User talk:Rua/Archives/2014/May

Deletion of notation stuff from Proto-Balto-Slavic language

I noticed you deleted the whole section on notation from the PBS page. I can understand why you might want to do that, as it's not all directly relevant to Proto-Balto-Slavic, but I really think we need to put something similar somewhere. Making sense of all the various accent marks in Balto-Slavic studies is hella difficult, and when comparing Balto-Slavic languages you have to know what the different accents mean for all of the languages being compared, and for this it's super-helpful to have a consolidated notation section, and that's why I created it. Keep in mind that the majority of readers even of this page aren't going to be Balto-Slavic experts and are going to be confused by all the accent marks. Leaving it in Proto-Balto-Slavic or Balto-Slavic languages is not a bad thing as this is where people are most likely going to be looking if they're interested in comparative Balto-Slavic. Benwing (talk) 00:12, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

The same argument can be applied to any aspect of spelling, though, not just accentual notation. Should we also dedicate space to explaining the Cyrillic alphabet for example, or explain that sz is the Polish equivalent of š? CodeCat (talk) 00:16, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

But this is hardly the same thing. It's easy to look up the Cyrillic alphabet or Polish pronunciation. Much of the info in the notation section is nowhere in Wikipedia (Chakavian accents, anyone?), or scattered across a bunch of articles. When I went through and did all the work on Slavic accent and such I was hella confused until I made the notation section -- and I'm far more knowledgeable than the average reader of this page. We don't have space limitations here, and you have to keep in mind your readership. Please put something like this section back and at least keep the vowel notation, which is more confusing and more specialized (remember that most of these accent notations are not part of the normal writing system). Benwing (talk) 00:41, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

@Benwing: Maybe this information should be added to their respective language articles then. With the information as it is right now in the article, it seems like it's going to great lengths to explain all this, only to not really make a whole lot of use of it in the rest of the article. It makes me think "ok, so...?". So is it useful? Definitely. Relevant to the Proto-Balto-Slavic article? Nah. CodeCat (talk) 13:10, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

Just saw this. I think that there should be two things done:

1. Something like the whole notation section should go together, perhaps split into Baltic and Slavic stuff and placed in Slavic languages and Baltic languages. There is precedent for doing this in Romance languages, which attempts to explain in a unified way the spelling conventions of various individual Romance languages.
2. Where it stands now should include the portion of the notation section that covers prosody (i.e. pitch and stress) in particular. I think it's important to have something like a "guide to Balto-Slavic accent notation" because the whole topic of accent is so damn complex and the notation is complex and also very confusing to people unfamiliar with it. In order to make sense of comparative data where variously Chakavian, Neo-Shtokavian, Slovenian, Russian, Lithuanian, Latvian and reconstructed Proto-Slavic and Proto-Balto-Slavic words are given, you really need to know the accent systems of all of these languages, and for this purpose a section on "Balto-Slavic prosodic notation" is incredibly useful. I can see it argued, however, that other vowel signs are less useful in this context, and I definitely get that the consonant notations are largely not useful.

If this sounds OK to you I'll go ahead and see about making the changes, unless you'd rather do the same yourself. Benwing (talk) 08:14, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

BTW no objection to also making sure each language appropriately describes its own diacritics ("also" meaning in addition to the two more general types of notation indications I mention above). Benwing (talk) 08:17, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

I have no objections. Slovene language already describes the diacritics, as does Serbo-Croatian, but I don't know about the others. CodeCat (talk) 11:32, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

Murska Sobota

Hi there. Could you join our discussion? --Peter238 (talk) 14:13, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

