Talk:Evenki language

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Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

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Old talk

If "erroneously, Evenk language", why is this the name of the article? Yonidebest 00:21, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

I'm just wondering about the same thing. ~~helix84 20:32, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

I tried moving it to "Evenki language" but it said that there was already a page with that name. I think someone ought to look into this: I definitely don't want to screw anything up…—Strabismus 23:34, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, the target is a redirect with some edit history, so it requires admin intervention. I've started the procedure in motion below. cab 11:51, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Total speakers

You show an estimate of 29,000 and one of 7,500. Neither is sourced. Please straighten this out. (Also, does the statistic that the Evenk are 92% Russian-speaking include the ones in China?) Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:47, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

7,500 is from the Russian Census 2002 (as stated in the text) and thus applies to Russia. 29,000 is the global figure from Ethnologue and includes Russia, China, and Mongolia. cab 20:44, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the debate was PAGE MOVED per request. -GTBacchus^(talk) 07:19, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Requested move

Evenk language → Evenki language – as per article and above discussion cab 11:51, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Solon

Is Solon language something different from Evenki? I don't mean to ask whether it's a language or a dialect, but whether it's not just an alternate name for Evenki, as Ethnologue says. --Ptcamn 13:56, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Infobox content

Recently the infobox was updated with dubious information. Please cite 1) that Chinese language "orthography" is in Mongol script; 2) that the name is nonetheless written in Mongol script without following its conventions; 3) Russian language orthography/terms transcribed into Latin with macrons. If there is no reliable reference indicating these transcriptions, they should be removed. Additionally, I have corrected misleading cited text that previously indicated Mongolian was a normative script for Evenki. The cite, however, indicates the opposite: that its use is experimental. JFHJr (㊟) 23:41, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

Fixed. Thanks, Taivo! JFHJr (㊟) 00:06, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

We've had a lot of problems lately with people adding "native names" all over the place that are nothing more than transliterations or translations of the English name into Russian or Turkish or Chinese, etc. --Taivo (talk) 01:14, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

It seems the uncited transcriptions have reappeared in the "native name" infobox field without any discussion. The edit summary left by the editor actually agrees that these are transcriptions. I've reverted the uncited information because 1) it's not a native name at all, only transliteration and 2) because the claims are wholly unsourced, and one transcription is called "??"! The note attached to the experimental Mongolian script was even more dubious. These should only appear if they can be supported by a credible source. I've also put Cyrillic before Latin because there are more Evenks in Russia than in China (per that article). JFHJr (㊟) 05:10, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

I added the Cyrillic name as given in a dictionary from 1994. I would give IPA or a Latin spelling but I'm not sure of the exact value of ы̄. I think Nedjalkov has it as /ɯː/, and he transcribes it to Latin as yy. Bulatova & Grenoble don't mention this sound at all. Bulatova's Russian works similarly don't give a phonetic description for the letter ы̄ (only и/ӣ --- she doesn't give IPA in her Russian works, but she describes as front high vowels), even though this letter shows up all the time even in her own examples (e.g. it's part of many morphological suffixes). So unfortunately for the readers who don't know Cyrillic there's no transcription I can give. The Latin transcriptions used in China aren't appropriate in this case because the vowel sounds are different there. Eric Baer (talk) 09:16, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

Awesome! Thank you, Eric, for cleaning that hot mess! JFHJr (㊟) 15:39, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

BTW, Nedjalkov (1997:311) says there is no long /ɯ/. Maybe it's something else, or maybe Nedjalkov reconfigured that system. There is no /y/ used in his 1997 work to my knowledge. There is, however, an /ɪ/ and an /ɪː/ per his scheme, but I think that takes the place of the front vowel /i/ in other schemes. Hmm... JFHJr (㊟) 00:05, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

For the phonology section I'd like to point out that the dialects in China have a lot more vowels. But I'm not sure what's the best way of fitting this all into the table. Brief overview of what we're dealing with: Chaoke (himself an Evenk, from Nantun in Evenk Autonomous Banner) these days (1995, 2005) seems to be saying /a/, /ə/, /i/, /e/, /o/, /u/, /ɵ/, /ʉ/ and long versions of each. (Hu and Chaoke 1986 had even more. They also pointed out two diphthongs, but restricted to Chinese loanwords). Seong et al (2010), based on an informant from Zalantun, come up with /a/, /ə/, /i/, /o/, /ɔ/, /u/, /ʊ/ (plus long versions of all but /ʊ/).

Regarding Mongolian script for Evenki, the only work I know of where it gets used is 《鄂温克语蒙汉对照词汇》 (People's Publishing House, 1983). It's an Evenki-Mongolian-Chinese dictionary. It lists Evenki words in IPA, pinyin-style Latin, and Mongolian script. Dunno if this qualifies as a "native" orthography for Evenki, though. Incidentally, the title of that dictionary is given in Mongolian on its cover page (sorry, FreeBSD, no Mongolian Unicode support so I'm spelling it in Latin): "Eweŋki Moŋɣol Kitad Kelen-ü Qaričaɣoloɣsan Üges-ün Tegübüri" (aka "Эвэнки Монгол Хятад хэлний харьцуулсан үгсийн түүвэр" for those of you who prefer Cyrillic). So even in Mongolian, the "ŋ" followed by "k" rule gets broken ... Eric Baer (talk) 03:43, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

