:::::With respect to the self-citation, I hear what you are saying, and I can see how it could look. In this particular case, I cited my own work because my diagram of the language family is the most thorough one that I am aware of, in addition to the fact that I had the rights to contribute it.
:::::With respect to the self-citation, I hear what you are saying, and I can see how it could look. In this particular case, I cited my own work because my diagram of the language family is the most thorough one that I am aware of, in addition to the fact that I had the rights to contribute it.
:::::-[[User:Dowobeha|Dowobeha]] ([[User talk:Dowobeha|talk]]) 02:04, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
:::::-[[User:Dowobeha|Dowobeha]] ([[User talk:Dowobeha|talk]]) 02:04, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
::::::Besides sending the email to permissions-commons@wikimedia.org, is there anything else that I should do to get the file deletion for copyright violation reversed? [[User:Dowobeha|Dowobeha]] ([[User talk:Dowobeha|talk]]) 02:06, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
== The OED is a document of the entire English language ==
== The OED is a document of the entire English language ==
Astrology has no effect on reality, so why should reality have any effect on astrology? – J.S. Stenzel, commenting on astrological planets that astrologers acknowledge don't really exist
(Previous quotes)
The official state rainbow flag of Russia (official in JAO since 1996)
Do you think the liberals are using these school shootings to further their anti-tragedy agenda?
— Col. Erran Morad, Who Is America?, s01e01
yod-dropper
— (when you need something that sounds like an insult)[1]
It is a mortifying circumstance, which greatly perplexes many a painstaking philosopher, that nature often refuses to second his most profound and elaborate efforts; so that often after having invented one of the most ingenious and natural theories imaginable, she will have the perverseness to act directly in the teeth of his system, and flatly contradict his most favorite positions. This is a manifest and unmerited grievance, since it throws the censure of the vulgar and unlearned entirely upon the philosopher; whereas the fault is not to be ascribed to his theory, which is unquestionably correct, but to the waywardness of Dame Nature, who, with the proverbial fickleness of her sex, is continually indulging in coquetries and caprices, and seems really to take pleasure in violating all philosophic rules, and jilting the most learned and indefatigable of her adorers. [...] The philosophers took this in very ill part, and it is thought they would never have pardoned the slight and affront which they conceived put upon them by the world had not a good-natured professor kindly officiated as a mediator between the parties, and effected a reconciliation. Finding the world would not accommodate itself to the theory, he wisely determined to accommodate the theory to the world.
Pela primeira vez na sua vida a morte soube o que era ter um cão no regaço. For the first time in her life, death knew what it felt like to have a dog in her lap.
The Church says that the Earth is Flat, but I know that it is Round, for I have seen its Shadow on the Moon, and I have more Faith in a Shadow than in the Church.
— (commonly misattributed to Magellan)
In the early years of the study there were more than 200 speakers of the dialect, including one parrot.
This is a totally new subject for me, and I noticed the title had been changed to include a curly, rather than straight, apostrophe. IIRC, there is a consensus to avoid them. Here's the redirect page:
Valjean, that's not an apostrophe, but a letter of the alphabet. All the apostrophes in that article are straight.
There's some debate about non-English letters and diacritics too, but for American languages there seems to be general consensus to spell words correctly when using native orthography. That's similar to Hawaiian, which has its own MOS (MOS:HAWAII). — kwami (talk) 18:28, 30 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Please excuse my ignorance, but that letter looks like a curly apostrophe to me, not an okina, and now I see you have just changed the straight ones to curly ones. You had also been the one who moved the article from a title with a straight one to the current title with a curly one. That's why I knew to ask you.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but the MOS says:
"An apostrophe should never be used in place of the ʻokina diacritic, even if it is used in the source. Unless used as a part of a formal spelling, apostrophes should be replaced with the ʻokina character (ʻ)."