Romance languages

I made a number of edits at Romance languages, each change relating to specific elements of the content. By reverting all that I did without discriminating each edit and judging it on its own merit, you have made obvious that this an edit motivated by spite and an urge to get even, not a desire to be constructive. That, is a form of vandalism. I suggest you take the time to appreciate changes before reaching for the undo button. Rui ''Gabriel'' Correia (talk) 12:08, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Please WP:AGF. I reverted your edits because I didn't think they were an improvement, especially the removal of information that seemed quite useful, without sufficient motivation given. CodeCat (talk) 12:33, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Okay, I accept AGF, but still, you reverted three separate things, while you disagreed with one. At any rate, my apologies for the use of the term vandalism. That entire page needs a thorough review (and it is tagged as such). A lot of what it says is outdated 'textbook'; it mixes terminology (Declension vs Latin declension vs cases vs misnomers such as first declension vc "noun declensions" vs "noun classes" vs "noun groups"). When we talk about declension in Romance languages we are talking about "they/ them/ their/ theirs" type declesnions, not 'nouns grouped into whatever, based on endings and origin. So if this section is about "declensional classes" what is it saying about:

• "a distinction between "four-form" and "two-form" words"? What words are these?
• What exactly is it saying about "The Gallo-Romance branch has gone further, merging the first and third declensions through regular loss of all final-syllable vowels other than -a"? Can YOU vouch for this statement? Can you give me examples from the various languages of such third declension words that have merged into first? AND once you have produced the examples, can you say that these represent the MAJORITY of words of the erstwhile third declension?
• What is it saying about "This merging is incomplete in some words as well as many adjectives" (and let's ignore absurdities such as "words as well as adjectives" ...)

I would rather delete than see information of no scientific merit included here and reproduced via a myriad third sites. Other then that, the other solution would be to tag , , all over the place. Rui ''Gabriel'' Correia (talk) 13:57, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

"Declension" doesn't necessarily refer only to cases. A language can have declensions (in the sense of having distinct patterns of inflection) without cases. When seen in this way, the 1st, 2nd and 3rd declension of Latin continue to exist in many modern Romance languages. Since it is usually the accusative/ablative case form that survives today, their origins are the Vulgar Latin 1st declension -a/-as, 2nd declension -u/-os (or -o/-os), third declension -e/-es. This three-way split is quite clearly preserved in conservative languages like Spanish and Italian.

The distinction between four-form and two-form adjectives is explained in the part that you removed. Four-form adjectives are those which have distinct forms for masculine and feminine gender, with the masculine forms coming from the 2nd declension and the feminine forms from the 1st. So these are the descendants of the Latin 1st/2nd declension adjectives. Two-form adjectives originate from the 3rd declension, and have no distinct forms for the two genders, both are identical, just as in Latin.

In the Gallo-Romance languages, all final vowels other than -a disappear. This is well established as a sound change and is described in the "Gallo-Romance languages" section. This sound change led naturally to the loss of any meaningful distinction between the 1st and the 3rd declensions. After all, if both -o/u and -e are lost, you're left with a consonant-final word that does not show any traces of its former Latin declension class. So this sound change effectively caused these two classes to merge.

However, the 2nd declension remained quite distinct because -a did not disappear. Thus, there were still two types of adjectives: the old 1st/2nd declension adjectives, which had no vowel ending in the masculine, and -a in the feminine (four-form adjectives); and the old 3rd declension adjectives, which had no vowel ending in either gender (two-form adjectives). In this sense, the merging was incomplete, as these two types of adjectives are still distinguished in for example Catalan. Catalan still distinguishes between four-form (1st/2nd declension) adjectives with -/a in singular and -s/-es in plural, and two-form (3rd declension) adjectives with - in singular and -s in plural. However, there is a tendency in the more northern Gallo-Romance languages to convert two-form adjectives into four-form ones. This means that the (descendant of the) feminine 1st declension -a is added to adjectives that originally belonged to the 3rd declension. This is quite clear in French, such as in the present participle, where you now have chantant(s) for masculine and chantante(s) for feminine. In Catalan, there are still only two forms, reflecting the original Latin 3rd declension more faithfully: cantant(s). CodeCat (talk) 14:17, 30 May 2014 (UTC)