Talk:Tuyuca language

Comment

I've never commented in Wikipedia before, but I am bewildered by this entry. Almost all linguists would agree that all languages are equally complex, if the whole system of the language is taken into account, including phonology, morphology, syntax, and discourse. They all have the capacity for expressing the same information.

Tuyuca has some features that make it quite different from English, but it does not have any features that are not found in plenty of other languages. In particular, there is nothing inherently "difficult", or even unusual, about evidentiality... in fact, English speakers virtually always express one or another type of evidentiality in their sentences... we just don't do it with verb morphology... we do it with adverbs, modals, complement-taking predicates, etc etc etc.

If a language is supposed to be "the world's most difficult language", you would need to show that it actually takes native speakers significantly longer to master (in its spoken form) than any other language, or requires more cognitive processing, and I don't see any evidence that this is true for Tuyuca.

The citations for this article are all "gee whiz aren't languages strange" pop linguistics type articles with no scientific credibility.

Not what I expect to see in Wikipedia!

I don't personally have the expertise on Tuyuca or the language family it belongs to to provide an adequate wikipedia article on it, unfortunately. It deserves a factual non-sensationalist treatment like other minority languages get.

68.6.93.242 (talk) 04:56, 5 January 2010 (UTC) Srikandi

That's an excellent point, and I've modified the article to more clearly indicate that this is simply an opinion from The Economist. DS (talk) 01:40, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

The vowel chart

Let's talk about this. If, for example, we go to the English phonology page, you'll see that, despite failing to show the EXACT placement of each vowel, which is more complex in English than Tuyuca, the table does a damn fine job without needing any alignment fuzzing. The alignment as you're putting it is hideous, it goes against (as far as I know) every single other phonology page on Wikipedia, and provides no information whatsoever as to the PHONEMIC values of the vowels. I've reverted your reversion, and I'm very interested as to your defense of this alignment. Kielbasa1 (talk) 23:56, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Because linguistic sources typically place vowel in a chart according to where they fall in the chart. Yes, this is crude compared to a measured graph, but it does show e.g. that /u/ is less back than /o/. — kwami (talk) 04:36, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

But no other article, so far as I know, on Wikipedia does this. Furthermore, that is in regard to phonetic realization - this chart is about phonemes, as shown by the fact that the consonants do not list Tuyuca's many allophones in the chart. Your diligence is misplaced; I'll make a proper vowel chart today, but please do not further revert the edit. Kielbasa1 (talk) 06:45, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

I think some do, but what other articles do is irrelevant. If our sources do this, then so should we, if we care about representing them accurately. As for it being about phonemes, that logic would suggest that we not have a chart at all. But I checked what is apparently our primary source, and they don't do this (unless I'm missing it somewhere in the text), so I removed it. — kwami (talk) 07:41, 3 November 2013 (UTC)