Talk:Khmer language/GA2

GA Review

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Reviewer: G Purevdorj (talk · contribs) 22:35, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

I will start reviewing this article in the next few days. G Purevdorj (talk) 22:35, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

• The lead section is to summarize the entire article, not just part of it. It lacks, for example, a typological characterization of Khmer. Whenever Khmer script is employed (which is not hyperlinked at all in the lead), a transcription or transliteration is needed next to IPA - there are many people out there who won’t feel comfortable with IPA.
• History section:

Following the end of the Khmer Empire the language lost the standardizing influence of being the language of government and accordingly underwent a turbulent period of change in morphology, phonology and lexicon.

Not clear for a lay reader. The language itself changed all the time, just that a conservative written standard stopped being applied.

The language of this transition period, from about the 14th to 18th centuries, is referred to as Middle Khmer and saw borrowing from Thai, Lao and, to a lesser extent, Vietnamese.

Style! Maybe better two sentences. “saw borrowing” sounds unidiomatic (to me as a non-native, at least).

The changes during this period are so profound that the rules of Modern Khmer can not be applied to correctly understand Old Khmer.

That statement is more or less trivial. The article would gain something from a more specific picture, i.e. that a modern speaker couldn’t make any sense of a modern text. Just a parallel: a modern German reader cannot “correctly understand” a text written just 300 years ago, misinterpreting any number of details, but she will most probably get the gist right.

The language became recognizable as Modern Khmer, spoken from the 19th century till today.

Style! The language family affiliation should precede the section on later history!

• Phonology section

Jargon is used quite heavily here. You may use terminology, but it is often so easy to create contexts that provide a non-linguist reader with an idea what the words in question might mean. This is not the case here.

The vowels are cast into the face of the reader, overwhelming her with their sheer number, but if there is anything like a vowel system in Khmer, it doesn’t emerge from the article.

” As Khmer is primarily an analytic pro-drop language” - fun for the lay reader! The point here is simple that syntactic roles are neither indicated by morphology nor necessarily by overt NPs. The author of a lexicon article has to get this across to non-linguists! G Purevdorj (talk) 16:41, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

• Word classes are but one element of grammar. Building up this part around a number of functions such as predication, negation, syntactic roles (including adjuncts), comparison, clause linking and so forth would make more sense to me, but many of these don’t get addressed at all.
• The two sections on dialect have to be integrated with each other and possibly with the history section.
• Except for wording, the section on social registers seems quite okay.
• Who will benefit from a table of the numerals? At a short gaze, the article on numerals in Khmer seems quite useful, but this table without any text and explanations is close to worthless.

G Purevdorj (talk) 22:04, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

After enumerating these particular points, I might summarize:

• 1. Reasonably well written? no (jargon in phonology section, lead not representative, and sometimes prose a bit lacking, some sections present twice and not well-coordinated)
• 2. References? insufficient in grammar section (which has insufficient content anyway)
• 3. Broad in coverage? Certainly not grammar section. (On the other hand, expanding the section on the writing system of inserting comparative tables wouldn't make sense at all. You don't even need to expand the grammar section: it is rather short, but a high quality text of this length might do.)
• 4. Neutrality, 5. stability and 6. pics appear to be unproblematic.

Note that my review here is still somewhat superficial, but there are so many concerns that passing this article as it is is just impossible. Note that because of the jargon in phonological matters, it even fails criterion 6 for B class articles:

The article presents its content in an appropriately understandable way. It is written with as broad an audience in mind as possible. Although Wikipedia is more than just a general encyclopedia, the article should not assume unnecessary technical background and technical terms should be explained or avoided where possible.

It is thus, plainly said, still a very good C class article. With some good copyediting, you could get it to B class within a few hours. With some hard work, one could possibly render it into a Good Article within this review. If the nominating editor is willing to address all of my concerns and to try to improve this article within no more than three weeks, I would keep this review open. Otherwise, I would fail the article. G Purevdorj (talk) 22:33, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for taking the time to review this article. I will attempt to address your concerns, but I must admit, I don't understand a few of your objections. I will work on the obvious problems as soon as I have time.--William Thweatt ^Talk | ^Contribs 02:03, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

The two sections on dialect have been integrated with each other, and the lead has been improved somewhat, though one would have to decide whether it now reflects the article or not. But as none of the other problems have been addressed during the "on hold" time, there is no way but to fail the article. Due to the too technical, intransparent phonology section, it doesn't confirm to the following B class requirement:

• The article presents its content in an appropriately understandable way. It is written with as broad an audience in mind as possible. Although Wikipedia is more than just a general encyclopedia, the article should not assume unnecessary technical background and technical terms should be explained or avoided where possible.

So I leave the article at C class where I found it. G Purevdorj (talk) 05:49, 6 July 2012 (UTC)