, take it to arbitration, because you have demonstrated your inability to be balanced, and I will revert anything you do. kwami (talk) 20:37, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Chinese languages
Please take a look at Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_%28Chinese%29 and offer your opinion. I opted to continue our Wenzhou discussion there. Colipon+(T) 23:44, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Voorhoeve 1968, Healey 1970
Hi Kwamikagami, perhaps you can help figure this out. I'm looking now at Healey (1970: 1005-1006,1061), and here's what it looks like to me: Healey's 1964 paper was his PhD thesis, while Voorhoeve (1968) is published in Pacific Linguistics. So, it looks like he's trying to emphasize (perhaps justfiably) that he had these ideas first. Checking Voorhoeve (1968), he cites Healey (1964), but it's not clear to what extent he's relying upon his findings. Now, here's the trouble: I don't actually have Healey (1964), because it's unpublished - it's something I've been meaning to track down for years now, but never got around to doing. If you could procure a copy, that'd be extremely helpful. I could repay the favor by tossing you a bunch more cites. At least, it will help solve this problem of precedence in this region, which is not always obvious, in part because the citation standards in the literature aren't as high as they ought to be (and it gets a lot worse than this) - and it's only made worse by reliance on omnibus classifications as previously discussed.24.22.141.252 (talk) 00:07, 31 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I have no access to ILL right now, or I'd be happy to. The best I could do would be to try ordering through the local public library, which isn't likely to be helpful. kwami (talk) 00:41, 31 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Okay, just thought I'd ask. Re the Awyu-Dumut article, I take Healey at his word that his paper mentioned these hypotheses; however from the standpoint of the literature, Voorhoeve is the author of CSNGP, and it's in his paper that the canonical membership was outlined and justified.24.22.141.252 (talk) 00:51, 31 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Sure, whatever you think is right. I just made a quick pass through the families I had some data on (ignoring blatantly obvious ones that were simply a matter of discovering the languages) to give a least a little credit prior to 1975. kwami (talk) 01:05, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

Orphaned language articles
I have prepared a list of orphaned articles with the character string "language" in their titles. I hope that you do not mind that I included every search result, because I do not know the extent of your interests. However, I decided against pasting the entire list on your talk page, so I pasted it at User:Wavelength/Sandbox 4/List of orphaned articles with character string "language" in title, where you can find it. Your talk page is on my watchlist, so please place any response here. -- Wavelength (talk) 01:24, 2 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks! I'll take a look. (One of the reasons I don't like the 'Swahili' convention.) There might also be orphaned 'dialect' articles, though probably not so many. kwami (talk) 18:37, 3 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm going through the actual language articles (as opposed to slang and legal articles), and merging them, deleting them, or if they're legit, linking them to the superior node in their family. Since that's all the links that can be expected for some of these, and it makes them easy to find, I'm deleting the 'orphan' tag as well. kwami (talk) 19:37, 3 August 2009 (UTC)


 * A lot of junk, but there were some good links in there - we had red links to 'Koaia', for example, and I never knew we already had an article under 'Kwaza'. kwami (talk) 21:19, 3 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I have searched Category:Orphaned articles for the first seven months of 2009, searching for the character string "dialect", and have found these articles, all from February 2009.
 * Ajami dialect (proposed merger w Luri—not sure if that's the right article. kwami)
 * Comic books in Finnish dialects (not a lang article)
 * Jasper (English dialect) (moved to wiktionary, not that there was much to move. kwami)
 * Open Dialect (not a lang. article)
 * Sanuki dialect (linked to Japanese dialects. kwami)
 * Sarawakian Dialect (moved to Sarawak Malay w/o leaving rd. kwami)
 * (What is the 'Swahili' convention? My Wikipedia search and my Google search did not help me to find out.)
 * -- Wavelength (talk) 03:22, 4 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks!
 * When you say you "searched orphaned articles for the first seven months of 2009", does that mean that articles tagged as orphaned in 2008 were not detected, here or in the orphaned language article list?
 * I meant the convention that we don't use 'language' in the article names for languages like Swahili, Esperanto, and Latin. (Sorry, just a nonce term.) It makes it less obvious which articles cover languages. kwami (talk) 04:19, 4 August 2009 (UTC)


 * If you visit Category:Orphaned articles, you can see at the right-hand side of the page a list of orphaned article lists, organized by month. There are lists for months in 2006, 2007, and 2008, but my searching involved none of those lists.  In my searching for "language" and in my searching for "dialect", I searched only in the lists for January through July 2009.  Those character strings may well be in some article names in the lists for some months of 2006, 2007, and 2008.
 * (Thank you for explaining the nonce term; I also prefer "Swahili language", "Esperanto language", and "Latin language" as article titles.)
 * Did you notice that I found Ajami language and Ajami dialect? -- Wavelength (talk) 05:48, 4 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, I found that cat and added all the links from 2006-2008 to your project page, assuming you hadn't gotten around to them. Hope you don't mind. (Actually, I didn't use the lists, but the category links themselves--same diff, hopefully.)