Valjean, "ʻOkina" is a letter of the Hawaiian alphabet. That MOS is specifically for Hawaiian. But the rationale here is the same: If we're going to use orthography, we should use orthography. If not, we should use anglicized spelling. There's a trend, especially in Canada, to use orthography, but if a word or name is sufficiently common in English, COMMON may override that. The anglicized equivalent of Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw is "Kwakiutl", which many sources object to as inaccurate.
Yes, when I checked out the article, I noticed some mistakes, which I fixed. Someone had added text with ASCII substitutes for Kwakʼwala orthography.
As for whether the glottal stop is 6-shaped or 9-shaped, we follow usage in the language. In Tahitian, it's turned on its side, which doesn't have direct Unicode support. In Hawaiian it's 6-shaped, in much of Anglo-America, it's 9-shaped, and in Mexico it's generally straight (the saltillo), but still not an apostrophe. For example, you can have a capital saltillo, but there's no such thing as a capital apostrophe. In still other languages, you use a gelded question mark, or even the digit '7'. Those are all commonly substituted with apostrophes, but that's no different that substituting for German umlauts and eszett: okay in a chat, but not what we expect from an encyclopedia. — kwami (talk) 19:03, 30 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Valjean: I think if we were going to ignore diacritics, as sports journals commonly do with Croatian names in tennis, then we'd drop the glottal stop entirely and spell it "Kwakwakawakw". Just as we do with "Hawaii". — kwami (talk) 20:02, 30 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Unicode Charts
Hi Kwami,
I have reverted your template merge [2]. In this case it is preferable to have a separate template, for multiple reasons. First of all, there is no wikilaw that forces us to do a single-transclusion merge like this. So we can judge case by case. In other situations, it may be done for conveniance. Keeping all the Category:Unicode charts (345) consistently a template, makes maintenance easier (much easier), even automatable sometimes. Also, it allows for reuse in the future (when an second article can use it). I have very good experiences with developing and maintaining a similar set with 1-transclusion. And, obviously, no harm is done this way. DePiep (talk) 05:29, 1 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The name Nǀuu is really breathy. That would have to be in the click, wouldn't it? I wonder why we don't see it in the orthography. — kwami (talk) 20:44, 5 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
"NIuu" is how the Dutch article spells it--that bar looks like a capital I to me. I don't know much about clicks. I was struck by the fact that the kids all spoke Afrikaans and I'm reading the Dutch subtitles. I mean, it makes perfect sense, historically, though I wonder if they're speaking a localized version of Afrikaans--and if they, way out there, still speak Afrikaans, that just shows you how powerful that colonial oppression was. Coincidentally, de Volkskrant is running a series (on their Instagram, couldn't find this on the website) on the Dutch colonial past--and today that concerned precisely these people, the San and the Khoi, and how they were portrayed by Westerners. Ha, and every other Dutch racist felt the need to chime in and say WHAT ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE STORIES LETS JUST MOVE ON. Drmies (talk) 21:08, 5 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, that's just a typographic substitute.
Afrikaans is the native language of the colored population. It's not just official because of the white population. AFAIK it's close to universal in the Western Cape.
I don't think there's any strong distinction between Kaaps (the Afrikaans spoken by the coloreds in the Cape) and Boer Afrikaans. There are some differences, such as a word nǀa (with a click) 'good, cool', and differences in grammar and pronunciation, with some colored speaking something closer to a creole [maybe, that's debated], but AFAIK you can't reliably identify someone by the way they speak. — kwami (talk) 21:29, 5 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Kaktovik numerals
@Kwamikagami Could you please stop reverting all of the changes
Hi, I see that you reverted a change I made, with a comment about Greenlandic not using base-20. Could you please help me understand your reasoning? Thanks! Dowobeha (talk) 06:38, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Dowobeha: Sure. Greenlandic has a decimal system, under Danish influence. (Rather ironically, since Danish is partly vigesimal.)
