Talk:Transphonologization

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I am very skeptical about this term. It's an obvious neologism, and seems to have no currency at all. It does refer to a very common historical process which probably should have a specific name, but this isn't it. We should simply use a more descriptive term until/unless "cheshirization" actually becomes used. Benwing (talk) 20:48, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

I see now that there was already a discussion [1] with a consensus to delete this page and redirect it to James Matisoff. I'm going to redo this change. Benwing (talk) 20:59, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Kwamikagami, you cannot unilaterally go against consensus -- see the AFD link above, where it was universally agreed to nix this page. You also seem to not understand, or to be ignoring, the Wikipedia policy on neologisms, see WP:NEO. Do a Google test and you'll see that this term has no currency. Regardless of whether the historical process is real, the term is not. It's also rude, to say the least, to revert a change without any discussion on the talk page, when there is a disagreement -- this is how edit wars start. I am going to put back my change; please don't undo it until you've commented here and given a good reason why we should go against prior consensus to introduce a neologism that has no currency -- just because you put effort into writing the text for this article is not enough. If you want to save your text, put it somewhere where it belongs. Benwing (talk) 22:01, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

That discussion was three years ago, before the article was expanded, and by editors some of whom did not understand the situation. The term is not a joke, even if it is humerous; it is not used by only one man, though normally credited to him; and the concept is not his, only the term. If you wish to initiate a new request for merger, by all means do so. kwami (talk) 22:31, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

@Benwing: I have said this at Template talk:Sound change, and I'll say it again... referring to a three-year-old AfD that was focused on an entirely different article is useless. That AfD says nothing about what consensus for this article is; the field has changed in the past 3 years, Wikipedia has changed in the past 3 years, and the article itself has changed in the past 3 years. If you think this article doesn't belong, you are entitled to your opinion—but you will have to bring it to a new AfD. The outdated AfD is moot and does nothing to further this discussion.

I had half a mind to full-protect this article for a couple days because of the edit warring that is beginning. Since kwami is an administrator, though, that wouldn't be fair to all parties; so let's all just stop reverting for now. If this article is going to be redirected, it will have to be through an AfD. No more reverts, please. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 02:29, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Rjanag, I think your attitude is somewhat inappropriate. Rather than trying to be a neutral party, you are consistently taking Kwami's side, yet at the same time you're claiming powers that only a neutral party should have. To me, this is abuse of position. The main issue here is that Kwami unilaterally undid a consensus to push his own viewpoint, and now you're claiming that to undo this *I* have to do another AFD? How can this be reasonable? How does this prevent anyone who lost an AFD vote from simply recreating the page later, and then insisting that another AFD must be done to get rid of his page? Essentially that's what you are doing.

As for the AFD, you guys are also misreading it. It says that the term "cheshirization" is a non-current neologism. Have either of you actually bothered to read WP:NEO? This page is very clear about the desire to avoid neologisms. The consensus of the AFD was clear, that "Cheshirization" is a neologism and should not clearly established, and hence there should be no page with this name, which would imply that it is a real linguistics term. The solution at the time was to merge back to Matisoff's page; a different solution may be called for here but that doesn't make the AFD irrelevant. On the contrary -- esp. given that you (Kwami) unilaterally recreated the page against consensus, the onus is on you to justify why the previous consensus no longer applies, and to do this you need to show that "cheshirization" is now an established term and not simply a neologism. I know a great deal about historical linguistics, quite possibly more than you in fact, and I have not encountered this term, so I'm skeptical. A Google Test shows 20 counts for "cheshirization" -- not a good sign, and some of these are very recent postings on language newsgroups which I highly suspect got this term from Wikipedia. (Note that WP:NEO specifically says that Wikipedia is not meant to be a way of popularizing neologisms, and this should be strenuously fought against, because we're supposed to be documenting the world, not changing the world.) A Google Test for "cheshirisation" shows 400 or so hits, but the vast vast majority are from Wikipedia or from sources linking to Wikipedia -- again not a good sign.

