Talk:N'Ko script

Split or merge

To Michael Everson aka Evertype

This isn't news to anyone. -- Evertype·✆ 17:44, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

If my mother would read the text, I guarantee it would be. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 12:54, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

WP has articles on languages and articles on writing systems. N'Ko alphabet is the article for the writing system. Writing systems and languages are distinct. Compare Latin and Latin alphabet. Stop merging and stop making wrong links in related WP articles. [1] , [2] Tobias Conradi (Talk) 13:31, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Mr Conradi, I have asked you repeatedly not to vandalize the article. You split a short article into two articles without comment. I protested that this is the wrong thing to do for a short article like this. I protested on the Talk Page and requested that you obtain the consensus of other editors before making the split. You have repeatedly ignored this. I do not think you have any particular expertise in N'Ko. I do. Your analogy with Latin and Latin alphabet is false. Both of those articles are long and it would be confusing to users if they were merged. You tell me to stop merging but it is you who started this war, by your unwelcome and unnecessary splitting. -- Evertype·✆ 17:44, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I do not think you have any particular expertise in N'Ko. - which does not stop me from knowing that alphabets and languages are two things. And that in WP we have allways (?) articles for scripts and for a languages. But we tend not to have articles like you suggest N'Ko (script and language). I simply edited in that direction. That you perceive this as starting a war may be true, but has nothing to do with my edit intentions. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 18:12, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

There are many short articles which deal with both language and script. There was no reason to split N'Ko into two articles. You did not ask anyone. When it was disputed (which it is), you simply charged ahead and started trying to show what a jerk I was for disagreeing with you. This is not pleasant. I have had no option but to put this up for AfD. I look forward to improving a single N'Ko article, and do not understand why you should find that objectionable. The split, however, makes it more difficult to deal with N'Ko in a reasonable manner. -- Evertype·✆ 18:19, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I look forward to see more language related stuff at all. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 18:54, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Hi Evertype :)

I was looking for info on N'Ko and I was surprised to see that this is one article.

So I want to carefully revive the twelve-years old discussion about splitting. It kind of makes sense to me to have separate articles about the language and the script, but maybe I am missing something.

Other than the current article length, is there a reason to have both topics in one article here? --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 11:00, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

The information on the N'Ko literary language would be a stub. I don't have the energy for this battle one way or another. In fact my participation on the Wikipedia has waned hugely because of the bias towards deletionism on the one hand and anti-expertism on the other. -- Evertype·✆ 22:40, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

I've split it off again into N'Ko language. Even though it's a stub, it's confusing to have the language as a subsection of the script, especially as it's not the only language to use the script. The script exists outside of the language and the language outside of the script. Hopefully both articles will be expanded in future. —Pengo 08:06, 1 December 2018 (UTC)

I enhanced the page about the langauge a bit after reading a few relevant academic articles.

However, I've only done it since it already exists. I don't have a strong opinion on whether it should be a separate article or not. Perhaps it's better to merge them again because the script and the language are indeed related more strongly than it usually happens with other languages. Evertype knows far more about it than I do, and I trust his judgment. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 17:44, 24 May 2019 (UTC)

Sourcing

This reference states that Kante had, before creating N'Ko, tried writing the language in the Arabic and Latin scripts, but found them inadequate. "Unfortunately none of those systems could satisfactorily capture the intricacies and the phonetics of Manden language."

Thinking about it, the Latin alphabet doesn't exactly capture the intricacies and the phonetics of English, but we still use it nonetheless. But it does suggest that Kante wanted something strictly phonetic, and didn't like the idea of adding diacritics to an existing script.

But then again, none of the specific information here reveals anything that isn't straightforward to write in almost any alphabet. Though it does state in the intro that it "obligatorily marks both tone and vowels". So why is there no information here on how it marks tone? (Even the Bambara version seems to be devoid of this information.)