Also, the family tree you've been adding isn't appropriate for every article. We try to avoid duplicating info, it makes it difficult to keep things up-to-date and consistent. Also, it's not cited to the best source, AFAIK is not well supported (e.g. there is no Yupik branch of the Eskimoan languages), and is pushing revisionist terminology rather than following COMMONNAME. — kwami (talk) 07:08, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Kwamikagami Thanks for the response. I appreciate your work on maintaining high quality articles. With respect to the language family, the family is broken into a major branch containing the Inuit and Yupik languages, and a much smaller branch that contains the Unangan (Aleut) language. The major branch is further broken down into Inuit and Yupik branches, as shown in the diagram. This is very widely documented. For example, see the Comparative Eskimo Dictionary, the Grammar of Central Alaskan Yup'ik, the Alaska Native Language Center language map, the Grammar of St. Lawrence Island Yupik, the St. Lawrence Island Yupik dictionary, the Central Alaskan Yupik dictionary, the Naukan Yupik dictionary, as well as many academic publications by Soviet, Russian, and Alaskan scholars. With respect to COMMONNAME, the terms Yupik, Inuit, and Unangan are the common names for those language groups. Dowobeha (talk) 07:27, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
It's the Eskimo-Aleut language family. That may change some day, but currently practically no-one knows the name "Unangan", and Alaskan Inuit continue to call themselves Eskimos.
As for the family, last I knew the Yupik branch was considered to be spurious, united in name but not linguistically. The family tree should reflect best knowledge. — kwami (talk) 07:30, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Kwamikagami I have provided academic citations. I am trying in good faith to make the articles the best as possible. If you have a counter-point, I would really appreciate it if you could also provide citations to back up your statements. Simply saying X is true and Y is not without providing citations does not help make good articles. Dowobeha (talk) 07:37, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The refs are in the family article. I see that Glottolog, citing Dorais 2010, currently support your classification. There might be reason to adjust our classification to match, but that should be discussed on the family article. But even if an Inuit-Yupik bifurcation is accepted, the file still shouldn't be repeated in 20 different articles. — kwami (talk) 07:42, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Kwamikagami I'm not sure what you mean by an Inuit-Yupik bifurcation being accepted. The Eskimo language has always been classified into Inuit and Yupik branches, and I have provided numerous citations to back that up. Dowobeha (talk) 07:48, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
No, it hasn't. Last time I delved into this, Yupik was paraphyletic. Again, consensus may have changed, but best to establish that on the main article before you start adding it to dozens of others. Especially where it's not relevant. — kwami (talk) 07:50, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Should be in the family article. That's the first place I'd look myself. If not, I'd need to dig through my refs, which are on a different computer. — kwami (talk) 07:55, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
If you could provide a citation regarding the Greenlandic decimal system, that would be much appreciated. All of the languages in the family historically had base-20 numbering systems. While it is certainly true that exposure to colonial languages (Russian, English, French, and Danish) led to widespread usage of base-10 number systems, as far as I know base-10 is universally used when speaking in the colonial language (Russian, English, French, and Danish) or when using colonial words as loan-words. If Greenlandic has incorporated base-10 into the language itself, that needs a citation. Dowobeha (talk) 07:30, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Should be in the Greenlandic article. I don't know the language, but I've come across that statement several times. If it's not true, that would simplify things. Do you have a source that contemporary Greenlandic is vigesimal? — kwami (talk) 07:32, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I haven't duplicated any information. I'm not sure what you mean by revisionist terminology. Could you please explain what you mean by that and provide an example of what I did that failed to follow the common name policy? Dowobeha (talk) 07:46, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Repeating the same thing on dozens of articles is indeed "duplication". Many times over.
