Talk:Chiwere language

Untitled

I might come back later and do more with the grammar of the language, but for now the link at the bottom will have to suffice.5th Angel 00:03, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm a man of my word. 5th Angel (talk) 00:06, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

Phonology stuff

First off, thank you Thetabs for adding all the phonology info to the article! I redid the table so that it uses the IPA rather than Americanist symbols; ideally there should be, I think, another section on the various orthographies used, which could include the Americanist system, the system used in GoodTracks' works, etc. In the new table I also changed the phonemic analysis a little to accord with what seems to be the more common modern interpretation, as exemplified in the Handbook of North American Indians article I cited. That article doesn't mention a glottalized/ejective /j/ as a separate phoneme, so I'm not sure what the status of that is.

As I see it, other remaining tasks include discussing the vowels (the HNAI article gives the inventory as /a e i o u ã ĩ ũ/ + distinctive length and stress). Plus of course the morphosyntactic stuff.

I had one question/concern, which is that some of the new material looks like original research--that is, rather than reporting the analysis contained in secondary sources like Whitman's grammatical sketch, there's a lot that reads as though it is an attempt to personally perform analysis on the primary data contained in Whitman's sketch. For example, take the paragraph: "The palatal nasal [ ñ ], on the other hand, seems to appear in a particular fashion. This pattern shows that the palatal nasal appears in the environment before unrounded vowels, as in ñíta épuxe ('driftwood') and ñikúwadhe ('assistant'). Assuming this analysis is accurate, this reveals a complementary distribution between the dental nasal [ n ] and the palatal nasal [ ñ ]. This could be fashioned into a rule by saying that dentals become palatals before unrounded vowels."

So, I'd like some clarification on whether this is original research by Thetabs, or an analysis already contained in Whitman's or GoodTracks' works? If the former, it's unfortunately not appropriate for a Wikipedia article, but perhaps some other secondary sources could be used to include the same basic information. In either case, thanks again to Thetabs for your recent good work on the article! --Miskwito (talk) 21:27, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

After waiting a while and getting no reply to my specific questions here--and after checking Whitman's original paper and confirming that this material is indeed original research and is not commented on in the source--I've removed the content in question from the article. If reliable secondary sources can be provided for it, it can be added back in, but original research is not permitted on Wikipedia. [Note that I have also had a conversation with the user who added the material on her talk page, User talk:Thetabs] --Miskwito (talk) 20:23, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

I removed it again when you (Thetabs) re-added it, because you haven't given any indication that this is not original research (and it's certainly not in Whitman, which I've looked at). If you can give some reliable sources (see here and here for an explanation) in which these observations on Chiwere nasals are stated, then they can certainly be added back to the article; but if they're your own conclusions drawn from the data in Whitman and in GoodTracks' dictionary, then it can't be included. Also, since Wikipedia works by consensus, please discuss some of these issues, so we can try to come to some sort of agreement--don't just ignore my posts here and on your user talkpage and add the material back without discussion (and please use edit summaries when making substantive edits, so that other users can have an idea of what you're doing without having to study the page history). Thanks, --Miskwito (talk) 02:36, 8 November 2011 (UTC)