Wed 12 Dec 2007
Wagiman is Good: Wikipedia
Posted by jangari under Indigenous, Languages, Linguistics, Media, Science, Wagiman
[10] Comments
A few weeks back, Joe wrote at Transient Languages and Cultures (which, owing to a historical accident, is acronymised to ELAC), that a page I wrote on the Wagiman language for Wikipedia had been nominated as a “good article”, subject of course, to peer review.
Well as of early this morning, a painstaking month after the initial nomination and two weeks since a review began, I can now announce that the page has earned “good article” status. This means that it’s the highest-rated article pertaining to an Australian language on Wikipedia, and joins 25 other language-related articles ranked as good or better.
However I would hardly think of it as a brilliant article per se; some parts are heavily over-simplified and need a lot more work and in some parts I just chose not to go into detail, but as it’s really just been an exercise in procrastination so far, it’s surpassed any expectations I had.
I’d personally like to see a lot more articles on languages on Wikipedia in the near future, because I think it can be a valuable resource for this sort of thing, provided it’s used wisely. So, linguists and language enthusiasts, get crackin’!
10 Responses to “ Wagiman is Good: Wikipedia ”
Comments:
Leave a Reply
Trackbacks & Pingbacks:
-
Pingback from OutPutShow « Worte,Zeichen,Bilder
December 15th, 2007 at 1:23 am[...] Wagiman (also spelled Wageman, Wakiman, Wogeman) is a near-extinct indigenous Australian language spoken by less than 10 people[1] [...]
December 12th, 2007 at 1:46 pm
Good show! I’ll have to check it out.
Okay, I just gave it a quick look, and learned a few things. I hadn’t realized, for example, that Wagiman was a split-ergative language.
I agree that Wikipedia can be a valuable resource for information on language, especially with lots of references, such as your article has. I haven’t really done much looking at linguistics/language articles there, actually. (Well, I vaguely remember coming across a page or two when I was taking my sociolinguistics class, but wasn’t impressed. It would seem that those had not been “good” articles.)
December 13th, 2007 at 8:17 am
its just sad that like entire species, language also falls victim to our accelerated modern society.
December 14th, 2007 at 8:39 am
Alejna, I look forward to a time when you can just do a Google search on such-and-such a language and find just about everything you need to know, location, genetic status, generic typological features, etc., on a single Wikipedia page that lists resources where you can find more detailed information. In short, it should be a starting point for research.
True, hellfried, although modern society has had a little help from a monolingual mindset in this country, a deeply entrenched White Australia policy and many attempts at cultural homogenisation.
December 15th, 2007 at 5:28 am
very interesting, good work. First time I’ve seen [ʡ] in a transcription!
December 15th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
But… the text says there’s a phonemic glottal stop, while [ʡ], used in the “examples of coverbs” and in the “phonotactics” section, is the symbol for the epiglottal stop. The consonant table uses the correct symbol for the glottal stop.
What’s going on here? Maybe I’m not the only one who simply can’t hear the difference? Try it yourself…
Besides, I bet the “palatal” stops aren’t dorso-palatal (as transcribed), but apico-postalveolar. Unfortunately there are no IPA symbols for the latter (other than putting the “retracted” diacritic under the symbols for the alveolar stops)…
Are the alveolars apical?
December 15th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
Ah, thanks for being so perceptive David. The IPA table in wikipedia’s edit page is so small and badly formatted that I can hardly see the symbols.
As for apical versus dorsal, this is what I meant when I said over-simplified. I personally don’t concern myself too much with the highly constrained labeling of the places of articulation, but I know from a talk with Nick Evans that with Australian phonotactics, we should be using a slightly more specific terminology than merely ‘alveolar’ versus ‘palatal’.
I’m following Wilson (1999) in his classification of the places of articulation, but I would personally like to standardise it with the other articles on Australian languages and call the five places labial, apico-alveolar, apico-retroflex, lamino-palatal and something like dorso-velar. But at the end of the day, I’m not a phonologist.
To answer your question though, the alveolars are apical while the ‘palatals’ are laminal. By my understanding of the terms, apico-post-alveolar would be like [tʃ], right? Despite that being the commonest pronunciation of Australian palatal consonants, this is wrong.
December 15th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
re epiglottal vs glottal – the only way to hear the difference afaik, is that the epiglottal has an audible (if barely) release, whereas the glottal stop is just silence.
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:11 am
Yes, but it would not necessarily be an affricate! If you put the tongue in the position for [tʃ] and then make a plosive release instead of a fricative one (…and, as you mentioned, if you make it laminal rather than apical), you’ve got the Australian phenomenon, right?
Part of this confusion is that “[tʃ]“, if used to transcribe Standard Average European, is a simplification for what is with proper pedantry transcribed as [t̠͡ʃ]. This probably doesn’t display here; it’s the “retracted” diacritic (a minus) under the t and a “tie bar” above the whole thing. The tie bar indicates it’s an affricate (plosive released into the fricative). The diacritic indicates it’s not a real [t] but, well, retracted to an unspecified degree. The funny thing is, you’ll find people (like Wikipedia) who’ll tell you that Polish has a phonemic difference between “[t͡ʃ]” (what may not display is the tie bar) (cz), claimed to be an affricate, and “[tʃ]” (trz — historically a /tʒ/ cluster with progressive assimilation in voice), claimed to be a plosive + fricative sequence. That would mean that the stop is released before the fricative begins. Sounds unlikely, right? I’ve been to Poland, and indeed it’s wrong. Both are affricates; “[t͡ʃ]” is t
he
familiar postalveolar affricate ([t̠͡ʃ]), which has a single place of articulation throughout, while “[tʃ]” is an alveolar-to-postalveolar affricate: it starts as laminal-alveolar, and then during the beginning of the fricative the tongue is retracted to apical-postalveolar. This latter one is the real true [t͡ʃ]. (Except that I should maybe add the “laminal” diacritic for people who take it for granted that alveolars are apical.)
Take-home message: even for linguists, the combination of “postalveolar” and “plosive” seems to be really hard to imagine.
So, the most proper way to write the Australian “palatal”s in the IPA is to use the symbols for the corresponding alveolars plus the “retracted” diacritic, i.e., [t̠] and so on. This leaves three problems: 1) “retracted” doesn’t tell how far retracted; 2) being just a horizontal stroke, this diacritic could mean anything; 3) if real pedantry is desired, there’s no space to add the “laminal” diacritic (on a computer or in print), because it goes in the same place (under the letter) as the “retracted” diacritic.
I suggest to raise a stink at the International Phonetic Association.
That’s the difference between a released and an unreleased plosive, regardless of place of articulation, isn’t it?
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:19 am
I probably should have mentioned that, AFAIK, epiglottal stops have so far only been described from languages that also have phonemic glottal stops. But who knows if this is because so few linguists know about epiglottal consonants in the first place and/or because the epiglottal and the glottal stop sound so similar…
That said, there are languages along the west coast of North America that (in addition to plain glottal stops) have been described as having “pharyngealized glottal stops”, at least some of which have meanwhile turned out to be epiglottal stops.
Whatever. It’s a quarter past 2 at night over here. I’ll go to bed.