Are you concerned with the fact that I included a link to the language family tree on all of the individual language pages? How is that duplication? Dowobeha (talk) 07:49, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know how to respond without repeating myself. You're adding the same paragraph of text to dozens of articles, where it's only marginally relevant and is best handled with a link to a single, central account. — kwami (talk) 07:52, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Kwamikagami I am asking because I legitimately don't understand what you think I have duplicated. I did two main things in my series of edits. 1) I clarified existing text to use ethnonyms where possible, and 2) I added a link to a diagram of the language family tree to the individual page for each language in the family. The diagram included a citation to the academic publication where the diagram was published, along with a quote from the article as part of the citation. At no point did I include the same paragraph of text to dozens of articles. The only thing that was duplicated was the quote within the citation. Dowobeha (talk) 07:58, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Kwamikagami OK. I attempted to do exactly that by providing a common image file and then linking to it. I don't know of a way to do the same thing for a reference. Is there a mechanism for creating a reference that is linked to from multiple articles? I would love to learn that there is. Dowobeha (talk) 08:10, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
But why does the file need to be duplicated? If we want to replace it in the future, we'd need to replace it in dozens of articles. When you say X is a language in family Y, and link family Y, that gives readers who are interested the ability to follow up on that info. That's why we have links. Encyclopedias are modular, with information centralized in discrete locations. If you want to now about X, you look up the article on X. If you want to know about Y, you look up the article on Y. Where they're interconnected, they state that and provide links.— kwami (talk) 08:13, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Kwamikagami I hear what you are saying. Thank you for helping me to understand your point. I thought that providing a link on each language's page to a language family chart from a reliable source would be appropriate. From what you are telling me, I was clearly mistaken. Dowobeha (talk) 08:24, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
It's not the links, it's the duplication of information. If it were in a centralized place and you linked to it, that would be fine. But you copied it across dozens of articles. That means that any correction or update will need to be copied across all those articles as well. And, inevitably, they won't be. Which means that different articles will end up claiming different things. That becomes a real pain to maintain, and is a disservice to our readers. — kwami (talk) 08:33, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Kwamikagami I understand, and I don't want to create duplication. I included the reference and the quote along with the link to the chart because I thought it was appropriate to cite the source where the chart came from. If I understand you correctly, the primary issue then is fact that there was a duplication of the quote across numerous articles. Is that correct? Dowobeha (talk) 08:38, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Also duplication of the file. Why does it need to be repeated over and over and over again? the place for the classification of the family is the article on the classification of the family. Although, at least for a transcluded file, any corrections to the file on Commons will appear in all the articles, so it's not as bad as duplicating text. — kwami (talk) 09:02, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I'm confused. I don't think I duplicated any files. I created a PDF version and a PNG version of the language family chart, in order to figure out which one would look the best. I then linked to that file on multiple articles. Did I somehow make multiple copies unintentionally? Dowobeha (talk) 09:18, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
It's not jargon, just my wording. I meant the trend to change everyone's name every couple of years, so that no-one can keep track of who anyone is. Sometimes this is due to the people themselves advocating a different name, such as the Inuit of Canada (though not of the US) dispreferring 'Eskimo'. But probably more often it's patronizing outsiders who think they need to protect the poor natives by correcting their names, based on what they imagine is authentic or might be offensive. A few years later they'll decide they (or someone else) got it wrong, and will go on a campaign to correct it all over again.
So e.g. the Lolo were renamed the Yi because 'Lolo' was supposed to be pejorative. Then 'Yi' was changed to the constructed name 'Ngwi' (which English-speakers can't even pronounce) because 'Yi' was a Chinese exonym. But 'Lolo' is the endonym and there's nothing pejorative about it, and the Lolo continue to call themselves that. Or the Bushmen were renamed the San because 'Bushmen' was supposedly racist. But actually 'San' is a racist slur, and 'Bushmen' is only racist if you think their traditional lifestyle is inferior, which is itself racist and a POV they're trying to correct.
One problem with changing names of small peoples is that as a result no-one recognizes them, which can be a real problem when achieving recognition is much more important to them that whatever people happen to call them (assuming it's not actually a slur).
