Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Ottawa language/archive1


 * The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was not promoted by SandyGeorgia 19:59, 20 June 2009.

Ottawa language

 * Nominator(s): Jomeara421 (talk) 03:33, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

I am nominating this for featured article because... Ottawa language passed Good Article in February 2009 and has undergone Peer Review subsequently. It gives a portrait of the general characteristics of the Ottawa dialect of Ojibwe (a prominent indigenous language of Canada and the United States), including what makes it different from other dialects of Ojibwe. This article was a Stub when I came across it in December 2008 - I have made 374 edits to it. Articles on language can get heavy with linguistic terminology and complex details fairly quickly, so I have split the more complex material into separate articles wherever possible. I have included ISBNs wherever known. There are a few website citations; these are mostly from official Canadian government websites, and virtually all are backed up with other sources. I have followed WikiProject Languages/Template quite closely. All images are in the public domain. There are few FAs on languages, and none on North American indigenous languages, so it would be nice to have one. Thanks. John. Jomeara421 (talk) 03:33, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Comments
 * In notes but not in refs: Goddard 1979
 * Done. Jomeara421 (talk) 10:35, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
 * JUST FYI: You may wanna use named refs for: Nichols John and Leonard Bloomfield 1991 pp. 18–23; Rhodes Richard 1985 p. xlix; Rhodes Richard 1985 pp. x-xi; Rhodes Richard 1985 pp. xxxix-xliii; Valentine J. Randolph 1994 p. 430; Valentine, J. Randolph, 1994, pp. 43–44.
 * Done. Jomeara421 (talk) 10:35, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
 * What's with the single brackets around Dawes, Charles E?
 * I've removed them. It's a locally published book (the only published material on Ottawa from Oklahoma), and has a copyright notice with that name, but doesn't otherwise clearly state that he is the author but I assume he is. Jomeara421 (talk) 10:35, 5 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Ling.Nut (talk) 07:49, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Oppose—Not happy with the writing yet. Here are tons of issues just in the lead.
 * Please avoid links to commonly known countries, which will be prominent in the higher-value links that jostle with them, to the states/provinces.
 * OK, that's fine. Jomeara421 (talk) 21:26, 6 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Infobox: semicolon then comma for "Region"? "Total number of  speakers". It that in some infobox template? If so, it should be corrected.
 * "Total speakers" is part of template, someone else would have to fix that. Jomeara421 (talk) 21:26, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Punctuation changed. Jomeara421 (talk) 21:26, 6 June 2009 (UTC)


 * "Linguistic innovation" gagged me, and then I saw it does pipe to the right term; please don't pipe it. "Innovation(s)" occurs many times in the lead, and probably once is enough. Readers will understand "change" more easily, and you do indeed use "change" once or twice.
 * I've cleaned up use of 'innovation'. The term 'linguistic innovation' is very common in linguistics, though. Jomeara421 (talk) 21:26, 6 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Remove "still" as redundant; see ExerciseI at the bottom.
 * Done. Other uses of 'still' cleaned up. Jomeara421 (talk) 21:26, 6 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Does MOS allow single quotes as used in the second para? Why doubles in the fourth para, then? They're not good in many browsers/fonts.
 * I've followed the linguistic convention of using single quotes only for glosses (translations) of terms in the language under discussion. The MOS recommends but doesn't require use of double quotes (for reasons to do with Wikipedia's search capacity). I can change the singles to doubles if need be. Some guidance would be helpful. Jomeara421 (talk) 21:38, 6 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Both "also"s are redundant. "Other innovations in pronunciation, as well as changes in word structure and vocabulary, also contribute to differentiating Ottawa from other dialects of Ojibwe." -->"These and other innovations in pronunciation, and changes in word structure and vocabulary, have differentiated Ottawa from other dialects of Ojibwe." (I think it's a bit fussy here to use "contributed to">). More importantly, why not continue the opening theme of para 3 (grammar) with the grammatical stuff in para 4; then deal with pronunciation.
 * Wording changed, will see about organization of paragraphs 3-4. Jomeara421 (talk) 21:26, 6 June 2009 (UTC)


