User talk:Paguiar1/sandbox

Steven's Peer Review
Lead Great lead that has a lot of interesting content about your language and background about the people that speak it. It is a bit confusing in that I thought your language would be Ao because you started off the lead discussing Ao, but it seems like your actual language is Mongsen Ao. I think your lead could benefit by first introducing Mongsen Ao, then saying it is a dialect of Ao. Also, I don't think you need to go into detail on how the endangerment levels are defined in the lead itself. Instead you could link the relevant Wikipedia page?

Phonology The tables are really clear and easy to read! I also like how you explain after the tables for your phoneme inventory in what cases the phonemes are used. One thing you could add to your phoneme inventory if you want is to link the phoneme to its corresponding page (ie. /i/ linked to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_front_unrounded_vowel). For syllable structure, I like the table to describe the form of words. However, I feel like you should try move down the "any consonant" for C1 to be aligned with the other columns in the table. Also, I'm a bit confused about the different types of structure you can have. Since you only have C1 and C2, does that mean an onset is max size of 1 consonant and same for coda? If possible, it would be great to have examples demonstrating the different types of syllable structures. This note "Two syllable words and one syllable words occur with equivalent frequency in Mongsen Ao, about 49% and 47%, respectively." could be added as a footnote for your syllable. The grammar and clitics section I think could be moved to Morphology as it does not seem to deal with phonemes?

Morphology Great use of examples in the morphology section to clearly outline the usage of each process. It's very easy to go through all the morphological processes and see how they apply to your language.

Syntax Very clear example of the SOV pattern that is easy to follow and concise. I think one way your three line glosses could benefit is using the interliner to match up the beginning of each word with its gloss line. That way it would be very easy to match them up and understand all aspects of the sentence. Your headedness examples formatting got a little bit messed up and for some reason some of the lines are extended. I think you could just pull the head complement pair from the sentence itself such that you don't have to write down the entire sentence and instead focus on the head and complement pair.

Overall Great job on the article overall. It is extremely clear and has a lot of great information about your language. With the above changes, I think the article will benefit a lot!

Stakeshita (talk) 21:48, 9 April 2019 (UTC) Steven

Overall Impressions
Overall I think your draft is very detailed and complete. I had no trouble finding any of the sections that I was expecting to find, and they are all organized in a logical, well-ordered flow.

I think overall each section has an appropriate level of detail, with the exception of a couple places where you might have been too detailed (esp. in the lead, see below).

There are also a few spelling and punctuation errors (e.g. unasperated --> unaspirated, concatination --> concatenation, possesive --> possessive), and one or two sentence fragments. I tried to point these out more specifically below when I saw them.

I really liked your examples and tables -- they had all the right information. I think some of them could look slightly more polished if you used the formatting guidelines on Piazza. If anything you could cut down on the examples and you would still have plenty of relevant information on your page!

For some reason your section heading for Syllable structure is in bold -- not sure why this is but it would probably be better to keep it non-bolded.

Lead
Overall I really like the lead. I think it would benefit from having links to many of the topics mentioned that likely already have pages (e.g. countries, places). There is also a number (170,00) that looks to have been mistyped.

I think I would like the first sentence slightly better if you split it into two smaller sentences -- one about the geographical location and one about the dialects. In fact I think the first sentence would be fine if you left out dialects completely and just saved it for the next couple sentences. It seems like the third sentence is slightly fragmented (there is a sentence beginning with a lowercased "which" that seems out of place, and then it seems to repeat itself a couple times). Other than that though the style seems to be pretty good and fairly consistent with Wikipedia.

I like that you've included the ethnologue rating of the language, but I don't think you have to define the criteria they use to assign that ranking. Instead I would just briefly mention the specific criteria that apply to level 4 languages (e.g. "Ethnologue lists Ao as a level 4 (Educational) language, which means that it is commonly used in literature and education", or however that category is actually defined.)

In the third paragraph, I would split the genetic classification (Sino-Tibetan) from the fact that it uses tone, as they seem somewhat unrelated in this context.

Also, you have some conflicting information on the number of speakers. From what I can tell, one set of figures is for the language as a whole, and the other is for a single specific dialect. I would try to be more precise with the words "language" and "dialect" to make sure it's always clear whether you mean the language as a whole or just the Mongsen Ao dialect.

I find the discussion of the speakers' alcohol use to be really really interesting, but I'm not sure if it's relevant to the language itself or if this would be better suited to a page about the ethnic group of speakers. Also, when you talk about "the nearby jungle" it might be more clear to identify the specific jungle by name to avoid ambiguity. Finally, the last sentence about deforestation is also very interesting, but I'm worried it might come close to editorializing (e.g. by using the word "dangerously". If you decide to keep it as-is I would try to reword it to be somewhat more objective-sounding, and add a citation since that's a very specific claim.

Phonology
I really like your discussion of vowels! It is clear, concise, and to the point, while remaining very descriptive. I think it's very thorough that you've included the environments in which each sound can appear, and identified the unfamiliar symbol for the creaky vowel.

I like the consonant chart and description, with the caveat that I would change the terminology slightly regarding voiced/unvoiced sounds. Your sentence beginning "There is a contrast in unaspirated and aspirated" sounds weird to me -- Maybe if you instead just said "There is a voicing contrast among stops" it would sound more natural. If possible, I would also try to follow the Piazza post about chart organization to see if you can better center the voiced-voiceless pairs within their respective columns.

