User talk:Landroving Linguist/Archive 2

Afroasiatic languages

All the numbers that I've posted have a source linked to them where the number of speakers can be verified, as do all Wikipedia articles, so wouldn't it make sense to take all those numbers into account.198.205.24.201 (talk) 15:58, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

Well, as an example, I checked the Arabic 420 million number that you cited first, and indeed there was a source for that number, but this source only stated 293 million. That's why you can't quote Wikipedia in Wikipedia. There are too many pages which are maintained by sloppy editors. Landroving Linguist (talk) 09:17, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

Priest

Any particular reason why you removed the picture of the paddling priest from the Lake Tana page? Landroving Linguist (talk) 12:39, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Hi Landroving Linguist. The file was low quality and a non-sequitur, so I replaced it with one of the lacustrine churches that are actually mentioned in the text. Best regards, Middayexpress (talk) 16:46, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Language-population update project

Hi. The 18th edition of Ethnologue just came out, and if we divide up our language articles among us, it won't take long to update them. I would appreciate it if you could help out, even if it's just a few articles (5,000 articles is a lot for just me), but I won't be insulted if you delete this request.

A largely complete list of articles to be updated is at Category:Language articles citing Ethnologue 17. The priority articles are in Category:Language articles with old Ethnologue 17 speaker data. These are the 10% that have population figures at least 25 years old.

Probably 90% of the time, Ethnologue has not changed their figures between the 17th and 18th editions, so all we need to do is change "e17" to "e18" in the reference (ref) field of the language info box. That will change the citation for the artcle to the current edition. Please put the data in the proper fields, or the info box will flag it as needing editorial review. The other relevant fields are "speakers" (the number of native speakers in all countries), "date" (the date of the reference or census that Ethnologue uses, not the date of Ethnologue!), and sometimes "speakers2". Our convention has been to enter e.g. "1990 census" when a census is used, as other data can be much older than the publication date. Sometimes a citation elsewhere in the article depends on the e17 entry, in which case you will need to change "name=e17" to "name=e18" in the reference tag (assuming the 18th edition still supports the cited claim).

Remember, we want the *total* number of native speakers, which is often not the first figure given by Ethnologue. Sometimes the data is too incompatible to add together (e.g. a figure from the 1950s for one country, and a figure from 2006 for another), in which case it should be presented that way. That's one use for the "speakers2" field. If you're not sure, just ask, or skip that article.

Data should not be displayed with more than two, or at most three, significant figures. Sometimes it should be rounded off to just one significant figure, e.g. when some of the component data used by Ethnologue has been approximated with one figure (200,000, 3 million, etc.) and the other data has greater precision. For example, a figure of 200,000 for one country and 4,230 for another is really just 200,000 in total, as the 4,230 is within the margin of rounding off in the 200,000. If you want to retain the spurious precision of the number in Ethnologue, you might want to use the {{sigfig}} template. (First parameter in this template is for the data, second is for the number of figures to round it off to.)

Dates will often need to be a range of all the country data in the Ethnologue article. When entering the date range, I often ignore dates from countries that have only a few percent of the population, as often 10% or so of the population isn't even separately listed by Ethnologue and so is undated anyway.

If Ethnologue does not provide a date for the bulk of the population, just enter "no date" in the date field. But if the population figure is undated, and hasn't changed between the 17th & 18th editions of Ethnologue, please leave the ref field set to "e17", and maybe add a comment to keep it so that other editors don't change it. In cases like this, the edition of Ethnologue that the data first appeared in may be our only indication of how old it is. We still cite the 14th edition in a couple dozen articles, so our readers can see that the data is getting old.

The articles in the categories linked above are over 90% of the job. There are probably also articles that do not currently cite Ethnologue, but which we might want to update with the 18th edition. I'll need to generate another category to capture those, probably after most of the Ethnologue 17 citations are taken care of.

Jump in at the WP:LANG talk page if you have any comments or concerns. Thanks for any help you can give!