Anyway, after some searching I finally found this. I'll see if I can incorporate the info into the article when I've a bit more time.... — Smjg (talk) 21:45, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

Tones

How are tones written? -- Beland (talk) 06:21, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

Apparently w apostrophes, prob'ly taken from roman. Maybe they weren't written originally? — kwami (talk) 05:34, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

Did "Rodney Salnave" confirm a writing sample as being an example of N'Ko?

A source (in French) has been cited as telling about an imported slave who wrote with characters that have been confirmed as N'Ko by "Rodney Salnave". I found the French source telling about how Tamerlan wrote something in a script he knew from Africa. That is clear. But where is any documentation about "Rodney Salnave" confirming this? Did Salnave actually have the original sample written by Tamerlan? I am dubious. Does anybody have any data on this "Rodney Salnave", the "Haitian researcher"? Pete unseth (talk) 20:58, 23 August 2017 (UTC)

Rodney Salnave is this guy who runs a blog on how the Haitian revolution was not Islamic. Regardless of how good you think his arguments are I think, for wikipedia, we need a better source for a claim like this, so I've removed it until a better source is found. (Personally I'm not even convinced that the original account about Tamerlan writing is accurate. It reads rather like a novel, and it's a bit too convenient, though I think Salnave is right about the revolution not being particularly Islamic at all).115.188.172.237 (talk) 02:43, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

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Requested move 10 April 2023

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: not moved. There doesn't appear to be much of an appetite for a move at this time. (closed by non-admin page mover) SkyWarrior 19:57, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

---

N'Ko script → N'Ko alphabet – See WP:NCWS#Alphabets, requiring "language-specific"; consensus at WT:NCWS was that this should cover one or more languages; N'Ko was designed specifically for a closely related group of languages (Manding languages). The people themselves, and academics, call it an alphabet: 1. Its readers and writers celebrate "N'Ko Alphabet Day", see cites in the article or google the quoted term. 2. Its creator Solomana Kanté's grave is marked 'inventor of the N'Ko alphabet' (not 'script'); see photo of that in the article. Other refs from the article: 3. Oyler, Dianne White (1997). "The N'ko Alphabet as a Vehicle of Indigenist Historiography". 4. Sogoba, Mia (2018). "N'Ko Alphabet: a West African Script". 5. Doumbouya, Mamady (2012). "Illustrated English/N'Ko Alphabet."... etc. – _•Raven  ^.talk 10:20, 10 April 2023 (UTC) — Relisting. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 14:32, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

Comment This is one of nine parallel RfM that Raven filed without announcing them at the NCWS discussion that is trying to decide this very issue. We should wait for consensus there and not address them piecemeal like this. — kwami (talk) 04:04, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

❌FALSE. See discussion under kwami's "Oppose" !vote 18 days earlier, below; also the (currently last) paragraph below from 00:46 today, quoting the RfC at NCWS, "Since [the page move requests mentioned] cite and quote the current text of WP:NCWS#Alphabets, they are unaffected if this RFC fails. Since they are also compatible with this RFC's proposal(s), they are unaffected if this RFC succeeds. In other words, they are unaffected by this RFC either way." [italics as in orginal]. – .Raven  ^.talk 07:10, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose Raven has it backwards. N'Ko is a script per NCWS. There are cases where articles on scripts are labeled "alphabets", usually when it's only used to write the language it was designed for, e.g. Armenian alphabet may be the only alphabet that uses the Armenian script. In that case, the alphabet is the primary topic and there's no need to develop a separate article for the script. For N'Ko, there is an artificial standard language that is intended to be used with N'Ko script, but it's unclear to what extent N'Ko may be a family of alphabets. As long as we're not clear whether we're speaking of Maninka and Dyula alphabets as well, it's best to err on the side of caution and simply label it a "script". — kwami (talk) 21:56, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

