Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Linguistics/Archive 22

Long-term OR abuser, now inactive
Thanks go to for this removal of an entirely unsourced OR paragraph at English phrasal verbs. Unfortunately, that paragraph survived ten years in the article, added in 2012 by, now inactive. Glancing at their contrib history, they were a heavy contributor to linguistics-related articles, and I notice an unusual proportion of their edits being reverted by other editors, some fat cuts and restores, and where content is added, it's either unsourced (diff1, diff2) or appears to have a citation or two, but they often don't back the preceding article content, instead, they are more of a forward-looking, "see-also"-style explanatory note within &lt;ref> tags, of the "See Foo & Bar (2000) for a debate" type thing. There are a lot of big cuts of 5, 10, or 20kb of content, indicating a bold style, but that bothers me less, as at least they don't introduce OR content (well, one can't be sure without examining the diff, but probably not) and mostly they are not reverted.

The 2012 OR paragraph at English phrasal verbs is the first time I've encountered Tjo3ya, so I don't really know how much damage they may have done. I wonder if anyone who enjoys gnoming articles for old OR content would like to try and tackle this, or at least, provide a better idea of the scope of the problem? I notice that appears to have tangled with them in April 2021 at Predicate (grammar), and had edits at half a dozen other linguistics articles around the same time, so perhaps they will recollect those edits and be able to give their impressions about this editor, in order to to better scope the extent of the problem, if indeed there is a problem. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 22:45, 14 December 2023 (UTC)


 * The problem is generally WP:NPOV more than WP:OR. Their contributions often argued in Wikivoice for their idiosyncratic version of dependency grammar, and even their less argumentative contributions still give undue weight. I removed some blatant instances, as did, but there's still a lot out there. This isn't trivial to fix, since this editor was the main person working on syntax articles for quite a while, and their problematic contributions are often intertwined with good ones. I'll do what I can when I have time, but unfortunately their battleground behavior contributed to an unwelcoming environment for many of the people best positioned to fix it. Botterweg14  (talk)  03:51, 15 December 2023 (UTC)
 * To add to this: their idiosyncratic version of dependency grammar is based on the notion of a catena, so I used Special:WhatLinksHere/Catena_(linguistics) a couple of times. The trouble was that, when edited to give a neutral point of view on catenas, the passages generally looked OK to me, but gave undue weight to this theory in the context of the article. So the best solution (I thought, not being very familiar with wiki guidelines) would be not so much to cut down on the catena content but to add content about other approaches to make articles more representative. Unfortunately this would take much more work than simply cutting down on catena content, and should also be done with someone with much more knowledge of syntax than myself. Kaĉjo (talk) 16:01, 15 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Perhaps some of this text can be moved to catena, since it wouldn't be undue weight in that context. Botterweg14  (talk)  04:48, 16 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Pinging and, since their syntax expertise goes far beyond mine.  Botterweg14  (talk)  03:59, 15 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Your diagnosis of the effects of Tjo3ya's edits is exactly right: a very large weighting of a very marginal (in the literature) theory using the catena, and a driving away of editors who didn't want to engage in endless small skirmishes over how to make the catena theory appropriately cited, and not give it undue weight. It was exhausting, and more than one of us simply decided to cut back on editing wikipedia. Really, as you say, all the syntax articles need a pretty thorough eye to rebalancing. Perhaps once I retire! Mundart (talk) 16:37, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

Difrasismo and Dvandva
There's a discussion regarding a merge between Difrasismo and Dvandva at Talk:Difrasismo that could do with some input (there). The key current query is whether there is a suitable over-arching article into which both could be merged, but please also consider the reasonableness of the primary proposal. Klbrain (talk) 18:45, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Komi languages
According to Oxford Guide to the Uralic Languages (2022), there is a single Komi language, for which two literary languages, Komi-Permyak and Komi-Zyryan were created. Neither of these languages seems to be primary one in any sense and deserve the designation as 'the Komi language', but for some reason Komi-Zyryan now holds that title. Also, Komi-Permyak is under a name Permyak, contrary to the reliable sources. I am not familiar with linguistics articles in Wikipedia, so I am asking for opinions on what should be done.