 * Ajami: that's cuz I moved the article. Not sure what it's supposed to be: AFAIK "Anjami" is just something written in Arabic script. kwami (talk) 05:53, 4 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Although I generally want other editors to refrain from editing my user page and subpages, and to post anything they consider important on the most revelant talk page(s), I do not mind in this instance, because I initiated the (possibly temporary) list there largely for your convenience. Thank you very much for the extra work which you did on it.  However, I do not want other editors to use your example as a precedent. -- Wavelength (talk) 21:10, 5 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Well, thank you. I hadn't even thought of going that route, and it dug up some good articles to connect to red links, plus some that needed to be brought to light for cleanup and even identification. (PS. I'm not planning on doing anything with the articles that aren't about languages, like the ones on language schools.) kwami (talk) 21:22, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Muntuwandi
I reported Muntuwandi's disruptive actions here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research/Noticeboard#Original_Research_edit_war_on_Genetic_history_of_Europe_by_Muntuwandi:

Cyrillic diacritics
Hi! I have a question I hope you might answer:

Is there a template on Wikipedia that can be used to help browsers load appropriate fonts when displaying Cyrillic words with combining diacritics, that would mark them properly on words? E.g on Serbo-Croatian words such as <ми̏лоср̄ђе>. On Wiktionary we use the template <tt>Cyrl</tt> for that, and I can't find anything similar on Wikipedia. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 13:59, 2 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Unicode ("ми̏лоср̄ђе") should work in a pinch.


 * Cyrlx is supposed to be the fix. However, for me it does not display properly: " ми̏лоср̄ђе " (the diacritics don't line up, and the ђ is italic). kwami (talk) 20:50, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

Catawba, Ohio
I'm really sorry, but why have you changed pronunciation [kəˈtabə] to [kəˈtɔːbə]? The source provided there says: kuh TAH buh, that is [kə'tɑbə]. --Koryakov Yuri (talk) 20:30, 2 August 2009 (UTC)


 * That source does not distinguish /ɑː/ from /ɔː/. "[kə'tɑbə]" would be fine as the local pronunciation in addition to the generic, but since it's predictable, there isn't much point in adding it. kwami (talk) 20:44, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Why you think it doesn't distinguish? There is "symbol" aw (like in awful, that is [ɔ] of General American) which is used in many other names in the list such as Broadway(BRAWD way), Chautauqua(chuh TAWK wuh), Chicasaw(CHICK uh saw) and many others, so there's no Cot-caught merger. --Koryakov Yuri (talk) 08:12, 3 August 2009 (UTC)


 * You're right - my bad. kwami (talk) 08:14, 3 August 2009 (UTC)
 * But everything is not so clear - here they say about name of the tribe: "It's pronounced "cuh-TAW-buh," and it comes from the Catawba placename Katapu, which means "fork in a river." Thus, either those two meanings have different pronunciations, or someone is wrong. And if the former is true how to pronounce many other Catawbas then? --Koryakov Yuri (talk) 11:39, 3 August 2009 (UTC)


 * The Catawba river in the Carolinas is /ɔː/. Since the Ohio ref would have noted that, I can only take their word for it that they have a different pronunciation. Whether they're correct I don't know. kwami (talk) 18:35, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

User:Izzedine
This user is continuing to rape and pillage his way through Iraqi-related articles. Despite several different editors objecting to his moving Ziggurat of Ur to "Great Ziggurat of Ur", he has repeatedly moved the article unilaterally without gaining consensus. What is your advice concerning him? I would suggest putting a move block on Ziggurat of Ur. Thanks. (Taivo (talk) 04:29, 4 August 2009 (UTC))


 * Easier just to block him. I blocked him once before, then lifted it when he seemed cooperative. This time he can ask someone else to lift the block. kwami (talk) 04:32, 4 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks. He just ignores (and deletes) warnings on his Talk Page and hasn't participated in any constructive discussions.  (Taivo (talk) 04:34, 4 August 2009 (UTC))

Hi, I unblocked the user, for the reasons given at their talk page. Feel free to swear at me. --Closedmouth (talk) 05:12, 4 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Hey, no problem. I just wasn't going to do it a second time. kwami (talk) 05:24, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Hertfordshire
1 - I don't like being accused of screwing around (your edit summary). What happened to WP:AGF? 2 - I saw an edit war between you and an IP. I looked it up at the OED where their IPA representation agreed with the IP's version. 3 - You seem to be having WP:OWN issues in regard to this little bit of the Hertfordshire article. Bazj (talk) 07:46, 5 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I shouldn't have said that. I was reacting to a repeated change without discussion. The question I have is, why should the pronunciation of Hertfordshire be transcribed differently than every other place in England? And OED or no, the version you give is incorrect, as at least partially explained at the key that this is linked to. (The OED does not transcribe exactly the same thing we do.) As I said, if you don't like our IPA conventions, the place to bring it up is at the IPA for English discussion. kwami (talk) 07:50, 5 August 2009 (UTC)


 * OK, we all have off-moments.
 * "The OED does not transcribe exactly the same thing we do."?? What are you transcribing if not the pronunciation of Hertfordshire?
 * "our IPA conventions" sounds a lot like WP:OR.
 * I've put it on the IPA for English discussion and asked for some impartial judgement. But like I said there, 'til an hour ago I thought I was being impartial. I looked it up, found some reference material, and used it. How much more impartial could I have been?
 * And on a more detached level, if there's no consensus on what IPA coding to use, and you're going to say the OED has it wrong (despite it being the gold-standard in the UK), and it has little/no meaning to 99% of those who read it... does it belong in Wikipedia? Maybe it does as an article on IPA, but as a guide on each proper noun...? Bazj (talk) 08:26, 5 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Every dictionary has their own conventions for how to apply the IPA to English. For example, some may transcribe sit and seat ; others, ; , , , or . We chose to use the last. (Reasoning: since could stand for either the vowel of sit or of seat, we thought it best to avoid it altogether; also, the transcriptions with /j/ we thought likely to be unintuitive to most of our readers.) Now, we could have chosen to follow a specific edition of the OED (note that the OED itself has used several conflicting IPA conventions), and tell everyone who doesn't have access to it that they can't contribute, but we decided it best not to choose any national dictionary and thus privilege the dialect/accent it transcribes.