— kwami (talk) 02:40, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Error

Sorry about that, I saw that (2015) was changed to (2015a) which drew suspicion as an potentially non-constructive edit, until I saw it was for the references. I will undo the revert for you. Cheers - Wikih101 (talk) 19:51, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject Languages

Thank you for the information about WikiProject Languages recently. Please tell me what "regardless of the number of speakers" means for my updates. If a language is currently spoken, then "high" is the importance, and I have fixed the languages I set otherwise. What about long extinct languages, like Linear A or recently extinct? What about currently spoken dialects, like Aachen dialect? What about constructed languages, like Nal Bino? Please clarify for me. --DThomsen8 (talk) 22:15, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for reacting in this way! Your request prompted me to look for the place that defines the importance scale for the project, and embarrassingly I cannot find it any more. It is certainly not available on the project page. I'm pretty sure I have seen it there at some stage, although years ago, but since it is not there any more, I cannot uphold the claim I made on your talk page. From my (admittedly twisted) memory I recall that basically all language varieties with their own ISO 639-3 code should get high importance. Dialects of such languages would get mid importance. I don't recall how extinct languages fared in that system, and constructed languages, including Quenya and Klingon, also had a set importance rate, but I don't recall which one. So, all being told, as there is now no record anywhere of how the scale works, you can probably follow your own intuition (countless ISO-3 language pages did not have any rating for years, or lower than 'high', so whatever the rule was, it was not followed in practice). You may ignore my objection on your talk page until the project decides on a new documented importance scale for its articles. Best wishes, Landroving Linguist (talk) 21:02, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

Languages of Ethiopia

Hello Landroving Linguist,

Some years ago you wrote:

That's a matter of perspective. The Classical Arabic, which most users with a religious background would know in Ethiopia, is from a language use perspective as dead as Latin - or as alive. It is a different matter with Sudanese Arabic, which is used as a second language by various speakers in Western Ethiopia. That, of course, is very much a living language. So maybe it would make sense to mention Sudanese Arabic on this page. Trouble is, I am not aware of any published sources. Landroving Linguist (talk) 14:18, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

Some days ago, you deleted the sentences:

There are three different types of Arabic used in Ethiopia, namely Modern Standard Arabic, Sudanese Arabic and Yemeni Arabic. Modern Standard Arabic is used by educated speakers of Colloquial Arabic, Sudanese Arabic is used by fewer than 100,000 people in Ethiopia and Yemeni Arabic is used by 10,000 people who live in coastal areas.

The sources for these information were mentioned. May I ask you why did you delete these sentences?

Kind regards, — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.79.44.163 (talk) 12:03, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

Dear 87.79.44.163, thanks for asking! As you were introducing three different varieties of Arabic, my response will necessarily have three parts. For all three varieties it applies that none of them appears to be spoken as a mother tongue in Ethiopia, and the article, in the place where you inserted your text, was dealing with mother tongues only. The next paragraph mentions important second languages in Ethiopia, and includes Arabic among English and Italian. I think this is a balanced treatment of Arabic, as it is certainly not more important than English as a second language in Ethiopia, but more important than Italian. Now, to Classical Arabic: What I have said in the passage you quoted is still my position: it is a language with limited religious use, and as such not actually well known by many people in Ethiopia - at most religious specialists have a good passive knowledge. It should not be mentioned as a living language here. Yemen Arabic, according to the sources you cite, belongs to the coastlands of what then was Ethiopia, which means that it now belongs to Eritrea. Eritrea became independent after the publication of the Ethnologue version the UNHCR site refers to. This leaves Sudanese Arabic, which, as I stated above, I believe (and know) to be used as a second language by people around Assosa. I just don't have a written source for it. The sources quoted by the UNHCR on that matter are oral statements by diplomats, who cannot be used as the kind of secondary source that we value here on Wikipedia (the UNHCR source actually only states that based on their information the use of Arabic is possible in Ogaden and Oromo; they further put heavy disclaimers on this, saying that this is by no means authoritative). This brings us to an important principle of Wikipedia: That we can only include information for which there are good secondary sources. This means that often I cannot include information that I know to be true (like that Arabic is spoken as a second language around Assosa), simply because I cannot support this with a good source. Also I need to make sure that a source that appears to be good really supports my claim. Ethnologue 1992 supported the claim that Yemen Arabic was used in Ethiopian coastlands. But since Ethiopia lost its coastlands since, I cannot use that source any more for that claim relating to the Ethiopia of 2016. I hope this helps as an explanation why I deleted these lines. Remember that Arabic is listed as an important second language in the article, and this is as it should be. Best wishes, Landroving Linguist (talk) 07:31, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

Dear Landroving Linguist,

Thank you for your reply. You are absolutely right that the coastland which was Ethiopia in the past now belongs to Eritrea.

It is also true that Classical Arabic or Modern Standard Arabic is rather used and taught as a religious language of Muslims in Ethiopia.

Concerning Sudanese Arabic, in fact it is used (amongst others) as a mother tongue in Ethiopia in some areas which are close to the border of Sudan as well as South Sudan.