Should we move Permyak > Komi-Permyak, Komi>Komi-Zyryan and make Komi language into a disambiguation or a short article explaining the variants and the historical reason for their existence? This would probably affect many links. Jähmefyysikko (talk) 23:17, 29 December 2023 (UTC)


 * I expect the move to Komi-Permyak to be the least controversial step so I opened a discussion about it at Talk:Permyak language. Jähmefyysikko (talk) 14:01, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

Discussion at Talk:Voiced palatal approximant § Do not undo the alveolo-palatal approximant
You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Voiced palatal approximant § Do not undo the alveolo-palatal approximant. Nardog (talk) 15:54, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

Linguistic input could be useful in a WP:V wording matter
Wikipedia talk:Verifiability has stalled out, with stonewalling by a single party, who claims that the syntactic problems in the policy material's opening sentence, which I've outlined in considerable detail, are just "[my] opinion" and that doing anything about them is "not needed" and is "WP:CREEP". I think these grammatical-meaning and parseability issues are objectively factual and not a matter of subjective opinion, but that editor will not engage on the matter further, there or in user talk, where I demonstrated that the revision actually complies with is not against the goals of the CREEP essay.

The discussion has too few active participants (despite "advertising" the thread to WP:VPPOL) to move past this issue. Either I'm correct that the sentence is syntactically faulty or I am not, and additional voices should get us past this blockage one way or the other. If I'm simply wrong about the problems I see in the original wording, then feel free to say so.

It's basically come down to a choice between the versions in the last two subthreads there (unless someone wants to propose a new revision); no real need to pore over the entire revision process. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:26, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

Query about IPA transcription of the latin word "tricolor"
I was reading the article Rubus tricolor and thought the IPA transcription was interesting: /ˈruːbəs ˈtraɪkʌlər/

I am no expert, but it was my understanding that the difference between the vowel sounds ʌ and ə was simply that the former is under stress, and the latter is not under stress. But in this word, the main stress falls on the first syllable, meaning that the second syllable must be unstressed (unless there is secondary stress?). Therefore, we should have both unstressed syllables (i.e., second and third syllables) rendered as schwa, correct? Anyway, I am not sure if it is correct, or if my previous understanding was not accurate. Many thanks, Moribundum (talk) 17:51, 8 January 2024 (UTC)


 * The second syllable has a subordinated stress like the second syllable of "homemaker" etc. I don't think the second and third syllables have the same degree of stress in the most usual pronunciation of the word... AnonMoos (talk) 18:09, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

Unsourced edits
Someone might want to review the edits from 90.241.160.140 and 84.68.219.93. The editor has changed many articles without any sourcing, mostly related to letters and alphabets (especially Armenian, Cyrillic, Glagolitic, and IPA ones), and the edit summaries range from vague to patent nonsense. Daniel Quinlan (talk) 21:24, 8 January 2024 (UTC)
 * I would block if they don't heed the warning to start sourcing. Just spot checking a few, they seem more in the realm of theories or original research. For example, here the editor adds some dubious origins of the grapheme ⟨X⟩ to the article on its descendant ⟨X̂⟩ but that same claim was removed from ⟨X⟩ a few weeks before for failing verification. Here they add some sister graphemes to ⟨U⟩, including ⟨उ⟩ which has a completely separate history from the Latin ⟨U⟩ and only shares a name. The 84... IP is slightly better in the sense that this edit at least is partially supported by the article text but we also get edits like this where the summary is just a skibidi toilet reference and the edit is unsourced. I'll probably just go through and revert them in bulk when I have some spare time since I don't have faith these are going to stand up to scrutiny if we took the time to research them (and the editor[s] should really be providing that if it's not in the text). — Wug·a·po·des 04:00, 9 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Based on those examples and the other reverts, it's likely that the best course of action is to undo every one of these edits, but we could wait another day to see if anyone here can make sense of some of them. I wouldn't object to undoing them now, though. Daniel Quinlan (talk) 06:36, 9 January 2024 (UTC)
 * I have undone most using this edit note: rv dubious edits by user:90.241.160.140 per Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Linguistics and left a note at their talk page inviting them to explain why they consider their edits to have been valid. The facetious tone of many of their edit notes do not inspire confidence. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 14:05, 9 January 2024 (UTC)
 * All my edits are constructive, I simply just ran out of ideas for edit summaries and went for silly things I’m sorry. 90.241.160.140 (talk) 16:13, 9 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Which, apart from showing your immaturity, doesn't respond to 's demand that you produce evidence to support your changes. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 23:23, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

90.241.160.140 is now reverting my reversions. I have no inclination to get bogged down in an edit war so if anybody cares about these topics, they will need to open a WP:ANI report and redo the reversions. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 23:23, 9 January 2024 (UTC)
 * I blocked them from article space for a week which prevents further problems but allows them to still discuss the changes. They were warned twice (three times if you count me saying above that I'd block them) and clearly knew there was an ongoing discussion, but they kept going. I don't see the need for ANI when it's that clear cut. If they want to discuss, they can do so here or make edit requests. — Wug·a·po·des 02:39, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
 * The IP address has resumed adding unsourced changes, coupled with inappropriate edit summaries, upon the release of their block. I've filed a report and am working on reverting their edits. Panian513 16:04, 17 January 2024 (UTC)