 * As for OR, the conventions are mere formatting. They don't change the facts of the pronunciation.


 * For local names, we often indicate local pronunciations when those are not intuitive. However, when they're predictable, we generally only use the generic English transcription outlined at the IPA key. Hertfordshire has a final /r/ no matter how you slice it (the OED does not use a phonemic transcription, and evidently your edition therefore feels free to drop it, but it's still there, and you'll hear when it's followed by a vowel, and my edition of the OED retains it, though in parentheses); the question is whether to note the internal r's. Since the lack of [r] is predictable for RP, there's not much reason to be explicit about this, though of course it would be fine to add "locally X" after the generic pronunciation.


 * Anyway, this subject comes up every couple months, and so far consensus has been not to have dialect-specific transcriptions unless they're in some way notable. For example, we don't give the Brooklynese pronunciation of New York, just the international pronunciation. kwami (talk) 08:41, 5 August 2009 (UTC)


 * My comment on Pronunciation (again) was purely aimed at getting people to discuss the matter before editing. Somehow I don't think it's going to work. Bazj (talk) 19:30, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Moar classifiers
Hey kwami, after receiving the book I was waiting for I've done a bit more work on Chinese classifier to try and address some of the issues you raised, and I left a note/update here. Thanks, <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 01:55, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Nilo-Saharan
I don't see any consensus among linguists that Nilo-Saharan is accepted and those who do do not agree on all of the branches. Even those who support it still admit it is controversial. Azalea pomp (talk) 06:59, 6 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Wow, thanks for the info on the Reefs languages. I doubt the controversy on those languages will ever end. Are they an Austronesian language influenced by non-Austronesian or non-Austronesian influenced by Austronesian.  I am sure linguists will be debating that for a long time.  Nilo-Saharan would be best viewed as a working proposal only and the infoboxes should have Nilo-Saharan (proposed).  I don't get the impression that the doubters are the minority view.  Nilo-Saharan has always been controversial as are any of the super families such as Altaic.  Wikipedia pages need to distinguish better established language families versus proposed super families. Azalea pomp (talk) 07:15, 6 August 2009 (UTC)
 * My biggest problem with how the individual language pages are represented here on wikipedia. Working proposals need to be clearly marked and not just stated as if they are fact. Azalea pomp (talk) 07:24, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Otomi citationstyle
I have reverted your changes to citation style at Otomi language, keeping the helpful standrdization of the references regarding page numbers. It is not a requirement to use named references according to the MOS, which instead says that any consistent referencing form can be used and that it is up to the main contributor to choose which one. While the current citation style is not completely uniform yet I am not familiar with using named references and will stick to the standard footnote type. I intend to standardize all citations to this format: "Surname (year:pp)". Thanks for your comprehension.·Maunus· ƛ · 12:20, 6 August 2009 (UTC)


 * No need for so detailed an explanation: your prefs are reason enough. kwami (talk) 18:45, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Hieroglyphics pron.
Thanks for changing the pron template, but you also seem to have changed the pronunciation. I took the first letter's pron. from Greek_letters from the Ancient Greek column - are i and j essentially interchangable? Just double checking! -- <font color="#4169E1">D <font color="#4572E4">a <font color="#497CE8">n <font color="#4D86EC">c <font color="#5290F0">r <font color="#569AF3">a <font color="#5AA4F7">g <font color="#5EAEFB">g <font color="#63B8FF">s  17:35, Saturday August 8 2009 (UTC)  —Preceding undated comment added 17:35, 8 August 2009 (UTC).


 * Actually I don't know. I can't find any ref that they would be maintained as separate vowels in hiatus. You might want to fact tag it. kwami (talk) 17:38, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Linking question
Is there a convention on whether a string like "Basque dialects" should link to Basque language and dialects or to Basque dialects? Akerbeltz (talk) 19:56, 8 August 2009 (UTC)


 * No. Depends on whether you think they'd be more likely to want to explore 'Basque dialects', or need an explanation of what a dialect is. kwami (talk) 19:59, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Diacritics question
Hey kwami, do you know if there's a way in WP to get a black dot underneath a character? I'm asking because in some of the discussions at Talk:Chinese classifier, people have complained about the current standard of underlining the classifier in example sentences (pointing out that to people who don't know how to read Chinese, the underline looks like it's part of the character). It seems like the standard in Chinese linguistics articles and books is to put a black dot (it looks like it's about the same size as a regular period) directly under each character, so I'm thinking maybe I can give that a try.