In addition, in the Somali Region of Ethiopia the majority of the population is of Somali ethnic background (around 97 %). They speak (predominantly) Somali and (partially) Arabic (in particular Somali Arabic dialect similar to Yemeni Arabic) as their mother tongue.

Kind regards, — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.197.63.30 (talk) 20:04, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

References

Languages of Ethiopia

While most international organizations including the UN and its affiliated bodies make a legal distinction between the notion of “working languages” and that of “official languages”, the constitutional texts of WIPO do not define the term “official languages” and refer only to “working languages”. --- http://www.wipo.int/edocs/mdocs/govbody/en/a_48/a_48_11.doc

I can find more sources if you like. —አቤል ዳዊት^?(Janweh64) (talk) 10:39, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

The WIPO document that you quote deals with the question whether WIPO works with official languages, and they don't distinguish them for their own purposes from working languages. This does not mean that they wish to define the term official language for all other purposes. Other institutions do make that distinction, right, but that does not mean that according to the purposes of the Wikipedia infobox, Ethiopia does not have an official language. By the general understanding of the term, a language in which laws are published is considered to be the official language. On the federal level in Ethiopia, this happens in Amharic and English, and no other language. You may want to have a look at this peer-reviewed article by Milkessa Midega as confirmation for the fact that indeed Amharic is seen as the official language of Federal Ethiopia, written by someone who definitely is not happy about the fact and wishes it to be different. I don't want an edit war, and I will not pursue this further, but I expect that others will correct your edits in a similar way. Landroving Linguist (talk) 13:29, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

AfroAsiatic language

The IP you reverted there is an EddieDrood sock, editor known for falsifying references and making up terminology not present in references Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/EddieDrood/Archive, so thanks. Doug Weller talk 13:55, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

Nilotic people

The article was previously written to give the impression that at 1500 AD there was no Nilotes, South Sudan Nilotes are possibly still living in their Paleolithic urheimat (in reference to the Dinka) -Sudd Marsh- which is very rare in any human population, that is why the Roman expedition to the Sudd Marsh was mentioned, although its not directly relevant. I am not talking about the Nilotes of Gambela or Uganda,in European history or Semitic we always focus on the main group, but when it comes to writing the history of other groups, it ends up with at 1500 AD, we re taking about lineal Africans that have no other land, they didn't come from the Steppe or the Levant, keep on roving & I hope you can elaborate and expand the Nilotic people article, just like the much more recent Germanic or Semitic people have elaborate articles, full of mainstream self-polishing. Tiwahi (talk) 13:31, 22 November 2017 (UTC)

Arabic in Ethiopia

The most spoken Arabic today is by returning immigrants (Gulf Arabic & Lebanese Arabic), Spoken Arabic is rare outside of the immigrant populations, similar situation to how German is spoken today in Anatolian villages by retiring/returning immigrants. Tiwahi (talk) 13:38, 22 November 2017 (UTC)

In both situations I doubt that the language picked up in the diaspora has any significant use. Turkish returnees to Anatolia of course know German, but they won't use it back in their villages, except maybe for watching German TV. The same is true for Ethiopians returning from Arab countries. Who should they talk to in Arabic? With any Ethiopian, they will just use their original Ethiopian languages. Landroving Linguist (talk) 05:26, 23 November 2017 (UTC)

I agree this in response to an earlier post on your talk, the current returnee Arabic (Gulf and Lebanese) is the only actual Arabic remaining in current Ethiopia the knowledge of few words in Arabic from Islamic Madrasa is not knowledge of Arabic, prior to Derg Yemeni Arabic had a minor presence in the major cities (Merchants brought by Menelik frst to Piazza then moved by the Italians to Merkato), they were targeted by the Derg & now their role has been replaced by Gurage. Even the Arabic spoken in Post-Derg Eritrea (previously Ethiopia) is mostly Bedouin (Rashaida) & a bit Hadrami Arabic near the boder were Sudanes-Hadrami presence overlaps with Rashaida. The main Yemeni Arabic speaking population in the Horn of Africa is in Downtown Djibouti. Very interested in Agaw people & Pre-Semitic culture of that region, hopefully your work helps expand on that Tiwahi (talk) 09:18, 23 November 2017 (UTC)

Heinrich-Hermann von Hülsen in Celle

He came up from Hauptman, so I presume he was branched as a horse-soldier. He most certainly was a Generalmajor, did they no longer carry branch? Not being an expert, I shall leave this to your mercies. I am no longer monitoring with page. ''Paul, in Saudi'' (talk) 12:33, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