 * "Compared with" is preferred by many writers for contrasts rather than similarities, although "to" is often used. Are "flexible" or "supple" better than "free"?
 * 'to' > 'with'. Jomeara421 (talk) 21:26, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
 * 'free' is the normal term. 'Supple' would not sound right. Jomeara421 (talk) 21:26, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I changed 'free' to 'flexible' - will see how that reads. Jomeara421 (talk) 18:16, 7 June 2009 (UTC)


 * "indicating an 'in focus' noun phrase that is being emphasized, and "obviative", indicating an 'out of focus' noun phrase that is less prominent"—I doubt whether many linguists, let alone semi-experts, will know what you mean by "out of focus" noun phrases. Do you simply mean grammatically marked and unmarked nouns and noun phrases, such as in many languages (in different guises, of course).
 * I've experimented with a simplified wording. "Proximate/obviative" is hard to explain concisely - there is no directly comparable phenomenon in English. Jomeara421 (talk) 18:16, 7 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Unsure quotes are needed if you're linking a term; it's already highlighted by the blue. No big deal, though.
 * Agree, changed. Jomeara421 (talk) 21:26, 6 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Strange not to be told in the lead how many native and non-native speakers, and whether it's taught in schools. Critical information, yes? The 8,000 in the infobox doesn't distinguish between n and nn.
 * Speaker information is discussed in 'Classification' section. Numbers are unreliable (Canadian census data does not break out 'Ottawa' and there are no other sources of non-anecdotal information) so I am hesitant about putting a number in the lead. There is no information at all about non-native speakers. The most authoritative source on Ottawa (publications by Valentine) does not give speaker numbers. Jomeara421 (talk) 21:26, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Spot-checks after the lead:
 * "literally"—not a correct usage.
 * Removed. Jomeara421 (talk) 21:26, 6 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Probably a hyphen is better for -mo, etc., not an en dash. See WP:MOSDASH and see what you think.
 * Changed. A bot went through and made mass changes, hyphens were there originally. Jomeara421 (talk) 21:26, 6 June 2009 (UTC)


 * "Also" again idle; please audit throughout for "also". BTW, do you point out that Canada's capital comes from "speak a language"? Maybe, maybe not. I wonder who chose it.
 * 'Also' cleaned up throughout. Jomeara421 (talk) 21:26, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Name of capital likely from word odaawaa; I can put it in. Jomeara421 (talk) 21:26, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Done. Jomeara421 (talk) 02:29, 19 June 2009 (UTC)


 * "mutually intelligibility"—nope, "mutual ...".
 * Corrected. Jomeara421 (talk) 21:26, 6 June 2009 (UTC)


 * MoS: external puncuation to be true to the original source: "could be said to consist of several languages,"—please audit throughout.
 * Corrected. Jomeara421 (talk) 21:26, 6 June 2009 (UTC)


 * "It has been noted that, along with the Algonquin and Severn Ojibwe dialects, Ottawa "show[s] many distinct features, which suggest periods of relative"—That's PhD thesis lingo, and should be discouraged even there. Just make the statement and own it ("Along with ..."), since you provide the source at the end of the sentence.
 * Changed. Jomeara421 (talk) 21:26, 6 June 2009 (UTC)


 * "that make each of them it distinctive".
 * Changed. Jomeara421 (talk) 21:26, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

