User talk:Rua/Archives/2016/July

Proto-Uralic vowel shifts

It is hard to see how the version of The version of Proto-Uralic language to which you just reverted my changes was an improvement on my attempt. Too-free use of reversion is one of the most deplorable features of Wikipedia culture: edits are to be done away with if there is anything wrong with their end state, never mind what came before; so much for being bold and all that.

That previous version spoke of "raising *a-ə > *o-a", which is a raising of the stem vowel and not of the following reduced vowel, and "fronting *ä-ä > *a-e", which is not true of either vowel! (OK, perhaps you take "e" to be /e/ and as such minutely fronter than /æ/, though not in a phonemically relevant way; then all we have is inconsistency in which vowel is the criterial one.) I had meant to rework the second description to be in line with the first, i.e. to have the stem vowel in mind when using the directional language. Anyway, now I've gone and torn it all out and just spoken of "changes", which I trust is unobjectionable... 4pq1injbok (talk) 15:31, 7 July 2016 (UTC)