Talk:Erromintxela language/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Jezhotwells (talk) 16:35, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

GA review (see here for criteria)

1. It is reasonably well written.

   a (prose): b (MoS):

   I made some minor copy-edits; the prose could do with improvement, perhaps some shorter sentences, clearer writing. Although wikilinked some terms such as endonym, bertsolaritza, pelota could bear with some explanation. Y

   The Lead does not comply with the requirements of WP:LEAD. It should be a succinct summary of the whole article. The prose parts, that is. Y

2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.

   a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):

   The artcile is suitably referenced and I assume good faith for all print sources. All online sources are WP:RS.

3. It is broad in its coverage.

   a (major aspects): b (focused):

4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.

   Fair representation without bias:

5. It is stable.

   No edit wars, etc.:

6. It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate.

   a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):

7. Overall:

   Pass/Fail:

   Please go over the prose and seek to clarify and improve the prose. Check that sentences are not overlong, introduce specialist words with explanations, even if wikilinked. Check that the prose flows smoothly.

   Please rewrite the lead to summarise the article. Anything in the lead should be in the artcle in expanded form.

   On hold for seven days to allow improvements to be made. Jezhotwells (talk) 17:05, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

   OK, I think this now sufficiently improved to meet the GA criteria. If you wish to expand the article further consider splitting off the linguistic features into a sub article. Jezhotwells (talk) 23:58, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Cool, thanks for the initial appraisal, I'll get to it straight away! Akerbeltz (talk) 17:44, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm copy editing bit by bit.

"While the Erromintxela identify themselves as ijitoak ..." Do they call themselves ijitoak when speaking Basque, and erromintxela when speaking that? The article does not make it clear. kwami (talk) 21:23, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks :)

I could have put that better - what that means is that they identify themselves as Erromintxela (both ethnically and linguistically) but within the wider scope of the Roma world as being ijitioak in the wider sense, but within the ijitioak as separate from the Caló. Akerbeltz (talk) 21:29, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

You mean they call themselves both Erromitxela and Ijitioak when speaking E? When speaking Basque?

And the "earliest research"--is that the earliest attestation of the language, or just the earliest substantive description of it?

I'm removing a lot of links. We normally only link the first mention of a word, unless (as in the case of Caló) a later mention may be more likely to cause questions. But I haven't bothered to go back and linked the initial use when I delete latter uses, so 'morphology' for example I think is now unlinked.

I'm adding some info I'm not sure of, for clarity of the text, and am tagging it as 'dubious'. You might need to delete or modify it.

The phoneme tables do not include /ɣ/, even though they're claimed to be 'maximal' and we don't know if /ɣ/ exists or not. Also, while the table lacks /θ/ as it is missing in the south, it includes /y/, which is also missing in the south. Personally, I'd add all three, and note that they only occur (or may only occur) in the north.

Okay, I'm done for now, if you want to start again. I'll come back later for the few paragraphs after 'phonology'. kwami (talk) 22:41, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Grand. A couple of clarifications:

• it actually is a collection of Basque poems with a lonely E poem in amongst. I tweaked the wording; it's also the oldest coherent text I've found cited anywhere that goes beyond short phrases.
• going to move the phonemes into the table as suggested.

Akerbeltz (talk) 22:58, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

So, northern has a 4-way distinction, /θ s̻ s̺ ʃ/? Wow. That's extreme.

I assume the language is ergative. That would be worth stating early on, as a clear example of how it has abandoned Romani grammar for Basque. Also, do verbs take multiple object suffixes the way Basque does, and to a greater extent or number than Romani? kwami (talk) 23:24, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Phonology: So it would seem - though that's based on Baudrimot's essay. I suspect the dental fricative may not exist anymore but in the absence of something more recent, we can't say.

Ergative: yes, case marking and verb formation essentially do exactly the same things as the underlying Basque dialects do; eg (from the poem) Hire dui ankhai baro, koloek your.familiar two eye big black-ergative.plural; for an example of crazy verbs, see the examples right at the bottom of the page. If you want to move those/change the layout/add the ergative example, feel free. I simply wasn't sure what the best way is on Wikipedia to do interlinear. Akerbeltz (talk) 23:40, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Okay, just wanted to confirm that Baudrimot attested the three sibilants in addition to theta.

With something as alien as Basque, I think it's helpful to include morpheme-by-morpheme glosses. A table to force alignment is a good idea; I added some examples to interlinear gloss based on the Leipzig glossing conventions. kwami (talk) 14:52, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Ah, these tables you linked are much better than what I found previously. I'll steal some time later and redo the interlinear in that format where needed. Akerbeltz (talk) 15:16, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Before I do the rest kwami, have a look at these two and tell me what you think: User:Akerbeltz/Basque. Akerbeltz (talk) 01:22, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, they look good.

I would make some slight changes: At List of glossing abbreviations I've listed some fairly standard abbreviations. (Refs at the bottom.) ALL, for example, generally stands for allative case, and that's what anyone familiar with such things would interpret it as. May ALLOC would be better for clarity? Likewise, PRF is generally perfect; perfective is PFV in those sources ... NOM is nominative case; nominalizer tends to be NMZ. (And PL or pl for plural: you've got both PL and PLU, which I thought at first was maybe pluractional.) There aren't very many tables like these on WP, but IMO it might be best to avoid conflicting abbreviations so we don't have problems later.

Also, it's standard practice to join abbreviations with periods and words with periods or underscores when they correspond to a single morpheme, so e.g. d-u-k would be s.t. like ABS.3sg-have-ERG.1sg.ALLOC.m (or 3rd_PERS.ABS-have-1st_PERS.ERG.ALLOC.MASC if you like; such things can depend on what contrasts in the paradigm).

Also, a minor stylistic issue: sometimes all caps can be a bit much; you might want to see how SMALL CAPS work. kwami (talk) 15:44, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

Ah hadn't seen that list. Fully agreed to keeping to a standard, made the changes. Question - -lo is a relational suffix (see first ex), not really a prounoun but relative pronoun is the closest category. Should I link to that or produce a red link to Relational suffix?

I've stuck with the caps for now cause I can't get the small caps to work the way you probably mean - if you want to, you can amend one of the shorter interlinears and I'll do the rest once I get the idea.

And yes, that was sloppy interlinera, my bad. Been too long >.< Thanks for the kick! Akerbeltz (talk) 16:10, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

From the link & abbreviation I'd've thought it was a relativizer. I wouldn't add red links--the whole point of the links is for people to be able to follow the abbreviations. You could write a short stub article, but we probably already have one. How's it different from a genitive? Or maybe "attributive", but that's pretty much the territory that genitive covers, isn't it? kwami (talk) 16:24, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

Basque has a genitive and -ko constructions. I'll quote Trask who has the most succint definition I've seen to date: The relational or adnominal suffix -ko [...] can be added to virtually any kind of adverbial phrase, regardless of its syntactic structure, to produce a complex adjectival modifier which can appear within a noun phrase. The adverbial phrase can be a lexical adverb, an adverb derived from an N-bar, a case inflected NP, a postpositional phrase, a participle phrase involving an adverbial particle, an adverbial clause or even a complement clause. [...] Really not sure where this goes. Maybe -ko deserves it's own page but that would be... stretching it on the English Wiki I guess. Akerbeltz (talk) 16:42, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

I'd call that an attributive suffix. ATT and ATTR are the abbreviations I'm finding in the lit. kwami (talk) 02:07, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

Ok will consider the split, many thanks! Akerbeltz (talk) 00:19, 6 December 2009 (UTC)