Talk:Xavante language

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Xavante language article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Article policies

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Brazil Low‑importance

	Brazil portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Brazil, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Brazil and related topics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.BrazilWikipedia:WikiProject BrazilTemplate:WikiProject BrazilBrazil articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Indigenous peoples of the Americas Low‑importance

	Indigenous peoples of the Americas portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Indigenous peoples of the Americas, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Indigenous peoples of the Americas on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Indigenous peoples of the AmericasWikipedia:WikiProject Indigenous peoples of the AmericasTemplate:WikiProject Indigenous peoples of the AmericasIndigenous peoples of the Americas articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Languages Low‑importance

	Language portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Languages, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of languages on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.LanguagesWikipedia:WikiProject LanguagesTemplate:WikiProject Languageslanguage articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Xavante /w/ and velars

[copied from my talk page—kwami (talk)]

Not that I speak Portuguese, but I took não-arredondado to mean "non-rounded", not "wholly un-labial" - i.e. a similar compress'd /w/ as in Japanese. Note how she still groups it with the labials. Maybe we could settle at lack of phonemic velars. (I wonder if the language has maybe had a similar k > ʔ shift as in Hawai'ian.)

Good work BTW! --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 22:19, 29 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect that the shift was k to tch, but that should be easy enough to check with other Ge languages.

Regardless of the form of rounding, the /w/ is presumably still phonetically velar. I'm not sure what a lack of "phonemic" velars would mean--we dictate that they are not velar because there are no other velars? That seems a bit like declaring that a language with [s] has no fricatives because it lacks [f], [x], and [h], or that Samoan has no alveolars despite having an [l]. kwami (talk) 22:29, 29 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

We still appear to be comfortable telling that X. lacks nasals on a phonemic level. I can see no explicit note about velarity, on the contrary she notes "there are sonorants at the bilabial, alveolar and glottal places of articulation".

Hm, and it's anyway "não-arredondado posterior fechado alto sonoro" - after "closed high" (?) sonorants. McLeod & Valerie's '03 paper tells it's pronounced "as in English after /i/, without rounding and with a little friction" - as well as "without friction and more rounded in outros ambientes", whatever that means. We can probably agree that English /w/ is not [β̞ɰ], so this remains still unclear.

I would presume /w/ not to be purely velar in a language that lacks velars otherwise, any more than it to be purely labial in a language that otherwise lacks labials. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 15:32, 1 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I hadn't checked (2003). That does support your edits.

Phoneme tables are frequently arranged more for convenience than for precision. If there's no other need for a velar column, then one's unlikely to add on just for /w/. Likewise, if there's no labio-velar column (as in English), then one's unlikely to add one just for /w/, but that doesn't mean English /w/ is not labio-velar. From the (2003) comment you pointed out, Xavante /w/ would appear to be labio-velar:

antes da letra ‘i’ é pronunciado como o ‘w’ inglês, sem arredondamento dos lábios e com um pouco de fricção. Em outros ambientes não há fricção e os lábios se arredondam mais

"before the letter 'i' it's pronounced as the English 'w', without rounding of the lips and with a bit of friction. In other environments it doesn't have friction and the lips are more rounded"

Since in general we define phonemes by their 'elsewhere' values, we should probably consider this a more-or-less typical /w/ with a non-rounded semi-fricative allophone (≈ [ɣ˕]) before /i/.

As far as the 1974 não-arredondado posterior fechado alto sonoro description, as far as I can tell that's a "non-rounded high/closed back semivowel"—the authors characterize all semivowels with the terms for the equivalent vowels. Taking that comment literally, she means it's the semivowel equivalent of the high back unrounded vowel [ɯ], or in other words, [ɰ]. But the (2003) description would appear to trump that characterization.

Rosetta Project

This link seems to be damaged Glavkos (talk) 17:42, 28 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Xavante language. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

Added archive http://web.archive.org/web/20070104051317/http://www.sil.org:80/americas/brasil/LANGPAGE/EnglXVPg.htm to http://www.sil.org/americas/brasil/LANGPAGE/EnglXVPg.htm

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at {{Sourcecheck}}).

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 16:23, 16 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]