  > "N'Ko is a script per NCWS." — You mean WP:NCWS#Alphabets, which I cited above? "'Alphabet' is used for language-specific adaptations of a segmental script, usually with a defined sorting order and sometimes with not all of the letters, or with additional letters" ? Are you taking "language-specific" to mean only one language? But see WT:NCWS#comments from the period that was discussed and added, e.g.:

  "Yes, 'national' wasn't right. But sometimes languages share alphabets, don't they? How about 'specific applications'? Currently also mentions individual lanugages." — kwami, 21:07, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

  "If an alphabet is specific to more than one language then it’s still language-specific. The point is that scripts are not, they’re language-agnostic." — Christoph Päper, 22:40, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

  "How's that?" — kwami, 23:44, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

  "If I understand Crissov well, the description should cover the plural: Alphabet is specific to one or more languages. Still, in the singular phrasing, to me it reads like covered as well. Somehow, the singular one does not exclude the plural (it does not exclude another language). If I am correct in this, we can use the simpler option. Either way: 'language' is preferred to 'nation'." -DePiep, 08:08, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

  [emphasis added]

  You were part of that conversation, asked for clarification, and got it. Remember?

  Also see, further above that section:

  "... Any alphabet article is likely to have some background info on the script, esp. if the script is predominantly a single alphabet, and I don't see how calling in an 'alphabet' would make the article hostile to such info...." — kwami, 12:56, 5 August 2011 (UTC)  [emphasis added] 

  By the term clarifications in that discussion, N'Ko is an alphabet, and the Manding peoples need not rename their holiday "N'Ko Alphabet Day" to "N'Ko Script Day", nor change the sign on Kanté's grave that says he invented the N'Ko alphabet.

  > ... it's unclear to what extent N'Ko may be a family of alphabets." — From the article itself, and all the cited sources I was able to read, the genius of Kanté's alphabet is that people speaking the different Manding dialects do not need to alter its letter-set to fit their own phoneme-set. What Kanté did was alter the letters' (particularly the vowel markings') phonetic values for each dialect, so that the same semantic word would be written the same way by every user, and spoken aloud in each user's own dialect. I think that's brilliant, though of course it relies on Manding dialects having so close a kinship. It wouldn't work that way between speakers of less related tongues, say from Manding to English, French, Russian, etc. – _•Raven  ^.talk 11:05, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

  See Clair, Kate; Busic-Snyder, Cynthia (2012-06-20). "Key Concepts". A Typographic Workbook: A Primer to History, Techniques, and Artistry. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley. p. 347. ISBN 9781118399880. alphabet: a set of visual characters or letters in an order fixed by custom. The individual characters represent the sounds of a spoken language. ... In addition to English, there are... Bassa (Vah),... International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA),... N'Ko,... Somali (Osmanya),.... – _•Raven  ^.talk 21:02, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

  Also see • "alphabet". Merriam-Webster [online]. 1.a. a set of letters or other characters with which one or more languages are written especially if arranged in a customary order
  • WP:NCWS#Alphabets: "'Alphabet' is used for language-specific adaptations of a segmental script, usually with a defined sorting order and sometimes with not all of the letters, or with additional letters:" [followed by list of examples].
  • Note that N'Ko is "language-specific" to the Manding language-group.
  • See also what Omniglot calls it. – _•Raven  ^.talk 02:02, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

• No other comments besides the original mover (kwami)'s, so far. As I understand it, in the absence of consensus, the stable status quo ante (in this case "N'Ko alphabet") is resumed. – .Raven  ^.talk 05:17, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Note: WikiProject Writing systems has been notified of this discussion. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 14:33, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

• Keep 'script'. As I understand it, "script" is the unattached meaning. (Not attached to a language). Then, Manding languages is plural. That says it.

