Talk:Georg Forchhammer/GA1

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Reviewer: Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs) 16:15, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

Comments

This well-written and well-cited article seems to cover the main points simply and clearly, so I only have a few minor comments to make.

• Lead: "mouth–hand systems, an approach to manually coded languages" --- the two links point to the same article, so remove one of them.

• "device that used flames to show vowel quality": this interesting and bizarre claim seems well worth following up, and it might be the most interesting DYK fact about Forchhammer, but it's not cited or present in the article body. It needs to be repeated, explained, and cited down there, and it would be really nice to have a diagram or photo of the device too.
  • I haven't been able to find any images of it. Also, it's just a rephrasing of He was the inventor of the phonoscope, a device similar to the stroboscope; his device was created in 1885, and was used to demonstrate to deaf students whether the vowel they were making was correct using a gas flame and rotating drum. later in the article. Perhaps "flames" needs to be changed to "a flame"? - F
    • I suggest you directly quote (and attribute) the phrase naming the instrument and stroboscobe, and the bit about the flame and the rotating drum, as it's totally obscure as it stands.
      • Done so - I found a source better describing how it worked, so I've fleshed it out a bit. It pretty much seems like an analog strobe tuner to me, so I added an image of a digital one to illustrate its function as best possible without an image of the original. - F

• Career: "Forchhammer advocated an imitative style of language teaching, which had a diminished importance of pronunciation in speech production." Hm, perhaps "which gave less importance to" would read better.
  • changed to "which lent less importance to" - F

• Career: "which had the effect of improving understanding of language, but reducing ability of self expression in it." Perhaps "but reduced students' ability to express themselves." or something of that sort.

• Other work: "Forchhammer was also a phonetician, constructing a three-dimensional vowel chart with axes of tongue height, roundedness, and place of articulation. He also ..." Probably cut both the "also"s here.

• "although not adopted in other Scandinavian countries,[28] was adapted to the German language": doesn't read well with the two similar-sounding verbs. Perhaps "not taken up by other Scandinavian..." would work better. I'm not too sure about "adapted" here either, as it could be read as meaning "was [in fact] better adapted/suited to ... German [while being rubbish for Scandinavian]", whereas what seems to be intended is "was modified for use with German". Perhaps say that.

• "in these fora" => "in these forums"; "fora" is best restricted to Roman marketplaces.

• Ido should be wikilinked in article body.
  • Done all above - F

• Images seem to be properly licensed.

• Spot-checks on sources are ok. I fixed a typo in one ref.

• I'm not convinced that we need relatives in the infobox.
  • Removed individuals, kept the link to the overall family, which I'll probably create at some point - F

Great work, it's a GA. If you'd fancy reviewing one of mine, of course I'd be delighted. Chiswick Chap (talk) 21:04, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.