And much more. Can you find one or two people new to this text to copy-edit it? Many WPs are clearly skilled at and interested in foreign languages: you can tell by the boxes on their user pages—can you access categories of them and ask around? See also anthrop. people. Tony  (talk)  16:57, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Haven't had much success with that in the past. Jomeara421 (talk) 21:26, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Tip: search the edit histories of related FAs or articles you know to be in good shape. You can pick out who does the copy-editing. Make a list of them as valuable potential collaborators in the future. Ask the most likely ones now whether they can help. Post a note at whatever WikiProject is most appropriate. If no luck, ask me. Tony   (talk)  13:26, 11 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Comments - sources look okay, links checked out with the link checker tool. Ealdgyth - Talk 19:44, 6 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Comments from r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs
 * In the Classification section, you have "Mutual intelligibility is the criterion applied to distinguish languages from dialects; varieties of language that are mutually intelligible are classified as dialects, while varieties of speech that are not mutually intelligible are classified as separate languages.[5]" (sourced to Lyle Campbell's introductory text). Is this a bit too authoritatively-worded? I am not a typologist, but I'm pretty sure this is just a rule of thumb and is not universally agreed on within the field (because mutual intelligibility is not necessarily binary&mdash;ie, two languages might not be entirely mutually intelligible but not entirely unintelligible either; and because there are sometimes sociopolitical factors that also come into account&mdash;for example, German and Schwäbisch are, so I hear, not intelligible, but Schwäbisch is still considered a dialect; and, finally, because it doesn't always go both ways...there are cases reported where speakers of X can understand Y but speakers of Y can't understand X. Seems a little unfair for the poor speakers of Y, but apparently it happens). Anyway, what I'm trying to say is, this sentence seems to present an oversimplification, so maybe it can be reworded a bit to imply that this is just a rule of thumb, or to imply that mutual intelligibility is the commonly accepted criterion for these languages but it's not a universal problemsolver?
 * Same section, "The suggestion that Ojibwe "could be said to consist of several languages"[6] is consistent with the use of the term "language complex" to describe Ojibwe.[10]" Seems to be a logic problem here; usually in 'X is consistent with Y', Y should be the assumption, or whatever happened first. (i.e., "i put the egg in the microwave and it exploded; the explosion was consistent with my prediction that eggs in microwaves would explode"). Here, these things seem to be parallel: some typologist claim that Ojibwe is a group of several languages, and likewise some people refer to it as a "language complex"&mdash;they're not assumption and evidence, they're just two examples of the same thing. (In fact, the source for calling it "language complex" is more recent than the "said to consist of several languages" one.) I think a rewording is in order.
 * A couple books in your bibliography have "Canada" listed as the author, and the short form footnotes for them (currently notes 14-16) are like "Canada. 1980, p. 20". That just seems strange to me; my intuition with government sources like has always been not to provide an "author", but just use the title. So, the long citation would be something along the lines of "Linguistic and cultural affiliations of Canada Indian bands. Indian and Inuit Affairs Program (1980). Research Branch: Corporate Policy. Ottawa: Indian and Northern Affairs Canada", and the short-form one would be like "Linguistic and cultural affiliations, 1980, p. 20". I don't know if there is a specific guideline on this, it's just a thought.
 * More footnote issues: the ones I pointed out above, the Canada ones, use a period between the "author" and year. The rest seem to use commas (i.e.: "Bloomfield, Leonard, 1958, p. viii"). That should be standardized. Also, most of the footnotes use the author's full name (personally I would feel more comfortable if it were only last names, but if you're consistent I guess it should be fine), but there is at least one like "Rhodes and Todd, 1981, p. 54, Fig. 2". And it's not just a two-author thing, because some other notes with two authors still use full name: "Feest, Johanna and Christian Feest, 1978, p. 772". Anyway, that needs to be made consistent.
 * In Geographical distribution: "For other communities that have been identified as Ottawa, see Ottawa people: Known villages." There must be some way to pipe that to avoid the self-reference. I'm thinking something along the lines of " ", I dunno, something to that effect.
 * Same section, "Canadian census data does not identify Ottawa as a separate group." ... would "does not identify the Ottawa as a separate group" be better? To clarify that we are using the term to refer to the people, rather than the language.
 * " The relative decline in the vitality of the language is reflected in the observation that "Today too few children are learning Nishnaabemwin as their first language" Actually, the language's decline is reflected in the fact of few children learning, not in the observation of that fact. Could be reworded...although, to be honest, it seems awkward anyway to say that the decline is "reflected" in childrens' not learning it, since one could also argue that the decline is caused by that. Whether or not children are learning the language as L1 is, after all, one of the diagnostic criteria for whether or not a language is moribund (according to Grenoble & Waley 2006, I think, and probably tons of other books as well), so you could just as easily say the fact that children are no longer learn the language is reflected in how much the language has declined in vitality. Anyway, I think there needs to be a rewording to make these things more parallel, rather than suggesting any cause-and-effect relationship. It could be trimmed, too, since the sentence before it already mentions that it's not often being learned as L1.
 * In Population movements: "The non-Ottawa-speaking Ojibwes who moved to these areas shifted to speaking Ottawa, as did the Potawatomi migrants, with loanwords in Ottawa reflecting these influences." is also a bit awkward, since the first half is referring to the past and the second half is referring to now. A better rewording might be something along the lines of "...and Ottawa acquired Potawatomi loanwords that reflect these influences".
 * "two subdialects of Ottawa have been recognized, corresponding to the ancestry of significant increments of the populations in particular communities.[41] The subdialects correspond to differences in the way that the language is named." Confusing. First of all, the use of "correspond" twice is just a style issue; more importantly, though, you're saying it 'corresponds' to two different things, and the reader's first reaction may be "well, which is it?" I think the problem is just one of word choice. The connection between the subdialects and the 'ancestry' seems historical&mdash;the subdialects grew out of these different communities. The connection between the subdialects and the naming is current&mdash;it's how that historical stuff is reflected today in the people's endonym. So, I think it's just a matter of choosing a different word to express one of those two 'correspondances'. (And I would advise against using "reflected in" like I just did, because I already see that phrase popping up a lot in the article.)