Right now, though, I can't find any way to get it working, either in WP or in a word processor. Using Word or OpenOffice, it's easy to make this with Latin alphabetic characters using U+0323 and then paste it into WP (for example, ẹ, which was just e + ̣ ), but it makes a mess if I try do do that with a Chinese character; and if I try to paste it into WP, all I get is 个̣ (as two separate characters). Also, U+0323 is very small; U+0325 is a bit bigger, but it's a little open circle instead of a black dot, so might not be appropriate. <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 21:55, 8 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Your example doesn't look half bad in Firefox 3.5: the dot is just to the right of the stem. The ideal solution would be FULLWIDTH COMBINING DOT BELOW, but I don't think that character exists.--Curtis Clark (talk) 23:43, 8 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I think I'm in Firefox 3.0 instead of 3.5, but I imagine it looks the same way. Unfortunately, with characters other than 个 it looks significantly worse (for example, 次̣ ), and even with 个 the main problem, in addition to not being really below the character, is that it's not prominent enough. If I get a chance I can try scanning one of the print pages from the book I got this idea from, to give you an idea of the look I am aiming for. <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 00:35, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Oh, actually, that character doesn't look bad. I think the one I tried earlier that looked bad was 次̥ . The only problem is, though, that the dot (in the character that looks good) is far too small; even I would think it was just part of the character. <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 00:37, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Agreed.--Curtis Clark (talk) 03:39, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

Mind you, the dot doesn't solve the problem either cause people still have no way of telling it's not part of the character. I still think color is the way forward. Akerbeltz (talk) 02:00, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
 * This is what that would look like. Personally I think it's a bit messy (although not as messy as bold was), and there is still the chance of accessibility problems that I mentioned at Talk:Chinese classifier. I believe the dots are pretty clearly not part of the character if it's possible to get the dots that I want (I will try to get a scan of this page up within the next week or so to show you what I'm thinking). Although, we should probably continue this discussion at the article talk page rather than bugging kwami more here ;) <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 03:22, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

Personally I think double underlining is clearer in the case of hanzi. Or the Chinese convention of a wavy underline. But I think it would be best to stick to formatting options rather than diacritics or combining marks: If s.o. copies & pastes, they should get just the characters, with nothing extraneous.

So it might look s.t. like this: 五 个 泥 —kwami (talk) 04:41, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
 * That's a good point, about formatting vs. combining marks. I can make a double underline template without much difficulty, although I think people still might complain that this is confusing to non-Chinese-readers...although I suppose anything will be confusing. Maybe I'll explore the html documentation a bit and see if there's anything in the  element that I can hack to look like a big dot. <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 13:15, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Actually, this works out pretty excellently; when a double-underline is put within the template, it shows up as a thick underline:
 * which is rather nice and I think solves all of our problem. Now the only thing left is that the English glosses still show up as double underlines, as in
 * (gè-ge rén, - person)
 * I wonder if it would be useful to put even the English glosses in the XML equivalent of just to make them also show up with thick underlines. This would have the added benefit of giving them a slightly different font to distinguish them from actual prose:
 * (gè-ge rén, - person)
 * <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 13:42, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
 * The XML equivalent of is  . I wonder if there's a place where I can find out just what font this uses, so that I can use   rather than   (which I worry could mess up things like AWB editing or data collecting, and also is unintuitive). <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 13:45, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Anyway, the font will be specific to the OS and browser. I currently see Code2000, because that's the one I specified.--Curtis Clark (talk) 14:09, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Most Chinese fonts have crappy-looking roman letters, esp. in italics. I much prefer the simple double underline. I don't think there'd be any confusion.
 * Also, if you make a template, you could add a color switch, for s.t. like . But perhaps simple black would be best. kwami (talk) 14:04, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
 * (editconflict) Yep, a color switch is precisely what I did in dunder (unfortunately, the shortcut "du" is already used by Template:Data missing.
 * As for the double underlining, I agree; I made a quick mock-up here of what my suggestion would look like (only did it for the first half of the article or so, because adding the code was time-consuming) and don't like it very much. <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 14:20, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
 * As for the double underlining, I agree; I made a quick mock-up here of what my suggestion would look like (only did it for the first half of the article or so, because adding the code was time-consuming) and don't like it very much. <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 14:20, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

I set up du. kwami (talk) 14:18, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Oops, looks like we were both doing this at the same time; I did double underline a couple minutes ago. It looks like they are both pretty much the same, so I redirected . <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 14:21, 9 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I retranscluded the few articles that used the old template, which was a synonym from when it was known as 'data unknown' rather than 'data missing'.


 * There are also cases when glossing text in roman script that more than one style of underlining is needed, so this will work for that too. kwami (talk) 14:28, 9 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Nice work you two, I like both the thick and the double (though I probably prefer the thick) but either is clear so I have no objections to either! Just thought I'd mention that as I was one of the people who brought up the problem on Talk:Chinese classifier Akerbeltz (talk) 11:49, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

I consider this issue pretty much resolved since kwami suggested the double/bold underlining, but anyway, just for reference, here's a scan to illustrate the dot thing I was talking about before (just in case anyone is interested in trying to replicate this somehow...although I think the thick underlining is even better):

I'll probably delete this file after a couple days because it doesn't have any use other than this and its copyright status is a bit iffy (although it's such a small chunk of text that it doesn't make a big difference, and besides it's China ;)).

Also, by the way, I looked at the article using IE7 today and the bold underlining didn't look as good (in fact, it was the opposite of firefox: underlining within templates was double, and outside of it was bold). But oh well, I'm not too concerned; there are so many other thing on IE7 that look bad (single-column reflists, anyone?) that this is probably the least of anyone's troubles. <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 00:08, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

George Soros pronounciation
I'm not an IPA reader but, I'd guess you got it wrong on your change to Soros. Hungarians pronounce S like Americans pronounce Sh. I've never heard GS pronounce the name, but I've heard him introduced (in both countries, and without correction by him) as Sore-os (US) and as Shore-osh (Hun). Please check with a Hunganrian is you don't believe me. Smallbones (talk) 15:35, 9 August 2009 (UTC)