What is missing here is a beginning of a definition of "script", by Raven, which could help falsifying. -DePiep (talk) 15:34, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

@DePiep: I keep referring back to the existing (not "my", I had no part in writing it) definition at WP:NCWS#Alphabets: "'Alphabet' is used for language-specific adaptations of a segmental script, usually with a defined sorting order and sometimes with not all of the letters, or with additional letters:" [followed by list of examples]. Context for the phrase "language-specific" is set by the discussion at WT:NCWS shortly before and shortly after that was added [by kwami, BTW]. I quoted notable portions in small print just upthread:
• Päper's "If an alphabet is specific to more than one language then it’s still language-specific."
• Your own "Alphabet is specific to one or more languages. Still, in the singular phrasing, to me it reads like covered as well. Somehow, the singular one does not exclude the plural (it does not exclude another language). If I am correct in this, we can use the simpler option."
• kwami's "... Any alphabet article is likely to have some background info on the script, esp. if the script is predominantly a single alphabet, and I don't see how calling in an 'alphabet' would make the article hostile to such info, units of sounds that distinguish words, of certain spoken languages."

Also Merriam-Webster's "1.a. a set of letters or other characters with which one or more languages are written especially if arranged in a customary order"

And the Wikipedia article Alphabet opens: "An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) representing phonemes, units of sounds that distinguish words, of certain spoken languages."

All of these seem to concur in allowing more than one language. Thus "language-specific" can mean "to a specific group of languages." In the case of N'Ko and the Manding languages – those could be regarded as dialects within one language, since the same semantic word is written the same way by all Manding-speaking writers (just read aloud differently in each dialect) – something not possible to share with unrelated languages. The set and sequence of its letters do not vary.

If there were multiple  N'Ko alphabets (multiple letter-sets or -sequences) – as there are multiple alphabets using the Cyrillic and Arabic and Latin scripts, for instance – then N'ko should and would be called a script. Instead there is just one, and a "N'Ko Alphabet Day". – .Raven  ^.talk 17:22, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

re "Your own" (referring to my posts/contributions): wikipedia is not a RS. If this is meant as a gotcha, pls speak for yorself. DePiep (talk) 07:11, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

Not a gotcha. I could have listed the quote as "DePiep's", as though that were a 3rd person, but that would seem not to acknowledge your authorship and participation in that discussion.

And no consensus (nor other text) on Wikipedia is an "RS", as I understand it. That a definition of "alphabet" discussed by a few WP editors (and finally posted by one in a form not entirely matching even their consensus) was then thumped to override all the off-WP RSs, I found rather shocking, actually – but that's how the "convention" came to be. If I can't cite that discussion and consensus when discussing how that convention should be interpreted and applied, what can I cite? This is not for an article footnote. – .Raven  ^.talk 11:38, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

> Then Manding languages is plural. — That article's lede begins: The Manding languages (sometimes spelt Manden) are a dialect continuum within the Mande language family spoken in West Africa. Varieties of Manding are generally considered (among native speakers) to be mutually intelligible – dependent on exposure or familiarity with dialects between speakers – and spoken by 30 to 40 million people.... [underline added] – .Raven  ^.talk 21:41, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

• Per Wikipedia:Requested moves/Closing instructions#Determining consensus, "If objections have been raised, then the discussion should be evaluated just like any other discussion on Wikipedia: lack of consensus among participants along with no clear indication from policy and conventions normally means that no change happens (though like AfD, this is not a vote and the quality of an argument is more important than whether it comes from a minority or a majority). However, sometimes a requested move is filed in response to a recent move from a long existing name that cannot be undone without administrative help. Therefore, if no consensus has been reached, the closer should move the article back to the most recent stable title. If no recent title has been stable, then the article should be moved to the title used by the first major contributor after the article ceased to be a stub." [underline added; two further explanatory paragraphs not quoted]  The underlined situation appears to be the case here.
  As noted at the RfC at NCWS, "Since [the page move requests mentioned] cite and quote the current text of WP:NCWS#Alphabets, they are unaffected if this RFC fails. Since they are also compatible with this RFC's proposal(s), they are unaffected if this RFC succeeds. In other words, they are unaffected by this RFC either way." [italics as in orginal] The RFC affects only alphabets for specific uses which are not language-specific (e.g. ISO basic Latin alphabet, International Phonetic Alphabet), and clarification of multi-language general alphabets (arguably N'Ko, though that is specific to Manding languages, and preceding discussion had said "language specific" could mean to "one or more languages"). – .Raven  ^.talk 00:46, 28 April 2023 (UTC)
• Comment Raven has made these false claims on multiple articles. The NCWS discussion is specifically about cases like these, where a script functions solely as the alphabet of a single language (though that's debatable in the case of N'Ko), and thus a single article covers both topics. Thus a decision there might result in reverting any premature decision here. — kwami (talk) 01:49, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

