User talk:SaranToure/sandbox

Article Evaluation
Everything written in the article was relevant to the topic of Yalunka people, and there was no distracting information. Since this topic is understudied, I noticed that the article itself lacked depth and information that goes beyond the Yalunka people's relationships with other ethnic groups in the region. This article was also written with a very neutral tone and seemed to be more informative than opinionated. In terms of the citations, there are not that many works cited, and the author(s) of the page made many claims about the economy of the Yalunka people (i.e "...they were farmers, and women churned butter...") without adding a citation to lead readers to read more about the topic. The Wikipedia page even acknowledges that there is a need for more reliable citations for this page.

SaranToure (talk) 05:31, 5 March 2019 (UTC)Saran Toure

Lead
The lead is very informative but is missing some important information and could be more organized. You mention regions and territories but never explicitly state where the language is spoken so I was a bit confused as to which "northern territory" or which "regions" you were referring to. The lead also jumps around topics related to Wardaman. I would suggest starting the lead with where the language is spoken followed and the peoples and communities who speak it then talking about the younger generations and then the linguistics studies that have been conducted.

Phonology
The Vowels section has a good description of the vowel phonemes. The vowel phonemes table could be improved by having the rounded vowels appear on the right side of the cell. Also, maybe consider including an empty "Open-mid" row for completion since the table contains "Close-mid".

The Consonants section also a good description; however, you should probably include some explanation of the places and manners of articulation since they aren't standard and are a bit confusing. Also, you should have the voiced phonemes appear on the right side of the cell.

The Stress section is incomplete.

The Syllabel Struction section's description is a bit confusing and could be written better. You should also include examples to more clearly showcase what the syllable structure is like.

Morphology
The beginning of the Morphology section is very informative and contains relevant information about affixation and other morphological processes. For the subsections, I think discussing the affixes before the other morphological processes would make the section flow better since you mention that affixation is the main morphological processes.

The description of reduplication is good since you explain the meaning the process of reduplication generally conveys. The Reduplicatin section could be improved by including clear examples that illustrate how the process is applied. The Suppletion section could be slightly clearer since the explanation of the future stem and future suffix is a bit confusing. A clearer example could also help illustrate why the future version of the example is suppletion.

The Category Changing Affixes section is informative with regards to the two most productive derivational affixes. I think it could be fleshed out more by including which types of derivational affixes attach to different categories of words in general.

The Non-category changing Affixes section is incomplete.

Syntax
You shouldn't have first person in your article or refer to the grammar, which you do when you write "my grammar". Also, I think the Free Word Order paragraph could be separated with information about ergative/absolutive case placed in another paragraph. Also, a small correction about ergative/absolutive: ergative/absolutive groups together intransitive subject and transitive object, not just any subject, which is what you currently have written. The examples for the different word orders are well-chosen and clear. You could maybe flesh them out more by mentioning how frequent or preferred each of the word orders you have examples for are.

The Headedness section contains clear examples that illustrate the headedness of each complement pair. The description could be fleshed out more by maybe relating the headedness of complement pairs to the most common verb phrase orderings if there's a relation.

--Bcatoto (talk) 19:42, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

Lead
Give the reader a bit more geographic context to place your language—Katherine is a town in the Northern Territory of what continent/country? I would place the sentence about the endangerment level of Wardaman closer to the sentence about Yangman and Dagoman, since my first question after reading that both of these were extinct was about how endangered Wardaman was. I was also curious about the justification of the hypothesis that “the three may even be dialects of the same language.” Why do people think this? Are the three languages mutually intelligible? In the sentence starting “there are not many published linguistics studies on Wardaman,” I was wondering if you could cite or list the relevant studies? I wasn’t quite sure that you were trying to communicate with that sentence—that the language is understudied? Or that unpublished studies are a useful source of information? It didn’t feel super necessary but if the state of the scholarship is very relevant/important than maybe consider putting it in its own section?

Phonology
Try to figure out the table alignment for your vowels and consonants—I am working on this myself. I think it might be useful to a reader if you linked the articles for “place of articulation” and “manner of articulation” in your consonant section. For the section on syllable structure, I thought it might be useful to include a table/some examples of words with the different structures. Keep working on the stress section!

Morphology
Providing a link for “category changing” and “affixation” might be useful for your reader. I would reorder the lead of this section so that the comment about an even distribution of prefixes and suffixes came earlier, forming the sentence “Wardaman is a language that uses affixation as its main morphological process, and there is an even distribution of productive prefixes and suffixes in the language.” Make sure the section on reduplication has an example or two. I noticed that you never say the word “suppletion” in the body of that section—it might be helpful to do so and then link that term for your reader. When you include examples of the category changing affixes, it might be nice to write them on separate lines instead of just listing them.

Syntax
I thought that your remarks on case could potentially form a separate section, apart from “Free Word Order.” I actually put case under my Morphology section, but I need to check with a course assistant about what’s correct there. Instead of using a first person pronoun when you say “My grammar provides a table,” I would just say something like “The following table shows” and then cite it. In the examples of sentences you give, make sure to line them up so that the word and the translation are stacked on top of each other. I was a little confused about your classification of Verb and Object phrases as head-initial, since the word order was relatively free, so maybe you could explain that more?

Holistic Comments
You clearly have all the main sections in your draft, so that’s great. I would just keep working on adding detail to your draft, to create a more complete picture of how the morphology and syntax of the language functions. In general adding examples of all the processes would be helpful for understanding the grammar of your language. I didn’t notice redundancies so that was good. Your article appears well organized and just needs some added information!

Scarolinebailey (talk) 14:46, 13 April 2019 (UTC)