r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 20:33, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Responses

No. 1. I've qualified the sentence on mutual intelligibility. One could write a book (or two) on m.i., but I'm not going there. Jomeara421 (talk) 02:29, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

No. 2. I've tightened up the 'language complex' prose. The main idea is that Ottawa could be considered either a dialect of Ojibwe or a separate language that is part of the Ojibwe language complex. Nobody's ever said which is right, so it's a tossup. Maybe they're both right. Jomeara421 (talk) 04:12, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

No. 3. I've changed references to government publications to an 'anonymous' style a la Chicago Manual of Style, with same for footnotes. Jomeara421 (talk) 23:36, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

No. 4. I've made the citation style consistent. Footnote citation style is consistent now as well ('Rhodes and Todd' was only stray, very observant). Jomeara421 (talk) 23:36, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

No. 5. I've reworked this sentence. Jomeara421 (talk) 23:59, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

No. 6. Changed. Jomeara421 (talk) 23:41, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

No. 7. Surgery on sentences about decline of Ottawa. Jomeara421 (talk) 01:17, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

No. 8. I've broken the sentence in two, should be better. Jomeara421 (talk) 00:32, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
 * That's an improvement. I further reworded it a bit to "Many Potawatomi and Ojibwe loanwords in Ottawa are a result of the influence of the incoming groups." Other possibilities, with slightly different nuances, are
 * "The large number of Potawatomi and Ojibwe loanwords in Ottawa is a result of the influence of the incoming groups."
 * "One result of such migrations was a large number of Potawatomi and Ojibwe loanwords in Ottawa"
 * "As a result of these migrations, Ottawa came to include many Potawatomi and Ojibwe loanwords"
 * I'll leave it up to you which rewording is most faithful to the source. r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 09:07, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
 * The 'Many ...' version is potentially ambiguous since it can be read to infer that there could be other sources of Potawatomi and Ojibwe loanwords. The source doesn't quantify the amount of borrowing, so prefer: "As a result of the migrations, Ottawa came to include many Potawatomi and Ojibwe loanwords." Including 'many' would not be consistent with the source and would be a fudge in any event. Jomeara421 (talk) 11:20, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
 * That sounds good to me. I see you've made the change, so I can strike #8. r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 17:15, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

No. 9. I've combined and reorganized the offending sentences - should be clearer now. Jomeara421 (talk) 00:53, 13 June 2009 (UTC)