  ❌FALSE. To quote the original post at WT:NCWS#RFC on alphabet definition in full:

  Should "alphabet" in WP:NCWS include letter-sets for specific uses (e.g. ISO basic Latin alphabet, International Phonetic Alphabet, Theban alphabet), as well as for specific languages (e.g. Somali's Kaddare alphabet and Osmanya alphabet; Zaghawa's Zaghawa alphabet; Mandaic's Mandaic alphabet)?

  Background: per Vanisaac's comment opening WT:NCWS#Honing in on a consensus, "I think we are seeing an emerging consensus on 'X script' for all of the scripts out there, eg 'Latin script', ' 'Phags Pa script', 'Jurchen script'; and 'X alphabet' for national alphabets, notation systems, and other symbol collections for specific languages or use, eg 'Belarusian Latin Alphabet', 'NATO phonetic alphabet', 'Russian alphabet' (implied Cyrillic), 'American manual alphabet', etc. The plural forms 'X scripts' and 'X alphabets' should be used for describing a family of scripts, and the collection of script conventions for writing a given language or in a particular medium, eg. 'Brahmic scripts', 'Semitic scripts', 'Belarusian alphabets', 'Semaphore alphabets', 'Manual alphabets'" ("or use" emphasis added by me).

  The text later placed by a different editor, without consensus, omitted the "or use:" alternative: "'Alphabet' is used for language-specific adaptations of a segmental script, usually with a defined sorting order and sometimes with not all of the letters, or with additional letters" (emphasis added again). That same editor has since cited his own text to insist that the ISO basic Latin alphabet, the IPA, and Theban, which can be used by multiple languages, are therefore not "alphabets", but "scripts". As this aspect of the "convention" was not consensus – his draft received two comments, one disagreeing, one not clearly either supporting or opposing – it's a one-person "rule" with no moral force in my opinion. I reverted to reinstate the prior version and add "or use-specific" per the consensus mentioned above: "'Alphabet' is used for specific applications of a segmental script, usually with a defined sorting order and sometimes with language-specific or use-specific letters" (emphasis added; the text other than "or use-specific" is from the prior version). He reverted my reversion. At this point I decline to edit-war, and instead post this RfC.

  Lengthy foregoing discussion at Talk:Theban script#Requested move 3 April 2023 and WT:NCWS, as well as side-discussions at User talk:.Raven#Script vs alphabet and User talk:Kwamikagami#"Script" in article titles. Please note Merriam-Webster's definition 1(a) of "alphabet": "a set of letters or other characters with which one or more languages are written especially if arranged in a customary order" (emphasis added again). – _•Raven  ^.talk 04:39, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

  Note that adding the missing "or use" term was the original focus of that RfC. Note also that the consensus when WP:NCWS#Alphabets was written was that "language-specific" covered "one or more languages" (not necessarily just one); the Manding languages, whose speakers celebrate "N'Ko Alphabet Day", are described in that article as a "dialect continuum", in effect dialects (mutually intelligible) rather than separate languages; thus covered under the consensus meaning of "language-specific". – .Raven  ^.talk 04:14, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Thank 93.150.234.9 (talk) 22:39, 23 December 2023 (UTC)