We don't feel the need to 'correct' the name of the Germans, or Greek, or Armenians, or Chinese, or Koreans, or call Hebrew "Ivrit". Best to leave familiar names alone unless and until common usage shifts. — kwami (talk) 08:48, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Kwamikagami That makes sense. I live in Alaska at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. I work next door to the Alaska Native Language Center and interact every day with Yup'ik faculty members. I am very aware of the danger of outsiders choosing names. The changes that I am making to prefer the names Inuit, Yupik, and Unangan over Eskimo and Aleut are the direct result of members of those ethnic groups consistently asking that their own ethnic and linguistic names be used. If you look through the edits that I made, I was very careful and conscientious to provide appropriate and reliable academic citations to back up the changes that I made. It is very frustrating to have those careful changes indiscriminately reverted without even the courtesy of a discussion. Dowobeha (talk) 08:58, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
But we're not here to WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS. If readers recognize 'Aleut' but not 'Unangan', then it's a disservice to use the latter. (It would be different if 'Aleut' were pejorative, but it's not.) If common usage shifts to 'Unangan', so that readers come to recognize it, then WP usage will follow. But we follow the shift: we don't create it.
Similarly with the names of countries. Turkey has recently decided that from now on they should be called "Türkiye" because they don't like sounding like the bird. But common English usage is "Turkey", so that's what WP continues to use regardless. If common usage shifts, then WP will follow, but we're not here to promote the decisions of organizations or governments. — kwami (talk) 09:29, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not trying to right great wrongs. Let me ask you this. How would you know when common usage shifts? What metric should Wikipedia use to measure that? Because in my professional experience, the usage has shifted, and in my edits I have referenced reliable sources that use the terms that I am using in my edits. Dowobeha (talk) 09:34, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Kwamikagami I also want to point out that from my perspective, this situation is a clear example of Wikipedia's problem of [expert retention]. I am a published expert in this field. I am being very careful not to conduct original research and to provide justifications through reliable citations to everything I do. Your statement that Yupik isn't a branch of Eskimo is a great example of amateurs promoted dubious or plainly wrong positions in spite of their utter lack of knowledge of the topic[4]Dowobeha (talk) 08:52, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I see that you're the one who added the claim that Eskimoan bifurcates into Yupik and Inuit, rather than Inuit being just one of several branches of the family, back in 2008. Perhaps the linguistic reconstructions that lead to that conclusion have been superseded; i haven't reviewed the lit is years. — kwami (talk) 09:20, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I have never seen any reliable source that claimed that Yupik wasn't a subgroup of Eskimo. Every source I have ever read clearly states that Yupik and Inuit are the two branches of Eskimo. This isn't something new. If someone on Wikipedia claimed something else, that was a case of amateurs making edits that weren't backed up by references. Dowobeha (talk) 09:29, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
No, it was a matter of it not being properly cited. Yes, the traditional classification was that Eskimoan has two branches. But at least at one point, when people tried reconstructing it, they found that there was little evidence for a Yupik branch: genealogically, Yupik was anything that wasn't Inuit, and that as far as they could tell there were half a dozen branches of Eskimoan, one of which was Inuit. Similarly, the traditional bifurcation of Yupik into Alaskan and Siberian branches didn't hold up either. It looks like no-one's resurrected that. — kwami (talk) 09:33, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
If you have citations that actually show what you are claiming, I would love to read them. I have studied multiple Yupik languages, and I posted reliable citations, including multiple published by the Alaska Native Language Center, which is one of the world's leading expert organizations on the language family. What you are saying about reconstruction sounds like amateur speculation. It certainly isn't discussed in the Comparative Eskimo Dictionary with Aleut Cognates by Fortescue et al. That is the foremost work on the subject, written by three of the top scholars in the field, first edition in 1994 and second edition in 2010. Dowobeha (talk) 09:42, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed, Fortescue reconstructed proto-Yupik, so it wasn't him.