 * All those changes look good, and I've striken those points. I've still only been through the first bit of the article, so hopefully tomorrow or Sunday I can do the rest and I'll leave further comments below here. r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 00:07, 13 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Ok, just about everything above has been addressed. I'm still not 100% happy with the rewording of the bit about subdialects (#9) but it's not really ambiguous anymore, and is not an urgent issue; I can keep brainstorming for rewordings. Anyway, I'm collapsing the above points, and will continue to add further stuff below (once the stuff below is resolved, I'll collapse it as well). r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 02:44, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 15:34, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Further comments from r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs
 * 1) In the Phonology section, "Words are written in the Modern orthography described below, with phonetic transcriptions in brackets using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) as needed.[46]" is a bit confusing. At first I thought it was talking about the status of the language itself (ie, "nowadays everyone writes in Mod. Orth."), but once I got to the end of the sentence I realized you were just explaining what orthography you chose for the article. Could that be made a bit clearer? Also, what is the reference at the end of the sentence for?
 * 2) Same issue with the first sentence in the Consonants subsection.
 * 3) The description of fortis and lenis consonants might be confusing to lay readers. I can understand it because I have enough background to know that all the things you describe (lengthening, aspiration, etc., as opposed to voicing, alternations, etc.) are associated with stronger or weaker consonants/positions, so I can understand what the underlying difference between fortis and lenis is...for a reader without a linguistics background, though, I think this would come off as a random list of features. Perhaps in the first place you mention fortis and lenis (right under the consonant chart) you could add a brief sentence explaining the underlying difference (strong vs. weak)?
 * 4) Section on consonant labialization: I can't really see the dot in ɡ̣taaji. Not sure if there's anything that can be done about that, though.
 * 5) Why are f, r, l not included in the consonant chart, or in the list of letters used in the Modern Orthography section (ok, I understand the second part...because they're never used to write Ottawa words)?
 * 6) It seems like the Morphology section would be more properly titled "Derivational morphology". Inflectional morphology (verb inflections, etc.) seems to be covered in the intro of the Grammar section; the Morphology section appears to focus on derivational morphemes and compounding. On the other hand, "Morphology" is a nice, clean section header...maybe some of the discussion of inflectional morphology could be moved down so it comes under this instead? (And, if you want, you could also divide it into sub-sub-sections, "Inflectional" and "Derivational", or what-have-you.)
 * 7) In the section on verb orders and yes-no questions vs. content questions... could "content question" be linked to wh-question rather than to Question?
 * 8) Under Writing System... "interest in standardization has increased, with the publication of a widely used dictionary and reference grammar providing models for spelling conventions." : Some dates, even general estimates, would be useful. Increased since when (i.e., as compared to when), and as of when? Is there still increased interest today?
 * 9) "A study of indigenous writings in Ottawa produced between 1823 and 1910"....  what did this study find? Was it looking at the different orthographies used during this period?
 * 10) Is "Double vowel system" also written that way, without hyphens, in your sources? I was tempted to stick a hyphen in there, but if that's it's official name then I guess it's ok.
 * 11) Does Ottawa have a velar nasal ([ŋ])? The consonant chart near the beginning of the article does not include one, but you give an example of one in the explanation of apostrophes in the Modern orthography.
 * 12) As for the History section...I think this may have come up during the GA review as well, but i still feel that a lot of this detail (especially in the "Development of Ojibwe dialects") is not really about Ottawa, and not necessary for most readers. Wouldn't it be enough to just mention that Ottawa is one of the dialects that split off of Ojibwe due to these various historical changes, and leave off the long list of all the Ojibwe dialects that have been identified? To be honest, I think the whole History section could be shortened, and may not even need subsections; it could probably just be a paragraph or two with  links.
 * 13) In the Sample Text section, "The texts that Medler dictated were originally published in a linguistically-oriented transcription using phonetic symbols, and have been republished in the modern orthography, with analysis." ... I'm not sure what you mean by "republished", do you mean they were published again (in a book or something) or that when you wrote the text in this article you re-wrote it in modern orthography on your own? Also, I assume "with analysis" should be removed, now that the analysis has been spun out into a sub-article.
 * 14) A more general note...judging by this article, it seems that Valentine's work is one of the most widely-used, seminal references on Ottawa, yet in the article itself his name is never mentioned. If he has had such a huge influence on Ottawa language studies, maybe it would be good to mention him somewhere...I don't know where it would fit, but a small section or paragraph somewhere mentioning noted Ottawa scholars such as Valentine and Andrew Blackbird.
 * 15) In the References section, the title of Valentine's book is given as Nishnaabemwin Reference Grammar (note the missing "o"). Is this a typo, or a real alternate spelling?