BTW the fact that the inventor of this term is American and certainly used -ization, and of the tiny number of references most have -ization, indicates that -ization is the correct usage. Again, Kwami's reason to change to -isation "looks better to me" is a good example of how not to do things in Wikipedia -- your personal preferences are not worthy of or appropriate for inclusion in an encylopedia.

I suggest you step back a little from your understandable emotion reaction at someone trying to delete "your" text, and consider whether it's really a desirable situation for a newbie to come to Wikipedia, see in the Sound Changes box that "Cheshirization" (along with lenition, elision, assimilation, sandhi, etc.) is one of the six or seven basic sound-change processes, and then go and to a linguistics professor and start discussing the "cheshirization" of this or that, and quickly discover that Wikipedia was simply wrong -- few if any professors will recognize the term and most or all will tell you that this is not an established term and should not be used in scientific papers. Do you really want this? (If you're skeptical, do a survey of the profs in the linguistics department nearest you and see what reactions you get.)

Now that you've done that, if you're really attached to your text (BTW Wikipedia text belongs to no one and for this reason it's a bad idea to become attached to text), find somewhere else to put it. I'd suggest adding a section in Sound change. You could also rename the article to something more descriptive, like "indirect preservation of distinctions in sound change", but this could also be misleading in implying that there's a consensus around identifying the process you're describing as something deserving of its own name and article. Better simply put it in the sound-change article.

Benwing (talk) 08:33, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

TL;DR. But as for me "tag-teaming"... no, I started out as a neutral party, and once I read the article and the arguments involved I decided I agreed with kwami's side. Do you not like the conclusion that this neutral party has reached? Perhaps I can look around for some new neutral parties that will be more malleable. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 13:47, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

As for your AfD claims...yes, I am saying if you want this deleted you need to start a new AfD. First of all, none of us "lost" the last AfD. AfD is not a battleground, and besides, none of us were even involved in it; I wasn't on Wikipedia yet, and kwami was not involved in this article. But anyway, yes, you are exactly right that new articles get new AfDs. For all intents and purposes, this is a different article than the one that was merged before; regardless of what you think about the people's decision in the afd, it was based on what they had before them, a poorly-written article. Their decision does not necessarily mean that this term can never have a good article written about it. Since you seem so worked up by this article, I don't see why it's such a big deal to ask you to start a new AfD. Anyway, this is the last time I'm going to say it; if anyone even so much as mentions the meaningless 3-year-old AfD again, I'm ignoring it. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 13:51, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Supporting links

Personally, I haven't quite made up my mind on whether I think this article should be kept or removed per WP:NEO. In any case, I've googled a bit (note that one should google "cheshirization" with a 'z', not an 's', or the only results will be from Wikipedia - which tells me the title should be changed back. For now, the things I've found that may or may not be valid as WP:RS are:

• Defining Creole By John H. McWhorter
• Areal Diffusion and Genetic Inheritance By Aleksandra I︠U︡rʹevna Aĭkhenvalʹd, Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, Robert M. W. Dixon

Add more if you have some!

LjL (talk) 15:57, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Aikhenvald & Dixon is definitely RS; McWhorter I would call an RS but that's always a bit of a toss-up I think. To be honest, I'm not sure how much he is considered to be a "linguist" by others in the field (ie, how often he is cited, how much weight his theories & work are given), at least in the US; I think a lot of people consider him to be more "political". But as far as lay people are concerned I would say he's an RS; even if he's not cited by a lot of linguistics papers, he does write stuff that is accessible to non-specialists (his book The Power of Babel was what first got me interested in linguistics, back when I was in middle school). He's also a contributor to Language Log, which should count for something. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 16:08, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps I should have mentioned Wikipedia:NEO#Reliable_sources_for_neologisms rather than simply WP:RS, because the former does seem to provide some additional constraints for neologisms: "To support the use of (or an article about) a particular term we must cite reliable secondary sources such as books and papers about the term—not books and papers that use the term". So, do my links satisfy "secondary source", and "about the term"? I honestly have my doubts, seeming more like primary sources using the term (and, in passing, mentioning what the term is about). I think we might need something better. LjL (talk)