 * You're right for Hungarian. But I haven't seen that for English. If you have a source, great: we'll add it as an alternate pronunciation. kwami (talk) 23:04, 9 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Again, I may be reading your IPA incorrectly, but the pronumciation of the introducer 28 seconds into the video ref given is pretty much standard [Authors@Google: George Soros]  Smallbones (talk) 03:42, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Irano-Afghan
Obviously you have no respect for Westerners since you insist on deleting a modernised version which were edited on by PHD doctorates Americans and Iranians, Its intresting the expansion of the article is such a major factor for you while I keep the old version and add and edit with books in front of me from Coon, Gimbutas etc so their work should be limited to what you feel should be in the art? Whats the real issue here? Its no wonder 2/3:s of Americans think bombing of the East is justified after all the tech. yall copied from the West then disresp! I spent 2 hours with my Indian friends trying to Improve and advance the article but you rev. to a version which looks like it came from a book from the 1700 hundreds. While my version keeps all your edits and ads new! The tomography image is my own head! the 2 type Nor image is my own head, why dont you add new info instead of deleting 90% of the art.? Can you explain the reason for this? this image as admin you should help me correct it finding the right copyright!Thats your job as admin! You didnt even bother to debate me on the issue even though you lied about an edit you did. Here is what you will do! you will bring this up to power admins,(several) Americans alike then present all the disc, then explain to them why you insist on deleting modernised versions, scholars work and editors with PHD:s, and why this version is better and more justified than this  And second why A German term should be used in an Irano-Afghan (Am vers. section art. Coon is princiality here), If you are intrested in editing on Anthropology please feel free to do so for East Asians or Mongoloid race (here is a start for you ) which occupy about half this planets population while I edit on cordeds-nordics and Irano-Afghan which ocupy 0.something % of world population and could almost be considered an extinct species". You are welcome to edit anywhere but please do not erase months of work after you just bash in, and then have the nerve to block me for wanting to keep more det. newer vers.!?! I will rev. to more modern more educational more detailed version while keeping your and other young peoples pref. version! Until you will get me several American admins who think that your vers. should stay and my vers. is false, (my vers. present all the scholars work) as well as them American. admins have to explain why they would del. a vers which a PHD:doc have edited on.Cyrus111 (talk) 17:21, 8 August 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.38.3.208 (talk)


 * Yes, I must be Anti-White if I don't buy your racist ideology. As I've said before, this kind of pseudo-Nazi bullshit from the 1930s is no excuse for an encyclopedia article—unless we present it as racist bullshit from the 1930s. You haven't even noticed that what I'm reverting to is not "my" version—AFAIK I've had no hand in crafting it. You are also engaging in fraud with the images you post—not that I'm surprised. Sorry, but you need to convince the other editors on the discussion page. If they accept your edits, so will I. Meanwhile, I will erase everything you do. If you don't like it, go to arbitration. kwami (talk) 23:12, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

There is no racism or pseudo-Nazi BS as you call or personal racism ideology, My version is scientific research up to the present day! Duda et al, lawrence Lunberg, Gimbutas Sharifi, Tehrani etc, you have 50:s 70:s 90:s up until present days, and yes Coon who wrote ex. on this issue as well as his theories today are being confirmed! and there are tons more out there. It seems you fail you reflect on your percep. which makes you think its racism. If so point this out, Its funny half the world ids being linked and still you use this as your argument. If you feel this way then point out in the presentation, presented what you feel is racism as well as the art.being strictly from scholary sources. I dont even know what racism is in the way you seem to indicate which is an insult as well. You narrow the whole art. into ---pseudo-Nazi bullshit from the 1930s--- and ignoring all work, all sources, just read them! Its not my work! Its theirs ! Presented here! You had no craft in it yes, but others have, other that were educated, and many other editors during months! while more younger editors about 4 of them is altered by bias my friend with no backing of whatsoever, it seems you fail to understand this. And then you stand behind these while ignoring others with ed. and many many others who ed. on det. vers.!? It has nothing to do with convincing those youths since sources do it perfectly, if you see disc page I presented all works etc when dis. them, while those who insist on rev it presented nothing!?So dont sorry yourself here, and whom do I have to convince?If anything you have to convince me and those other editors why you rev to poor vers. liked by a minority young editors! Majority have accepted detailed edited version. Also I asked for your help on the images rather than accusing and insulting --do your job as admin-- and help me correct the copyright, as well as some images were personally created and released PD (being my own head and all!) them you did wrong on. Here is what you will do, you will present our disc. disc. page disc. and them 2 vers. to admins and others who like to be involved and convince them why keeping a poor undet. vers. approved by a few kids is more justf. than the vers. which majority editors and educated. people approved and edited on. 194.14.94.1 (talk) 11:05, 10 August 2009 (UTC) (User Cyrus111
 * Take it up on the talk page, not here. As I said before, if the other editors accept your edits, so will I. kwami (talk) 11:16, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

First of all you blocked me! Second your arg. dont hold water since above arg. from me perf. explains the reasons, also just because some go to disc with no arg and also insults and with no pres. and then rev page with a click of a button, dont mean they are right and that we have to keep poor vers. because of this. You can not base art on this arg. It retards the art. I`ll ask your service as admin. to bring others more exp. involved on this issue, do your job! (User Cyrus111) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.14.94.1 (talk) 11:26, 10 August 2009 (UTC)


