Talk:Yele language

Not sure what the panel for Anem is doing on this page MarcusCole12 (talk) 07:18, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Oops, sorry. Cut & paste error. kwami (talk) 07:42, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Phonology and other information

Here's a link to something that may be useful for putting some more information on this page. In all seriousness, there's no excuse to not even have a vowel chart.

http://www.sil.org/pacific/png/pubs/0000377/Yele.pdf

97.81.65.138 (talk) 06:03, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

"Usher classifies it as an Oceanic language, with regular sound correspondences obscured by the development of the doubly articulated consonants."

This "Usher" is presumably

https://santafe.academia.edu/TimothyUsher

but I cannot find anything anywhere to substantiate this remarkable claim, which seems to be very much a fringe theory. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.171.244.168 (talk) 01:53, 9 July 2024 (UTC)

á

This letter has been dropped from the orthography. If it ever transcribed a distinct phoneme, which has not been confirmed, it was marginal. Fine for a note in the text, but not in the vowel chart or alphabet as if it currently exists. — kwami (talk) 05:58, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

⟨ʈ⟩ and ⟨ɳ⟩

The usual practice for phonemic transcription in IPA is to maximize the use of distinct letters, and only use diacritics when necessary. This increases legibility. For Yele, we have sounds that are sometimes apical postalveolar -- that is, "retroflex" in the sense that the Indic languages have retroflex consonants -- and sometimes true subapical retroflex consonants. ''t'' and ''n'' with a retraction sign is fine for phonetic transcription, at least for tokens that aren't subapical, but given the variation of transcription of Yele, it's best (most accessible to the reader) to choose the retroflex letters for this article.

However, we should redundantly retain the dental diacritics to avoid confusion with sources that use t and n for the postalveolar/retroflex consonants. — kwami (talk) 06:50, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

And no, they're not palato-alveolar. They're apical, not laminal, and sometimes sub-apical (Levinson 2022). That is, they're retroflex, varying between Hindi-like and Tamil-like retroflex. Only the 'dentals' are laminal. — kwami (talk) 07:33, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

It should not be about legibility in this case. The main realizations of the phonemes are not retroflex. If they are post-alveolar (including “apical” post-alveolar) then that is still not the same as “retroflex”. That only confuses the true transcription, and nowhere are they transcribed as such. Fdom5997 (talk) 07:35, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

Apical post-alveolar *is* retroflex, and they are indeed transcribed as such, e.g. in Levinson 2022. And of course legibility is an issue. That's a basic principle of IPA transcription, and is used in such articles as Hindustani phonology. — kwami (talk) 07:50, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

Well this is not Hindustani phonology. If they truly were retroflex, then they would be both described and transcribed as such. This is not about “legibility”. Not all IPA transcriptions are right-by-the-book and simplified. End of discussion. Fdom5997 (talk) 07:59, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

Repeatedly saying "end of discussion" after misrepresenting sources does not end the discussion, it only makes it look like you have nothing coherent to say. — kwami (talk) 08:10, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

Palatalized retroflexes are phonetically impossible, see e.g. here. Hence it's misleading to transcribe these as retroflex even if some sources do; we should only transcribe them as such if there is consistent agreement in the sources to do so (which there is not). This in my opinion trumps the issue of legibility described above, since it would be WP:OR to assert that retroflexes can indeed be palatalized without sourcing it. Furthermore, I've read Levinson 2022 and it explicitly does not transcribe them as retroflex. For proof see this sentence: "intervocally the post-alveolar

stop /ṭ/ becomes a retroflex flap [ɽ]". This in my opinion clearly contrasts retroflex and post-alveolar, and implies that post-alveolar is the intended transcription (and it most definitely can't be used to contradict the source I linked above and others which support the non-existence of palatalized retroflexes). Hence I'm restoring the transcription to how it was previously; please respond to this first if you intend to revert. Stockhausenfan (talk) 10:26, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

Your edits made the article inconsistent. You have one source that palatalized retroflexes are phonetically impossible for theoretical reasons, yet they're trivial to pronounce, and Masica (1991) i.a. describe palatalized retroflex consonants in Kashmiri. As for Levinson, apical post-alveolar is retroflex; the flap is perhaps not well defined, we can't know without clarification. — kwami (talk) 19:40, 6 November 2024 (UTC)