I don't know if I'll be able to find the citation; it was the latest reconstruction when I learned the structure of the family. Not a positive reconstruction, just a conclusion that proto-Yupik didn't hold up. I'll keep looking, but if all RS's since then have most of Yupik as a coherent branch, then that's what we need to show on WP. Perhaps the exclusion of Sirenik from Yupik is the remnant of that agnostic position? that Yupik holds up once Sirenik is excluded? — kwami (talk) 09:52, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The only thing I can find to support what you remember is the text on the Eskimo-Aleut page from 2008 "Traditionally, the Eskimo language family was divided into the Inuit group and the Yup'ik (or Yup'ik-Yuit) group. However, recent research suggests that Yup'ik by itself is not a valid node, or, equivalently, that the Inuit dialect continuum is but one of several languages of the Yup'ik group. However, although it may be technically correct to replace the term Eskimo with Yup'ik in this classification, this would not be acceptable to most Inuit. Also, the Alaskan-Siberian dichotomy appears to have been geographical rather than linguistic." No references were listed.
The following all show the language family laid out as I showed in the diagram I posted:
- Comparative Eskimo Dictionary with Aleut Cognates by Fortescue et al
Yes, I suspect that the source was ca. 2005, give or take a few years.
From Dorais, it sounds like most of Yupik was until recently a dialect continuum, so that means the Yupik branch consists of just that and Aleutiq (unless Aleutiq was also part of the DC?). But Dorais and several other recent sources posit three branches to Eskimoan, which means that the traditional bifurcation is indeed dead. Not uncommon for someone to reject a branch only for much but not all of that branch to later be resurrected.
I'm also noticing that a lot of relatively recent sources continue to use EA as the name for the family, even when they change the names of the individual languages. — kwami (talk) 10:23, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I've got my copy of Dorais right in front of me. Can you point me to where you are referring to with respect to Yupik being a dialect continuum. I can believe that with respect to Central Alaskan Yup'ik. But making that claim about Naukan, St. Lawrence Island Yupik, and Sugpiaq is a stretch.
He says on p. 18: As far as mutual intelligibility is concerned, Naukanski stands midway between Central Siberian Yupik and Central Alaskan Yup’ik. It seems that when the latter was still spoken on the north shore of Norton Sound (southern Seward Peninsula), all the way to Bering Strait, there existed an east-west linguistic continuum that linked Central Alaskan Yup’ik with Naukanski (across Bering Strait) and Central Siberian Yupik (the south-western neighbour of Naukanski).— kwami (talk) 10:46, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I see it. At that point in the text Dorais is discussing mutual intelligibility in the the historical distribution of the languages. Central Yup'ik was once prominent on the Seward Peninsula, but was mostly replaced by Inupiaq quite a long time ago. I'd need to check the dates, but I would guess quite some time ago. Given that the Yupik languages have a common proto-language, then of course at some point there would have been something like a dialect continuum. But Dorais isn't making the case here that that is true today, only at some historical point in the past. Dowobeha (talk) 10:54, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I'd have to dig. The Inupiaq invasion of the Seward Peninsula isn't my area of expertise. The next time I see Larry Kaplan I can ask him. He would definitely know.
In any case, all sources agree that the Yupik languages (Naukan, Yupik, Yup'ik, and Sugpiaq) are definitely not mutually intelligible today.
Don't worry about it! Yes, I got that about not being MI. I just meant that if we can trace the connections that closely, then we're not talking about deep divisions. And that's consistent with the bi/tri-furcation of the Eskimoan languages. — kwami (talk) 11:10, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
There are certainly still places where you will see the term Eskimo-Aleut used. But the most reliable and most highly cited sources don't:
Indigenous Peoples and Languages of Alaska. Krauss, Michael, Gary Holton, Jim Kerr, and Colin T. West. 2011. Fairbanks and Anchorage: Alaska Native Language Center and UAA Institute of Social and Economic Research.