Responses

Nos 1, 2. I have clarified both sentences. Jomeara421 (talk) 04:28, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

No. 3. I have tried some wording changes. The problem is that 'fortis' and 'lenis' are just cover terms for an aggregation of phonetic features, and there is no real explanatory force to the terms; 'strong' and 'weak' are just equivalent terms and have no explanatory power. The Wikipedia article notes this problem. 'Tense' and 'lax' are similarly problematic cover terms, they don't really mean anything and don't correlate with any non-adhocly (?) determined phonetic features. Jomeara421 (talk) 01:55, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Hm...I guess just mentioning "strong" and "weak" will do, then. We can't expect lay readers to understand everything, no matter how much we water things down, so that should be a decent compromise...it's enough for people to get the general idea (more clearly than they would with Latin terms) and still keep it concise. <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 02:37, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

No. 4. The subscript dot shows up clearly in print, but is not great onscreen. As you suggest that's likely as good as it gets. Jomeara421 (talk) 00:56, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Ok, no worries. I think readers will be able to figure it out. <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 03:51, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

No. 5. f, l, r only occur in loanwords so have a somewhat different status than the other sounds. Valentine excludes them from his consonant chart, so I have followed that. But on the other hand words containing these sounds are incorporated into Ottawa, so these sounds are part of the Ottawa phonological inventory. Sometime borrowed sounds are included in a consonant chart, but put in parentheses. So it's a tossup. Jomeara421 (talk) 04:01, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Yeah...I was thinking about word-initial [ʒ] in English, which only occurs in like French 'loanwords' and stuff (i.e., "genre"), but English is probably not a good comparison, since it has loanwords that are so well-assimilated by now. Maybe you could put them in the chart, but in parentheses and with an asterisk that leads down to the sentence mentioning how they only occur in loanwords? <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 04:28, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I've put f, r, l in the consonant table. Jomeara421 (talk) 01:38, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

No. 6. I have been following the outline of the WikiProject Languages/Template, which has 'Grammar' as a Level 2 heading with 'Morphology' and 'Syntax' as Level 3 headings underneath. The whole section is intended to be a summary (so not too detailed), with a separate article for 'Ottawa morphology' and (when I get to it) 'Ottawa syntax'. I have put the inflectional morphology material underneath the 'Morphology' heading, which of course is where it belongs. Jomeara421 (talk) 01:25, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

No. 7. "Wh question" redirects to Wh-movement so I linked to that. Jomeara421 (talk) 00:56, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Oh, man, well that's a pain...I don't know whose great idea it was to make wh-questions a disambiguation page, which doesn't even link to any article about wh-questions. I think wh-movement is not really the same thing as the question itself (and certainly not what people are looking for if they click a link that appears to be "content question"), so maybe it would be better to keep the link you had before, or redlink it. <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 02:37, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I've put it back to the original link. The Wh-movement article is not so bad, and one could argue that Ottawa wh-questions have movement at some fairly abstract level. It might be better if the article were called Wh-phenomena, but that's not my area. Jomeara421 (talk) 04:13, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Yeah...wh-questions and wh-movement are completely different phenomena (which just so happen to co-occur in English), and unfortunately Wikipedia does not appear to have any decent treatment of wh-questions at the moment. But just for an example, Mandarin Chinese has wh-questions (as far as I know, they have to be universal...I couldn't imagine a language without them) but no wh-movement...their equivalent to English "what did you buy?" is "you bought what?" <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 04:28, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I've done some thinking, and I don't think Question is the right place to link. It's not about content questions, it's just about general mechanisms for marking interrogative mood (and, on a side note, much of it is unreferenced and dubious). I think the best solution is to either a) link to wh-question, even though it's only a disambiguation page, and just hope that someone will do the cleanup work there eventually (specifically, turn it into a real article and just leave some hatnotes at the top); or b) leave it unlinked (after all, I think the meaning of "content question" should be relatively clear if "yes-no question" was just mentioned before it). <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 04:44, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Links to disambiguation pages are frowned upon at FAC, so I'll just delink it. Jomeara421 (talk) 12:43, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

No. 8. There is nothing for which there is a real source. I have modified the sentence by adding the dates of publications of Rhodes' Ottawa dictionary and Valentine's Ott. grammar. The former in particular provides a strong model for spelling since dictionaries of course need to apply spelling conventions for consistency. I don't know if that is enough, but I don't have any other published references. Jomeara421 (talk) 04:34, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I've also added a reference for a 1996 Ojibwe orthography standardization conference. Jomeara421 (talk) 01:13, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