I've now encountered "y" in the 1997 work. I had been poking through a digital copy and found plenty once I spent more time on it. I think differentiating dialect groups, if only as "Russian" or "Chinese dialects" until we find out finer details, is appropriate for phonology. I'll next make a table for "Chinese dialects" according to what you've indicated here. Once it's up, please adjust it if something is incorrect. JFHJr (㊟) 03:57, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

And about the Mongol script, as far as I've seen, it's not a normative mainstream script used for the language, and IMHO that's a pretty good indicator of what's appropriate in the infobox. For example, Serbo-Croatian language has two scripts (but not Glagolitic), Belarussian language doesn't include the Belarusian Arabic alphabet. I know they're imperfect analogies because of obsolescence. BUT! Even those have a place within the article itself. The 鄂温克语蒙汉对照词汇 sounds fascinating. If you have access to its contents, would you mind helping me add Mongol to the scripts in the article? Since you can't type Mongolian, could you make a chart with the /phoneme/ or cyrillic inside a <!-- comment -->? I was hoping we could do this if the dictionary includes any information on letter order, letter values, and other spelling conventions you might recognize from looking at entries (clearly some are broken)? If you can make a list on the order of the Cyrillic and Roman boxes already there, I can fill in the appropriate Mongol characters and remove the comment fields. What do you think? JFHJr (㊟) 04:33, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

I went ahead and stuck a chart in, hidden in a comment. I'm hoping you can edit the basic inventory to describe what's used in the 1983 dictionary. (fingers crossed) JFHJr (㊟) 05:20, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

I filled in the table. The way they use vowels is rather odd but I'm reasonably sure I didn't get it wrong. Other than that, based on the explanation by Grenoble & Whaley I added in the Cyrillic orthography section I think I finally understand the и vs. ы issue mentioned above; that would mean Эвэды̄ турэ̄н is /ǝvǝdiː turǝːn/. Eric Baer (talk) 08:11, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

Looks excellent! It's been fun working together! JFHJr (㊟) 17:33, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

Vandalism

Subtle vandalism from a 95.*.*.* IP during March 2011, adding non-existent letter to alphabet (also done that in other lang articles) etc. This has been mixed with good faith additions later from "real" editors to other parts of the article, so I don't want to try to fix it myself. Anyone cares to do it? -- Vmenkov (talk) 19:04, 12 April 2011 (UTC)

Tried to fix it myself by reverting the Orthography section to pre-March 1 state. -- Vmenkov (talk) 19:34, 12 April 2011 (UTC)

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Script clarification

Table with general information says that the language operates in 3 scripts, and it says "(experimental)". Which script is considered experimental? 83.142.158.99 (talk) 15:59, 18 April 2024 (UTC)

Citations

@Isaidnoway: When citations are implemented "longhand" with <ref>{{harvnb|, then if there's more than one reference which references the same exact thing, you're relying on people to see that and manually unite them with name=.

Using {{sfn}} automates all that. If the same page is cited twice, they're automatically put together. It my eyes, that makes it easier to use, with less burden on users and less room for user error.

{{sfn|Campbell|2000|p=548}}
...
{{sfn|Campbell|2000|p=548}}

is obviously simpler and more streamlined than

<ref name="Campbell 2000 548">{{harvnb|Campbell|2000|p=548}}</ref>
...
<ref name="Campbell 2000 548" />

To me it just seems like an obviously better way to code references. If you would prefer to code it the other way, can you make a case as to why that method is better? Eievie (talk) 05:05, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

You seemingly admit that the {{sfn}} citation style is your personal preference, which WP:CITEVAR advises against changing it to. The Template:Sfn page explains this as well - Note that the use (or even non-use) of these templates is an element of citation "style", and adding or removing them in articles with an established style should be consistent with that style. See WP:CITEVAR. A look at the history of the article shows that the established citation style of <ref name=>{{harvnb}}</ref> has been used in this article for the past 14 years since May 2010. Additionally, in my experience from cleaning up ref errors for the last 12 years, I've seen way more ref errors with editors using the {{sfn}} citation style, as opposed to editors who use the <ref name=>{{harvnb}}</ref> citation style.

Here is the version of the article from April 9, 2024 immediately before your edit (three example refs)

• Bulatova & Grenoble 1999, p. 4
• Whaley, Grenoble & Li 1999, p. 286
• Nedjalkov 1997, pp. 310–311

Here is the version of the article from May 3, 2024 after your edit (same three refs)

• Bulatova & Grenoble 1999, p. 4
• Whaley, Grenoble & Li 1999, p. 286
• Nedjalkov 1997, pp. 310–311

Looking at the April 9, 2024 version, it appears to me the established citation style is working just fine, and as intended, and there is no compelling reason to change it to your preferred style. Isaidnoway (talk) 08:45, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

I do not think it's a preference, at least not in the way you're implying. I think that automating combining citations which cite the same source has obvious benefits over doing the same thing by hand. It's like using {{convert}} rather than listing both measuring systems by hand and just hoping the user who added it was correct and two measurements are actually equivalent. I guess you could say that both are just a "preference" for computed rather than done by hand. But having less room for human error is a demonstrable improvement. Eievie (talk) 15:26, 12 May 2024 (UTC)