 * There are others more experienced on the issue, but of course you won't accept them because they don't agree with you. Meanwhile do your job and present your argument in a convincing manner. kwami (talk) 11:37, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Presenting and arguing in a "convincing manner" as you put it is exact. what I am doing here, while you block and avoid. I will accept if valid points are shown. It seems you try to avoid the issue and instead divert attention, if you read above I made my case clearly if there are more experience on the issue then where are they? they will then disc. on the disc. page which over there I cant see any, others that were debating presented no sources or valid arg. but insults and threats. Valid arg. and pres of sources I did indeed. Also bring these more exp. of yours which you for some reason claim I wont accept? to disc page then they will debate me, if not you must rev. to det. version which a majority have edited on for month and not vers a few with no arg. insists on keeping. I have already deb and disc. a valid point, them haven´t you also seem to avoid to bring in more unbiased admins on this which I asked sev. times, let them point out why present version is more just. than last version via reason. arg. sources and deb. I will, like you said, bring this case to Disc. page and deb. disc. via facts etc. If a no show. from "exp." and a "no show" via reas. deb. fact. etc. from editors, then your job is to rev. to prev. more det. ver. via rights of maj. of eds. and conv. arg. pres. via sources, old and new. Unfort. you blocked me for deb. and disc. and keeping det. vers. You might want to unblock if you want me to take this to disc. page... (User Cyrus111) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.209.29.165 (talk) 17:24, 10 August 2009 (UTC)


 * You are literate, aren't you? What part of "you need to convince the other editors on the discussion page" didn't you understand? kwami (talk) 23:37, 10 August 2009 (UTC)


 * [You apparently aren't literate, or at least are not cooperative, since you continue to post your argument on my talk page instead of the discussion page of the article. I'm also not going to bother deciphering your telescopic orthography, which becomes less legible the more you write, and will simply revert you from now on. kwami (talk)]

Oh by the way, here is the one of the editor I am to convince and the editor whom you change last version to, thanx... (User Cyrus111) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.209.29.165 (talk) 19:53, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Esperanto claims
The fact that virtually no evidence for the existence of this curious "Institute" can be found on the Internet, combined with the fact that Bruno Flochon appears to be little more than an Esperanto enthusiast who likely edits the wikipedia himself, the very inclusion of this highly questionable and self-serving "study" appears to violate several Wikipedia policies on sources (sources must be verifiable, reliable, not self-published, third-party, "with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy", etc.)

In short, I'm removing the reference to the "Institute". The claim simply is not credible enough, and the source not reliable enough to warrant its inclusion. I will keep removing it and will ask for original research/bias tags if someone persists in reinserting it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.151.63.196 (talk) 01:12, 10 August 2009 (UTC)


 * [Seems the institute is attested in German, and exists after all. kwami (talk)]

Book of Mormon
Kwami, hope your summer is going well. We've got some anonymous IPs who are trying to change some carefully crafted compromise text at Book of Mormon. That article takes a lot of work between LDS and non-LDS to maintain some level of NPOV, so any disruption by anon IPs is unwelcome. Over the last two or three days several anon IPs have been making a change that has been reverted by several of the involved editors (including both LDS and non-LDS editors). Could we get that page semi-protected? Thanks. (Taivo (talk) 20:27, 10 August 2009 (UTC))


 * Sure. kwami (talk) 23:37, 10 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Someone else got there first. kwami (talk) 23:39, 10 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks. Apparently two of us regular watchers were asking for the same thing at the same time from different admins.  (Taivo (talk) 03:42, 11 August 2009 (UTC))

Erromintxela
Kwami, a different sort of question for a change - no Basque article has ever made GA or above and I was wondering, since I've been very careful in writing it, whether the Erromintxela article might stand a chance of becoming a GA? I've not been really been involved much in nominated articles but since you have, could you give me some general pointers in relation to the E page? If you're busy, that's ok, I can try and find someone else. Akerbeltz (talk) 22:30, 11 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I haven't had very good experiences with such things, and am often confused as to what people are looking for. The article looks good to me, though. A couple general things to consider: Does the article give good coverage of every aspect of the language that a reader is likely to need? and are the sources varied, consistent, and reliable? In this case specifically, some editors might object that it's more a list than an article in many places. For example, much of the vocab does not support the general thesis of a Romani lexicon, since you don't show it to be either Basque or Romani. Personally, I like all the vocab, and I think it would be a shame to remove it, but I can imagine other reviewers objecting that it's inappropriate, or that it should be a Wiktionary appendix. (I had multiple fights with editors wanting me to mix my explanatory notes/commentary in with my references/citations in the rongorongo articles, merely because the MOS didn't specify a way to separate them, and in the end I won, but it took a month of sometimes idiotic argument to do so. So just because s.o. says that some feature disqualifies the article from GA status doesn't mean you should change it—but then, you might never get to GA status.) kwami (talk) 00:33, 12 August 2009 (UTC)


 * That's helpful, thanks. I agree on the "list" aspect of it but when I realised, just after starting the article, that there's virtually zilch out there, it took on the aspects of... well, I guess a complete listing almost of everything that's out there. In that sense it's balanced because just about everyone who's ever written on the topic is on it ;)
 * Very good point about the problem with showing Romani roots, I'll see if I can make that clearer but the problem is there's no etymological Erromintxela dictionary (not even a proper dictionary) out there and I feel I'm constantly having a tight scrape with OR for looking up glaring cognates. Perhaps I'll try and make it clearer by making sure it's clear that Basque is definitely not the root of those in question.
 * I have a feeling I might not be too keen to fundamentally change the article if that's a prerequisite for GA for the sake of providing a nice, rounded view of a strange topic, there will be others I can work on for GA I guess if this one gets blown out of the water. Thanks for your thoughts! Akerbeltz (talk) 00:55, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