The original 1974 edition used the terms Eskimo and Aleut. The current version is from 2011 and is the best and most cited source for the language family. It uses Inuit-Yupik and Aleut as the names of the sub-branches, and then uses the endonyms for the specific language names.
Could you point me to the citations? Dorais (2010) primarily uses Eskaleut, as do the publications by Berge that I have seen most recently. I haven't seen anything recent by Fortescue.
Yeah. I would say that the change away from the term Eskimo and towards the endonyms Inuit and Yupik has been gradually shifting for the past thirty or forty years, and has definitely sped up in the past 15 years. But really you can trace the changes back quite a long way, at least as far back as the Alaska Native Claims settlement act.
Yes. My point is that they're not calling them the Inuit-Yupik-Unangam languages. The difference between "Eskaleut" and "Eskimo-Aleut" is trivial, like "Afrasiatic" vs "Afro-Asiatic". But I can't even write the other without looking up what Aleut's supposed to be called. — kwami (talk) 11:14, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, but it's not a trivial difference. The difference between the use of Eskaleut and Eskimo-Aleut is huge. Whether you use Eskaleut or Inuit-Yupik-Unangan, either way you are recognizing that Eskimo-Aleut is not really the best name. And the fact that Fortescue was using Eskaleut in 2000 is really important. There is a consensus that Eskimo is not the right term. There is a consensus that specific endonyms should be preferred whenever possible. - Dowobeha (talk) 11:19, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
So... going forward it would be great if I could provide my professional expertise (with citations) in making edits to the articles in about these languages, especially in my area of expertise in the Yupik branch. I'm very happy to back up my proposed edits.
But it would be really nice if I could do so without having to constantly fear that my changes will be reverted by well-meaning editors who quite frankly aren't familiar with the field.
@Dowobeha: You are of course welcome to share your expertise. And I do mean "welcome": we need people like you. But this wasn't a matter of a factual dispute, but of maintaining an encyclopedic presentation.
Text shouldn't be unnecessarily duplicated when it can -- or already is -- centralized. For a guideline, if you look at the coverage of our other language families, you'll see that we don't have family trees in the individual language articles and even dialect articles, as you've been adding. Uyghur language, for example, does not have a tree of the Turkic language family. And neither do our articles on the peoples who speak these languages, such as Uyghurs. This is true both for familiar languages in large families and for obscure languages in tiny families. We will occasionally make an exception to illustrate some point or other, but we don't, for example, duplicate the Afroasiatic family tree in our articles on the dozens of Arabic dialects that we cover.
Terminology should be consistent. Readers have enough difficulty with the jargon we use without us constantly switching terminology on them. If it is desirable to rename a language family, we should rename the main article. If not, then we shouldn't rename it by proxy in the dependent articles. Whatever name we use for the main family article, we should use for mentions elsewhere. For example, if I thought Indo-European should be returned to the original name of Indo-Germanic, I would do that by starting a rename-discussion on the main article. It would be inappropriate for me to try to accomplish it by changing all mentions of "Indo-European" across Wikipedia to "Indo-Germanic", and if I did that, someone would rightfully revert me.
These are your edits that I reverted. Your recent edits at least came across as an attempt to subvert consensus on naming; I assumed that unnecessarily duplicating the tree was a further strategy to change the name. It's possible that a few changes of fact got caught up in that, and if so I apologize.
Perhaps taboo-avoidance is part of the reason for changing the family name to "Eskaleut", but you see this pattern elsewhere, e.g. in "Afrasian" for "Afro-Asiatic", "Algic" for "Algonkian-Ritwan", "Celtiberian" for "Celtic Iberian", "Japonic" for "Japanese-Ryukyuan" where there is no opposition to the component names. Generally, shortening a family and using familiar names seems to have a greater chance of success than the opposite. I'd have no problem moving the family to "Eskaleut" based on recent sources. That would be an easy change to make, where IMO the other would be disruptive until external consensus converges on it.
