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Five levels of tone
editThere is often confusion about the claim that Bench has five tones and how unusual this is. Other languages may have nore tones, but by building contours out of different levels. That is, with a two tone system, we can have high, low, high-low (falling), and low-high (rising). What makes Bench so unusual is that it has five distinct levels: extra low, low, medium, high, extra-high. In addition, it has a falling tone. That makes a total of six tones, but it still has only five levels of tone. (See Wedekind's tone articles cited in the Wikipedia article.)
I reverted an edit that said that five tones is not so unusual. My assumption was that the editor did not understand the distinction I was making between levels of tones and distinctive tones. If my revert of the edit was incorrect, I will be happy to be corrected. Pete unseth (talk) 13:05, 2 February 2009 (UTC)
- I agree with Kwamis edit which clarified that five distinctive tone levels are the notable feature of Bench. Six tonemes as such is not a rare thing at all, considering the commonness of contour tones. On the other hand, those five tone levels are indeed extremely rare - so far it has only been identified four or five times world wide, and only twice in Africa - I think this is noteworthy, and should be stated as such. So a wording such as "Bench has five distinctive tone levels, which is the highest number of tone levels identified so far within the worlds languages. Only a handful of languages world wide, two of them in Africa, have been proven to have five tone levels." Landroving Linguist (talk) 16:29, 2 February 2009 (UTC)
Audio Bible
editA free audio book version of the complete New Testament in the Bench language is available at the Faith Comes By Hearing website ("Free Audio Bibles" tab, at the bottom of the page). Is there a legit way to add this to the article? I cringe at it being received as so much spam, but it would allow readers to hear a sample of this language, which appears difficult to come by on the Web. 68.118.156.71 (talk) 18:25, 9 March 2011 (UTC)
small errors and omissions i don't have the information to fix
editEverything i know about Bench language(s) comes from this article and bench (disambiguation). Struck formerly true, still almost true statement.[1] Still have unanswered questions.
Who/What is Blench? The word appears only once in the article without any explanation of why the source is worth considering, and the word looks distressingly distractingly like a typo of Bench, which would severely alter the meaning of the sentence.
Please identify Blench and Rapold before citing them as sources. The References section hints at why we should pay attention to Rapold, but the first mention of Rapold in the actual article should tell us that. i have made an attempt to improve that sentence.
Are Bench-non, Bench Non, Benchnon, Bencnon, Benč non, and Benc Non (Benesho) all the same thing?[2] If not, please clarify what each means. (The comparison that comes to mind is a girl named Brittany, who might speak British [English] to a Briton in Britain without being British.)
Are Bench-non, Bench Non, Benchnon, Bencnon, Benč non, and Benc Non (Benesho) all acceptable spellings/capitalizations? If not, which spelling(s) should we fix in the article? Should Bencnon be bold instead of italicized in the first sentence of the article? Should any of them accompany the [Bench language] on bench (disambiguation)?
Are Bench-non, Bench Non, Benchnon, Bencnon, Benč non, or Benc Non (Benesho) the same thing as Bench (or Bench’, with an apostrophe-like symbol, as seen in the References section)? or are they a type of Bench (or several types of Bench), like Shenon or Mernon?
Are Mernon, Mer, and Mieru all the same? What do the different names mean?[3]
Are Shenon, She, and Kaba all the same? What do the different names mean?[4] (For comparison, are Angel, Angelique, and Angelica three different people, or different nicknames for one person? or one person, described with a French adjective, at a certain location?)
Who here speaks Dutch?[5] bedankt !
- ^ Is <https://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/bdescr.cgi?root=new100&morpho=0&basename=new100%5Como%5Cggm> a reliable source? "Bench", or "Bench-non" (non = 'mouth, language'), is the name of a dialect (spoken by about 200,000 people) of the language formerly called "Gimira" that also includes the closely related She (She-non) and Mer (Mer-non) dialects.
- ^ ibid.
- ^ ibid.
- ^ ibid.
- ^ Rapold, Christian. 2006. Towards a Grammar of Benchnon. Dissertation, Leiden University. (University webpage has a link to download a PDF of a Dutch summary.) <https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/research/research-output/humanities/towards-a-grammar-of-benchnon> (i capitalized the g in "Towards a grammar of Benchnon" to match Leiden University's webpage. i changed "PhD thesis" to "Dissertation" to match Leiden University's webpage, and because Wikipedia's dissertation article says there's a difference between a dissertation and a thesis, which varies based on context. i changed "University of Leiden" because Leiden University's webpage uses "Leiden University". i admit i don't know if these are actually two entities with the same/similar name, like The Beast Master and its adaptation The Beastmaster or the University of Michigan and Michigan State University, so revert my edits as appropriate.)
96.244.220.178 (talk) 08:06, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
- Blench is Roger Blench, one of the leading experts on classification of African languages. In his Wikipedia article you'll find a link to his web-page, with a full list of publications. Landroving Linguist (talk) 17:01, 11 November 2020 (UTC)
NPMk?
editThe article has several mysterious abbreviations that require clarification.
66.97.20.206 (talk) 19:43, 31 October 2021 (UTC)