The Sámi and the Samoyeds
Dear Kwamikagami, you seem to be more knowledgeable and active concerning His Dark Materials, so I would like to present to you the question about the Samoyeds. Is it specified in the novels that this hunter people inhabits Northern Scandinavia? When I saw the movie, I automatically connected the fictional Samoyeds with the Nenets, a real-world Samoyedic people inhabiting vast northern tundra areas to the east of Sápmi. – Jippe (talk) 07:19, 12 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I was just fixing up the pronunciations, and I haven't seen the movie. But HDM is fantasy, and distorted from our own reality. Just scanning the book, it doesn't appear to specify the geography very exactly, but it certainly would appear to be somewhere in Norway/Sweden/Finland. Whether this means that in this reality the Samoyeds range further west, just as the Tartars do, or whether the author thought 'Samoyed' was another term for Saami, I don't know. kwami (talk) 07:44, 12 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Indeed. It has just been bothering me that HDM fans editing Wikipedia might not know about the real-world Samoyeds at all and confuse references because of that. Having not read the books, I really cannot go deeper into the question. Thank you for your time! – Jippe (talk) 08:51, 12 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I did a scan of an ebook, and they're fairly minor characters. They would appear to be nomads/raiders in the interior of Scandinavia at least. Not sure how northern without a closer reading (if then). My impression is that Russia never became a great state to stop the Tatars, who are still advancing west in this mythos (and, it would seem, still shamanistic). Who knows, maybe the Samoyed are imagined as part of of a nomadic expansion out of Siberia into Europe, or maybe in this alternate history the Samoyed occupy the place of the Saami. kwami (talk) 08:59, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Rongorongo text B
Hi Kwamikagami, I was doing some reading about rongorongo lately. You made the articles great with your scans of Barthel rubbings of the tablets. However with the scan of side verso of tablet B [[Media:Barthel Bv.png]] you made a mistake. In the place of line Bv6 you pasted line Br6. Compare it with rongorongo.org scans here and here. Can you possible fix it? I of course don't have even a remote access to Barthel's book. Thanks very much, --xRiffRaffx (talk) 20:19, 13 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Wow, good catch! Thank you so much for finding that. I'll fix it this afternoon. kwami (talk) 23:26, 13 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Couldn't remember the exact settings I used, so you can tell it was patched. But good enough. kwami (talk) 00:00, 14 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks very much for taking care of it. As an amateur rongorongist I appreciate it a lot. Thanks to you Wikipedia is a great source. --xRiffRaffx (talk) 17:43, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

to do list
original version


 * Canis Major
 * Capricornus
 * Cassiopeia
 * Centaurus
 * Cepheus
 * Cetus
 * Corvus
 * Cygnus


 * Draco
 * Eridanus
 * Gemini
 * Hercules
 * Hydra
 * Leo
 * Libra


 * Ophiuchus
 * Orion
 * Pegasus
 * Perseus
 * Sagittarius
 * Scorpius
 * Taurus
 * Ursa Major

obscure etymologies: Nusakan, Mesarthim, Phact, Alifa al Farkadain, Subra, Zeta Puppis (suhail ħađ̧ar or xađ̧ar), Kakkab, Alya (yet to look up), Spica (alt names), Skat/Pi Aquarii, Albulaan (spelling), Theta Columbae (etym.), Phact (yet to look up),

Otomi language
Hi Kwami. I would appreciate it if you get time to go through the IPA in the article - just to be sure that everything is in order. Thanks.·Maunus· ƛ · 13:54, 15 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I made a few minor touchups, but there wasn't much. kwami (talk) 00:47, 17 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks anyway. Feel free to edit the rest of the article if it catches your interest. I want to get it to GA or FA.·Maunus· ƛ · 00:53, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Nadahup
Hi Kwami. According to Patience Epps (2005) Nadahup only design Nadeb, Daw and Hupde languages, then, this name is not applicable to Nukak and Kakwa languages. At present time, Epps named Nadahup (Maku) family only Nadëb (Kuyawi), Dâw, and Hup-Yuhup languages. She asserts that Hup and Yuhup share over 90% cognate basic vocabulary; Dâw share approximately 75% cognate vocabulary with Hup and Yuhup (see also Martins and Martins 1999: 254); for the Nadëb language (also known as Guariba), the percent of its vocabulary that it shares with Hup, Yuhup, and Dâw has been estimated at roughly 50% (cf. Martins and Martins 1999: 254). Instead, Martins and Martins (1999) propose that Kakua-Nukak share only 35% of their vocabularies cognate with Hup-Yuhup, but they note that “the lexical data on Kakua-Nukak are scanty and these figures are provisional” (1999: 254).

Kakua-Nukak relationship with the other Nadahup languages is in question because “it was not possible to discover rules of regular correspondence” among the words, although they appear to “share a certain resemblance” (Martins 2005: 331-41). Epps 2005 has attempted to reevaluate the claim that Kakua-Nukak is related to the Nadahup family.

Mondragón 1999 had calculated 42% cognate basic vocabulary Nadëb - Hudë and only 24% Hupdë - Nukak and 20% Nadëb - Nukak but 26% Nukak - Hoti and 25 % Nukak - Puinave and he discovers four rules of regular correspondence Nukak - Puinave.

It isn't possible to build a linguistic group "Vaupes" with Hup-Yuhup and Nukak-Kakwa. This is a geographic group only because Nukak-Kakwa is linguistically longer than Nadëb from Hup-Yuhup.