For syllables, I'm not sure you need to introduce the sigma-notation, since it's only used once, in the following line. If you end up needing that notation for something else later on (e.g. for syntax or morphology) then maybe it is a good idea to keep it, but otherwise I don't think it is necessary. I like the level of detail you've put into explaining the syllable templates and listing all the possible phonemes in each position. I'm not sure if you need to put them in a table, though -- it might look more natural if you just explain them all in-line in sentence form (e.g. ", where C1 can be filled by any consonant, V can be any of the language's vowels, G must be one of the glides /w/ or /j/, and C2 must be either a voiceless stop, voiced nasal, or r.") I would also love to hear a little more detail about the "schwa nucleus" process, as it seems interesting but right now there isn't too much detail about it.

I like the example at the end of the syllable section, but I would try to avoid using the "E.g." to start the sentence on the actual Wikipedia page. Instead maybe you could introduce it with a short sentence or phrase, like "The following sentence is an example of the XXXXXX process described above".

There are a couple of typos in the syllable section (e.g. spell-check "concatenation" and "aspirated", "schwa").

For the tone section, I really like your explanations and the examples. I don't think you have to go into a lot of detail on the notation for tones (as I understand it, the notation is fairly standardized across linguistics. Maybe ask on Piazza to double check if this is the case). When discussing the two tone sequences that never occur in disyllabic words, perhaps you could just state them in the sentence instead of placing them in a list after the colon. Also, I'm not sure what Wikipedia's policy is on boldface, but maybe italics would be a better way to provide emphasis on the words "do not".

For all the sections after Tone, I think they would be better suited in the Morphology heading, as they do seem to relate more to word formation and the like than to sounds and phonological processes.

The Words section would make a great introduction to the morphology section (almost like a mini-lead). Make sure to cite the percentages as they are very specific facts.

For the Grammar section, I'm not familiar with the three pillars of grammar mentioned, nor am I familiar with the literature you referred to. At the very least, I would say you need to add a citation to this section. I'm not sure how much this section helps provide info about Ao specifically. Maybe you could remove this section and incorporate the relevant bits of info into the lead for the morphology section?

For the clitics section, this should definitely be in the morphology section. I like your details, but I'm personally not a huge fan of numbered lists in Wikipedia articles, so I'd prefer if they were all just listed in complete sentences. Same thing for the phonological processes -- I'd prefer if you had these in complete sentences and maybe explained the specific circumstances in which each process applies.

Morphology
There are a couple small typos in this section as well (e.g. affix instead of affixes). Also I'd re-word that first sentence slightly. You say "one of the most common" and then go on to describe two different morphemes -- maybe just start out with "two of the most common" and avoid issues later on.

Your examples for the morphology section all seem pretty clear, but I think they would look a little nicer if you used the interlinear template someone posted to the Piazza page.

I would also try to use the technical linguistic terms instead of the glossed translations if possible (e.g. instead of saying that a morpheme means "a" it might sound better to say it corresponds to the indefinite determiner -- assuming of course this is how that morpheme would truly be translated).

For the Suffixes section, I would drop the comma after "others" and just say "Others do not change the verb tense...".

For the pronouns section, I would try to reword the discussion of possessive pronouns slightly. At first when I read the sentence "Possesion is commonly denoted by the pronoun in Mongsen Ao", I got the impression the language just had one pronoun, since you said "the pronoun". I also assumed the pronoun would be a separate word (probably due to English bias), so it might help to be a little more explicit about the fact that pronouns are in fact morphemes attached to the root rather than standalone words.

I like the section about reduplication and the example is very clear and easy to follow.

For the nominalization section, it seems like there are some cool things going on in this language (e.g. words being able to be nominalized without morphological modification), but I had a little trouble telling when you were describing the process of nominalization in general, and when you were describing it specifically in the context of your language.

I really love the pronoun table! It does a great job conveying all the relevant information and it seems to be neat and complete.

Syntax
I like the syntax section - it isn't as fleshed out as the others (neither was mine) but this is to be expected since we covered it at the very end.

I like your examples for the headedness and word order, but the formatting seems a little bit off. I would try to avoid excessive bolding and ALLCAPS if possible, and maybe use the interlinear template to keep things more organized and avoid having to use the --- to align things. It's also not super clear which annotations correspond to which three line glosses (And in fact some of the three line glosses seem to span over 4 or 5 lines), so maybe you could add a little bit of whitespace before/after some sections to make the groupings more explicit.

Finally, I would try to move the description sentences for each example to before the example is provided -- this just makes more sense to me. I tried to reformat one of your examples below so you see what I mean:

Before

ADJECTIVE(comparative) + STANDARD

Head final

                                                              Comp              head

ípáʔ 	     la    i          jiptʃən thən   la     jiptʃən pi     áŋ   tə-hlaŋ-paʔ-ùʔ

EMPHAT TOP PROX bed    COM TOP bed    prox just NZP-be.long-NR-DEC

This bed is longer than that one

The tə prefix attaches onto the verb to create a comparative adjective. In the above example, the verb ‘be long’ becomes longer. The ‘longer’ refers to ‘bed’ which comes earlier in the sentence, so it is head final.

After

Comparative constructions are also head-final, as the comparative adjective follows the standard to which the subject is being compared, as in the following example:

ípáʔ la  i    jiptʃən thən   la   jiptʃən  pi     áŋ   tə-hlaŋ-paʔ-ùʔ

EMPHAT TOP PROX bed   COM    TOP  bed      prox   just NZP-be.long-NR-DEC

"This bed is longer than that one"

Kattusite (talk) 01:07, 10 April 2019 (UTC)