BTW, Austronesier who responded below is an excellent resource for editing WP. They're a professional linguist who knows WP conventions well. — kwami (talk) 23:06, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Kwami,
Thank you for taking the time to elaborate. Hearing your motivation and your reasoning is helpful.
It would have been greatly appreciated if you had you been willing to take the time to explain this motivation and reasoning prior to performing all of the reverts, especially given that I had taken the effort to contact you and initiate a conversation.
@Dowobeha: @kwami: you're having an important discussion here, and maybe we should move/condense/continue it in Talk:Eskimo–Aleut languages. I just want to make three points:
. As for the terminological shift from Eskimo-Aleut → Inuit–Yupik–Unangan, I see it on the way to become established, but we're not yet there.
. As for Dorais (2010), I agree with @Dowobeha that it is state-of-the-art, see e.g. Alana Johns's chapter "Eskimo-Aleut"(!) in the 2019 Routledge Handbook of North American Languages, where Dorais's classification is adopted 1:1.
. It's not advisable to duplicate significant content in multiple articles, as this becomes a maintenance nightmare. Ok, using a template or a graphic helps to keep stuff synchronized, but note that WP page watchers will not see when a Commons image is fiddled with. I had this experience with the map in Austric languages, which had rubbish added to it, and also with a classification template of the Dravidian languages, which was defaced by a "Tamil is the oldest language in the world"-freak—in both cases unnoticedly for quite some time. In any case, agree with @kwami that full classification schemes only belong in the article about the parent group.
Thanks, @Austronesier. I actually started a section in Talk:Eskimo–Aleut languages listing references. I agree that would be a great place to continue. I just hope the conversation can stay professional. There is a lot of ugly sniping in the history of the Talk:Eskimo page.
Wikipedia has a very strict copyright policy, stricter in some ways than copyright law itself, because our fair use policy does not allow us to copy material from copyright sources when there's a freely licensed alternative available. In this case the freely licensed material is prose that we write ourselves. Another choice would be to release the paper under a compatible license. Another option is to place the text in quotation marks so that our readers will know that it's been copied directly from the source. Regardless, Wikipedia frowns on people citing their own paper, and also frowns on the author using it as a citation in dozens of places. It looks very spammy. — Diannaa (talk) 01:31, 13 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the information. I have sent an email to permissions-commons@wikimedia.org with the appropriate CC licensing verbiage.
With respect to the self-citation, I hear what you are saying, and I can see how it could look. In this particular case, I cited my own work because my diagram of the language family is the most thorough one that I am aware of, in addition to the fact that I had the rights to contribute it.
Besides sending the email to permissions-commons@wikimedia.org, is there anything else that I should do to get the file deletion for copyright violation reversed? Dowobeha (talk) 02:06, 13 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The OED is a document of the entire English language
There are only three states left to legalize same-sex marriage in Mexico and there are bills in each of the remaining states. This means the [State recognition of same-sex relationships in North America & Hawaii] map is about to be almost full. Same with the [Same-sex unions in Mexico] map. In the event that this happens, I was wondering if you could make a same-sex marriage map that includes all of North America, including Central America and the Caribbean. I'm wondering if the info for [State recognition of same-sex relationships in North America & Hawaii] could be combined with the info for [Homosexuality laws in Central America and the Caribbean Islands.] They all are part of North America so technically our North America map on Recognition of same-sex unions in the Americas has been incomplete. I'm thinking that when the final three states in Mexico legalize, the [Same-sex unions in Mexico] maps on each of the pages like Same-sex marriage in [Mexican state name] can be replaced with the new/proposed comprehensive North America map. In states that have legalized but not codified yet (such as Chihuahua), we can also put the [Legislation for same-sex unions in Mexican states] map on those specific state pages until they codify. The new map with all of North America doesn't need to be published until the last state legalizes, but would you be willing to make such a map?