Here is another article by Kyongjoon Kwon that mentions Ch. very briefly. It's brief and just a "cfr.", but I found it interesting because he seems to be applying the term (or merely telling the reader to "cfr" it?) to traces left by a disappearing entire word on the grammar, rather than by a sound on other sounds. So might "cheshirization" be a generic term encompassing more than just phonetics (a bit like "alternation" encompasses both allophonic and allomorphic alternation)? LjL (talk) 18:29, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

That's exactly what floating tones are: grammatical morphemes which have entirely disappeared apart from their tone. kwami (talk) 21:20, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

I think you misread, I said the opposite thing (although, surely, I might have misread the article myself!), namely that the article talks about words (namely "est") leaving a trace in grammar (namely, changing the normal word order), not morphemes leaving a trace in tone. LjL (talk) 21:27, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

I would consider that part of the same general phenomenon, but it's interesting that it's used for s.t. that's not sound change.

BTW, although the word is catchy, I'm not bound to it. In the following section of the MOS, Articles wrongly titled as neologisms, it recommends that a notable topic (as here) w/o a good word for it should not employ made-up words for titles. That may be relevant, at least in that objecting to the title is not reason for deleting the article, though I would argue that 'cheshirization' is not a "non-notable neologism", since it's repeated it several RS's. It may be that we could place it in a footnote, though. kwami (talk) 21:36, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Look, if I may be very honest here, I think that on the one hand, this article probably doesn't hold up to the letter of WP:NEO standards. But on the other hand, I agree the topic is notable, and we're not talking about some weird Internet neologism that some fool made up, but about something quite serious made up by some serious linguist... so, really, my WP:Common sense tells me that at the end of the day, nobody will be hurt if the article stays, and everyone will be better off (the sound changes template is another story). LjL (talk) 21:45, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Yep, you've hit the nail on the head. I'm pretty sure WP:NEO is mostly about keeping Wikipedia from turning into Urban Dictionary, not so much about things like this. And, even if the word is a problem, the fact of the matter is that this is a real phenomenon and deserves an article in some way or another, no matter what we title it; if the title were a problem, we could simply move this exact same content to some awkward title like "sound changes with trace remains" or whatever, and have accomplished nothing other than making it more of a pain to search for and refer to. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 22:41, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

OK, the real reason I got worked up about this is seeing the term "cheshirization" sitting in the Sound Template. I don't much care that this article exists, but the presence of "cheshirization" in the Sound Template is extremely misleading. I've been bitten before in other similar situations, on topics I wasn't familiar with, where some Wikipedia editor used a neologism and presented it as if it were an established term. In those cases, it wasn't much fun at all trying to sort through primary sources on the Internet and figure out what the reality of the situation actually was, and I'd rather not have the same thing happen to someone else.

It was also frustrating having Kwami reverting major changes without bothering to discuss them on the talk page, esp. after I posted a specific reason for what I did. The appeared to me to be anti-social behavior of a sort that I would not expect from an established user; although I'm not an admin so I don't know whether there's some rule that allows people to do this sort of thing.

I very much agree that the concept of a set of phonetic changes that erase a distinction in one place but leave a trace elsewhere is an important concept in historical linguistics -- I'll call it a "transferred distinction" for now. For example, Verner's Law is a classic case of a transferred distinction (PIE stress -> consonant voicing); similarly the law of palatals in Indo-Iranian (vowel quality -> consonant quality); similarly Brugmann's Law in Indo-Iranian, where /o/ is voiced in an open syllable prior to loss of distinction between a/o/e (vowel quality, presence of laryngeal -> vowel length). It's probably useful for this concept to have a specific name, but it's not obvious to me that "cheshirization" is this name -- certainly, this term appears nowhere in any secondary sources (e.g. textbooks or linguistic dictionaries), which in this situation would be the standard for determining whether something is a neologism. Furthermore (and not surprising given the tenuous nature of the term "cheshirization"), it's not clear whether the term even bears the meaning of a tranferred phonetic distinction -- c.f. LjL's comment above indicating that one of the very few authors who uses this term appears to use it in a broader way.