Then, if you accept the Epps 2005 hypothesis, Nukak-Kakwa is out of Nadahup familiy but if you accept the Martins hypothesis, Nukak-Kakwa is not in the linguistic group "Vaupés" with Hupdë and Yuhup too. In this case, Nukak-Kakwa is separated but in the same family. Thanks.
 * Hhmb —Preceding undated comment added 06:00, 16 August 2009 (UTC).


 * Since you posted this two places, I'll answer on the article talk page. kwami (talk) 06:44, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Bernard Madoff pronounciation
The IPA pronounciation of Bernard Madoff's name has been marked for a citation a couple of times now. Could you check this out, please? The American news media is consistent, it's pronounced Made-off, and there are examples under external links labelled NPR (radio) and PBS(video). I don't know what the citation requesters are driving at - maybe the IPA is just wrong? Any help here would be appreciated! Smallbones (talk) 15:03, 16 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Looks fine to me. The tag is for things that might be contested, and they didn't say what they thought was dubious, so I just deleted the tag. If you want to cite it, any TV news archive would do, but we usually don't bother. kwami (talk) 19:50, 16 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Smallbones (talk) 00:40, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Button to play audio files
Following through on a question on the Village_pump_(technical) it appears that there is a way (using magic word "filepath") to make the loudspeaker symbol act as a button to play a sound file. This is much preferable to the current practice of adding the string "(listen)" to act as a link to play the file. At the same time a small link (for example i or ?) to the description of the sound file can be added to show first time listeners the way and to satisfy the legal requirements of attribution. See discussion on Pronounced. My proposal would be to gradually update all the audio templates this way. What do you think? &minus;Woodstone (talk) 19:35, 18 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, I like it.
 * And yes, whatever we do, it should be the same for all templates.
 * People might expect to hear the sound file if they click on the IPA rather than the speaker, but I assume they'll figure it out. kwami (talk) 08:21, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

IPA corrections on Basque Country related articles
Hi Kwamikagami, I saw you edited some Basque IPA pronunciations. Well I don't totally understand the IPA code, but I don't think the s with a tilde below (???) is the right sound. Perhaps you can enlighten me, but as far as I know phoneme /s/ stands for Basque spelling "z" like in zerri, zorri, ezer, hezi, etc. Regards Iñaki LL (talk) 12:08, 26 August 2009 (UTC)


 * There are two ess sounds in Basque, spelled s and z. The diacritic under the IPA letter distinguishes them. You perhaps don't make the difference yourself, since the distinction is being lost from many dialects, just as /h/ has. Check out Basque language for details. kwami (talk) 20:21, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

JSL
Hi. I frankly do not understand your edits to my revisions and your comment. What does it mean? Your revision I think lacks the clarity mine had. I want to revert, but before I do I would like to have your reasons for getting rid of my layout and other info. How about discussing major deletions or changes in advance, as I am doing now? Since I study JSL, I was planning to do much more work on an article you have de facto abandoned, but not if I have to deal with such heavy-handed interference. Urashima Tarō (talk) 07:06, 30 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I welcome you to continue with the article. Partially it was a style problem: a collection of bulleted quotations is not how an encyclopedia article is normally written. We normally expect prose. It may be a semantic problem. Some of your edits were wrong as far as the English definitions of the words you used were concerned. Perhaps you're translating from a Japanese source, which uses the equivalent words differently? For instance, you said that signs are "insufficient in number and sometimes clarity, and must therefore be integrated through several other techniques". One of these was facial expression, which you then go on to contradict yourself by saying they are "in most cases an integral and indispensable part of a sign". If facial expressions are an indispensable part of a sign, then they aren't a technique to clarify ambiguous signs. It sounds rather like old accounts of ASL, where the 'deaf & dumb' didn't have a true language, but could get a point across through gesticulating. Linguistically, mouthing and facial expression are as much a part of the sign as the manual component. They aren't supplementary techniques for a deficient language. You also say that "written Japanese [is] used when all other techniques have proven inadequate"; however, that would hardly to be part of JSL. For people born deaf, written Japanese is likely to be quite difficult, and they're hardly going to get out paper and write each other notes in Japanese because JSL is inadequate as a language. You might as well say that in Japanese, when all other techniques prove inadequate, they write in English. In the case of English loanwords, that might even be true: but we'd hardly call English a technique to supplement Japanese when Japanese proves inadequate. And then, as another technique to supplement inadequate signs, there are signs for specific Chinese characters. But that's tautological: it's like saying that when there is no English word to express X, then we get around it by using the English word that means X. All in all, your thesis that JSL signs are inadequate as language, and so are compensated by various remedies, doesn't appear to hold water. kwami (talk) 08:59, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I can see this is going to go nowhere. Without even going into discussing your changes, I will only point out that you do not address what is in my opinion the biggest issue here: the need to discuss, or at least justify in the talk page, major changes, something which you failed to do and is the direct cause of my messages. Frankly, I do not care to go ahead with someone with your attitude watching over my shoulder. I will leave the article to your care. Urashima Tarō (talk) 09:53, 30 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I kept several things of value that you added. The article is definitely better for your having been there. But WP is a cooperative enterprise: people aren't going to agree with everything you do. At the time I didn't know that you intended to continue with the article: most editors are never seen again. I didn't feel I needed to pick apart your edits on the talk page to justify what was half cleanup and half reorganization. However, if you wish, I will do so in the future. kwami (talk) 10:06, 30 August 2009 (UTC)