No. 9. I have written the sentence to make it clearer that the reference is to an inventory of the documents in questions, not any partiular analysis of them. Jomeara421 (talk) 02:51, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

No. 10. I've added a reference that cites it as "Double Vowel" (upper case both words, no hyphen), but have also seen other capitalization choices although never with a hyphen. The term is part of the folklore of Ojibwe linguistics and doesn't actually appear in print that often. Jomeara421 (talk) 01:13, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

No. 11. The velar nasal is a predictable allophone of /n/ before /g/ (this would be covered in the Ottawa phonology if I had got that far - I will some day). I have added some text to clarify the source of the velar nasal.
 * So does orthographic ng correspond to [ŋ], or to [ŋg]? I guess that's what I'm not clear about...whether the [g] is preserved after the [n] assimilates. I had a good idea for rewording that bit in the article (basically, just moving the explanation of assimilation into a footnote), but I wanted to check about this first. <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 04:23, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Orthographic ng is always [ŋ] word-finally. Jomeara421 (talk) 10:23, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

No. 12. I have been following the WikiProject Languages/Template more or less closely; it includes a 'History' section, so I thought I'd put one in. The linguistic history of a dialect is of course a list of the changes that differentiate one dialect from another. Since the article (and its subarticles) enumerates these differences throughout it is hard to have a useful 'History' section. So I've trimmed this section quite a bit. The other articles on Ojibwe are useful enough to provide some of the overall historical context so that it doesn't need to be included here. Jomeara421 (talk) 02:32, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

No. 13. I have added a reference and revised the sentence to make it reflect the meaning: the stories were originally published in Bloomfield 1958, and then retranscribed and analysed in Valentine 1998. Jomeara421 (talk) 04:43, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

No. 14. I've added a brief section "History of scholarship" after the lead. Thanks to the work of Bloomfield, Rhodes and Valentine Ottawa is one of the better described North American indigenous languages. If there's a better place to put this section, feel free to do so. Jomeara421 (talk) 03:34, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * It looks good to me. <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 03:50, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

No. 15. Nishnaabemwin is the syncopated version of Anishinaabemowin (i.e. with metrically weak short vowels deleted). That is the correct spelling and pronunciation in Ottawa. Jomeara421 (talk) 00:42, 17 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Oppose, 1a. It's not far off the mark, but it needs an independent editor to go through and clean up such issues as those I found from a representative section, Writing system:
 * "Written representation of Ottawa was introduced by Europeans, with indigenous literacy occurring sporadically through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries." The vague "with" connector leaves us guessing at the relationship between these two clauses.
 * "Ottawa and other dialects of Ojibwe have been written since the seventeenth century by native speakers of English, French, and other languages, by explorers, traders, missionaries, linguists, and others." Ungrammatical.
 * "Ottawa has been written in ways that ultimately derive from European alphabetic writing systems" Quite clumsy.. the "ways" derive from the "writing systems"? "has been written in ways" can certainly be said more elegantly.
 * "writing system used to write"
 * "a history of his people in English, with an appended grammatical description of Ottawa and the closely related Chippewa (Southwestern Ojibwe) dialect, including translations of short religious texts." The separate "with" and "including" clauses leave doubt as to what contains what. Are the translations within the grammar?
 * Do you write in an orthography or using an orthography? We can't decide.
 * "Documents written in Ottawa ... includes"
 * -- Laser brain  (talk)  20:07, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Responses

No. 1. Reworded. Jomeara421 (talk) 00:44, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

No. 2. Material removed, since it repeats the content of another sentence. Jomeara421 (talk) 00:44, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

No. 3. Reworded. Jomeara421 (talk) 00:44, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

No. 4. Fixed. Jomeara421 (talk) 00:44, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

No. 5. Reworded. Jomeara421 (talk) 00:44, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

No. 6. 'In' versus 'using' an orthography. It's close but changed to 'using' throughout. Jomeara421 (talk) 00:44, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

No. 7. Fixed. Jomeara421 (talk) 00:44, 20 June 2009 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.