On top of this, the concept of a transferred phonetic distinction (or "cheshirization" or whatever) doesn't belong in the current Sound Template at all, since it's not parallel with the other terms. Lenition, loss, epenthesis, etc. are basic processes in phonetics that refer to specific sorts of low-level sound modifications. There is nothing specific to historical linguistics about them and there is nothing higher-level or "meta" about them. "Cheshirization" or whatever is a different sort of thing and belongs with a template that describes changes such as splits and mergers, which refer to higher-level changes in the entire sound system that come about as a result of simple changes such as lenition, segment loss, etc.

So I'd suggest the following:

1. Rename this article to something generic like transferred distinction (phonetics) with cheshirization a redirect to this page, and in the intro indicate that (a) transferred distinction (or whatever) is a description of the process and is being used because the process has no established name; (b) some authors have used the term "cheshirization" but this term has no general currency in the community as of yet.
2. Don't use the term "cheshirization" in the Sound Change Template. Either remove the concept entirely, rename the template to "Phonetic Processes" and create a separate "Sound Change" template giving higher-level concepts such as conditioned and unconditioned mergers, splits, "transferred distinctions" (or whatever), etc.; or, split the Sound Change template into two sections, one covering the low-level phonetic processes and the other the higher-level sound change processes.

Benwing (talk) 06:13, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

1. I'm a phonologists and I've never heard this term. I don't mean the page has to be deleted, but putting it within a group of sound changes that comprehends deletion, assimilation, epenthesis does not make any sense at all for me. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.114.169.66 (talk) 09:44, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Recap

Starting a new section here too, as I've done on the sound change template talk page, as threads are getting mixed up (I did intend the "supporting links" section to be ultimately about supporting links, but hey).

Some specific statements we can see whether we agree or disagree upon:

• the term "cheshirisation" most likely fails the letter of WP:NEO, not having any real secondary sources and such
• it's not some silly useless term, though, but it describes a category worth describing, so WP:Common sense says it can't be such a bad idea to keep it
• it may or may not be renamed to some descriptive phrase (and a redirect to "cheshirisation" made), whether that's done or not is not exceedingly important
• some more sources that describe the term should be sought by its proponents

This is about the article itself; what we do with the sound change template, I've discussed on its talk page.

LjL (talk) 16:49, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

This looks like an accurate recap to me. I would not be averse to changing the title (to what, I don't know exactly) and including a small section on the term "cheshirization", while devoting most of the article to the process itself (it would be nice to add a list of examples of languages in which this has happened, some of which are in Benwing's post above). rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 16:53, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

-ization

I wasn't involved in any of the previous disputes and only came across the page today. I'm not touching the neologism issue, but I am changing "-isation" to the American form "-ization" in the two or three places it occurs. (This was discussed in the previous flurries.)

The reason is that Matisoff is American (he was one of my teachers in the Grad. Ling. Dept. at Berkeley) and uses the American spelling, as can be seen in the References:

• James Matisoff, 1991, "Areal and universal dimensions of grammatization in Lahu." ...

I'm also changing it in the word "nasali_ation" to maintain consistency throughout the page.

Thnidu (talk) 22:57, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

-ization should be used regardless, since it's also British and actually makes more sense than -isation (whereas most spelling differences make no difference). — kwami (talk) 06:02, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

Consonant gradation in Estonian

…is not an example of transphonologization: gradation is older than the elision of various endings, and remains in effect also where elision does not apply. (E.g. the genitive of mõõk 'sword' might be mõõga, from *mõõkka : *mõõkka-n; however forms such as the plural mõõga-d still have an express suffix and regardless still have gradation k → g triggered in the stem.) I can imagine that someone may have cited this as an example, but in the absense of any such actual citation, it is probably best removed. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 23:01, 16 June 2018 (UTC)