Eastern Sudanic languages

Hello, Landroving Linguist. There is no Consensus. Glottolog 3.2 (2018) (Scientific and Exact project, Biggest authority on language classification) does not accept that a relationship has been demonstrated between any of the nine families of Eastern Sudanic, nor their connection to a broader Nilo-Saharan phylum. For Now Surmic languages are top-level family. I am adding only Glottolog top-level families to the Category:Language families I will synchronize Wikipedia with newer Glottolog versions. From Glottolog : Comments on family membership (Surmic languages) No conclusive, methodologically sound basis for assigning Surmic to Eastern Sudanic Bender, M. Lionel 2005 or to an alleged full or partial Nilo-Saharan has been presented Blench, Roger 2000 , Bender, Lionel M. 2000 , Pascal Boyeldieu 2011 . Best regards (Jkrn111 (talk))

Based on your Glottolog quote it appears that you have a point - but I find that very surprising, as both Bender and Blench in fact support the inclusion of Surmic in Eastern Sudanic. Who of the Glottolog staff actually knows enough to go against those two in this? I'd still maintain that the consensus of reliable secondary sources is well in favour of the unity of Eastern Sudanic. Glottolog is a tertiary source, and as such should not be given more weight than secondary sources, when they agree with each other. Landroving Linguist (talk) 06:27, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

Responsible for exact classification is Martin Haspelmath Martin Haspelmath (German) born 2 February 1963 in Hoya, Lower Saxony) is a German linguist working in the field of linguistic typology. He is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (since 2015), and worked at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig from 1998 to 2015. He is also an honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Leipzig. He is one of the editors of the World Atlas of Language Structures and the Glottolog online database, and has worked on the Standard Average European sprachbund. Besides typology, his research interests include syntactic and morphological theory, language change and language contact. He is a member of the Academia Europaea. According to Google Scholar, his work has been cited over 12,000 times and he has an h-index of 52.[1] Best Regards. (talk))

Ethiopia

Hello. My edits were not for nationalist purposes. It does not seem to me that English has an official status, since Aramaic is indicated as the only official language. Furthermore, the Italian war crimes have occurred, but it did not seem necessary to insert the pages among the main articles, it is like inserting American, English, German etc. crimes in all the pages of the countries they have occupied. It would be more appropriate to put it as see also. In any case I don't want to cause any edit war and I'm willing to talk about it. -- DavideVeloria88 (msg)

Very good! I'm glad you're willing to discuss this, and an edit war would not be helpful. By virtue of its use for the publication of all federal laws in the Negazit Gazeta English is indeed a semi-official language in Ethiopia, although this is not matched by any proficiency of most people. English is also the language of most secondary and all tertiary education in the country. It therefore enjoys a status that goes well beyond that of any other foreign language in Ethiopia, certainly also beyond Arabic.

The role of the Italian occupation for ending slavery in Ethiopia is more complex than plainly stating that Italy abolished it. There was already much of an effort since Menelik to end slavery, and Haile Selassie was trying very hard to get rid of it. The Mussolini government rather used the fact that slavery was still practised as one of the pretexts for the invasion, and therefore the "abolishment" right after Italian troops crossed the border in October 1935 rather served propaganda purposes than having any real effect. A good summary of the situation by Hanibal Goitom of the US Library of Congress can be read here.

I'm German, and I can tell you that I fully expect any article and page dealing with German occupations to mention the countless German war crimes, as they do. Any war crime certainly has a big impact as to how an occupation is judged by posterity, and this is certainly true for the Italian occupation of Ethiopia. You will just have to accept that they will have a prominent place when talking about this time. Landroving Linguist (talk) 21:29, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

The way you handled the Italian war crimes on the page Ethiopian history I find acceptable. Landroving Linguist (talk) 21:37, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

Oromo in Benishangul-Gumuz

Akkam!(Oromo saying of Hi). I thank you for your edit on Oromo language. Like you said Benishangul-Gumuz region conducts education in local languages. It was. It is this year, though planned to start last year 2011 E.C, it started to give education in Oromo language in 13 schools. I wish I could provide better evidence than official bbc Afaan Oromoo facebook post - which is in Oromo language. The problem is I think you know. We dont document much and we dont use much internet. So do you think I put it back?

Thanks for starting this discussion! I didn't know about this initiative, but I take your word for it. The problem with the wording "the primary language of education" is that it will be misunderstood to mean "the main language of education", which Oromo also is not in Addis Ababa. Now that I look at it again, I believe you mean to say "a language of primary education", which then describes exactly what is happening in the regions you listed. I will change it this way, and re-include Benishangul-Gumuz Region. Best wishes, Landroving Linguist (talk) 08:45, 5 November 2019 (UTC)

References