Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2019 December 9

= December 9 =

Généalogies Commentées des Arii des Îles de la Société
Trying to understand this French source. The question I am trying to solve is if "Tefa'aora a Mai" mentioned in the book is the same person as Tefa'aora (pictured here with Mai; File:Chefs de l'Isle Borabora. (Isles de la Société) 1. Maï 2. Téffaaora (cropped).jpg). What I have gotten is that Mai III is the man pictured in the lithograph but not sure if Tefa'aora (Mai's son-in-law) is the same person as the rival/co-ruler of Mai pictured in the lithograph or a relative. Can someone skim it and help me find out more information for Template:Bora Bora family tree?

KAVEBEAR (talk) 06:47, 9 December 2019 (UTC)


 * The correct link is this. Page 66 says Mai III ("the great") was both father-in-law and co-ruler with (prince of Tiipoto, p. 124) Tehuiarii a Teihotu i Marotetini alias Tefaaora a Mai (p. 125: son of Teihotu-opuhauiui i Marotetini alias Tetahio Area, married to Ahu'ura daughter of king Mai - see ch. XI, p. 61). But p. 78 also mentions Tehapai Tehuiarii Tefaaora a Mai alias Maheanu'u a Mai, married to Terii-tau-mai-te-ra'i Maheanu'u i Marotetini Tepa'u a Tati (confirmed on p. 127), who was a protestant pastor, grandson of king Mai and son of aforementioned prince Tefaaora. (p.119) Hence the possible confusion, but the short answer is yes ;-) Wakari07 (talk) 21:03, 10 December 2019 (UTC)

Standard measures of dialect differentiation?
The question above about an English variety diverged into a discussion about whether accents are disappearing or getting stronger, or neither. This got me to wonder if any linguists have attempted to establish a standardized measurement system for dialectal variation? Given the large individual person's variations within the same dialect, it might be futile. What I mean is a not necessarily comparing between the various dialects of one language, that could be very hard (how do you decide if the glottal stop is a more or less important variation than "pop vs. soda"), although it would be interesting too, but since we have voice recordings dating well over 100 years, maybe someone tried doing some measurements on the same dialect, over time? Looking for references only, not opinions --Lgriot (talk) 13:19, 9 December 2019 (UTC)


 * Between different languages, commonly-used methods are tests of mutual intelligibility and lexicostatistics (see linguistic distance), but those wouldn't be so useful for closely-similar dialects. Back in the 1980s, when there was a mini-panic about whether black and white accents of American English were diverging (see New York Times), one technique which was used was to numerically compare vowel formants of selected vowels, both between dialects and between contemporary speech and old recordings. AnonMoos (talk) 14:38, 9 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Interesting, thanks. I can see how doing computer comparisons of digitized recorded vowel sounds would give some objective indication. I guess the same could be done on consonants, or one could count how many times "th" is pronounced identically to "d" etc. At least for one speaker vs another speaker. Then once refined, this methods could be expanded for sets of speakers (but introducing subjective grouping). Prosody could be harder. Vocabulary would hit the | what is a word problem. The instances of known divergent grammatical structures like "He be" could also be counted. Any linguist ever tried to combine these into a comprehensive measure? --Lgriot (talk) 20:59, 9 December 2019 (UTC)