Talk:-phone

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This page has been transwikied to Wiktionary.

The article has content that is useful at Wiktionary. Therefore the article can be found at either here or here (logs 1 logs 2.) Removing this tag will usually trigger CopyToWiktionaryBot to re-transwiki the entry.

This article was nominated for deletion on 2005-05-10. The result of the discussion was keep.

[edit] You must be kidding

• You must be kidding. Dutchophone, spanophone, finnophone? Are any of these words actually used anywhere? I know that anglophone, francophone, and allophone are known and used in Canada, but I don't know about any of these other words. Did you make them up, or is there a source? --timc | Talk 02:17, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)
  • I know that they are very rarely used but these words do in fact exist. Many, though not all of them, are French-derived and so they (or their translations) might be heard once in a while in a Francophone country. In English, you'd probably only use them in a linguistics class or demographics course, something of that sort. There are several others that also exist but are not listed hear because I have not yet learned them all. Any additions are always welcome and encouraged, of course, as this is an open-content encyclopedia. McDonald1985 22:35, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)
    • I tried looking them up in a dictionary and I didn't find them there. Now, I only looked at m-w.com and dictionary.com, but they both have listings for anglophone, francophone and allophone, but none of the others. --timc | Talk 23:50, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)
    • OED does not have those ones and several others more. Google test doesn't validate them either. They seem really obsolete. And whatever said on the [Dutchophone]-type articles is already said on Dutch language, etc. --Menchi 01:19, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)
    • They are used alot in linguistics. At least Italophone and Lusophone. The the last two are common enough when linguists are talking about the language communities in general. Even if they are a little obscure, there are plenty of obscure jargony words on wikipedi. Menchi is right though. The individual articles don't contribute much. Maybe a redirect or something would work instead. Kyle543 23:34, Apr 21, 2005 (UTC)
    • Even though I had never heard it in English, before reading this article, the term "lusophone" is widely used in Portuguese-speaking countries, in its original version (lusófono). As I said, I had never heard it in English, but you can be sure that it is an extremely common term in most CPLP countries. --MiguelFC 17:59, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)
  • Spanophone? Why is spanish listed as spanophone instead of hispanophone? (44 google hits vs 29,000 google hits) 132.205.15.43 00:59, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
    • Hispanophone gets 93,000 hits for me. --Revolución (talk) 00:48, 8 October 2005 (UTC)
      • The 93,000 hits probably contain mostly French usage, Revolución. These terms are as far as I know not more common in linguistics than in any other of the humanities and I doubt any sensible linguist would try to push them as proper terms. They're pointlessly oblique and are easily replaced in prose by a simple "XXX speaker" or "XXX speaking". I agree that they smack of pointless snobbery. / Peter ^Isotalo 17:38, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Dutchophone??! I would guess that any theoretically correct adjective would be Hollandophone or possibly Batavophone, as formed in analogy with the other adjectives with the meaning "[language]-speaking" or "associated with [language]". As for the suggested form finnophone my best guessing would be that fennophone is more correct, as analogous to the geographical label Fenno-Scandinavia, meaning the mainland (i.e. non-insular) Nordic countries collectively. But hey, let's face it: these terms are all really more or less unnecessary intellectual snobbery... ;] --Big Adamsky 20:55, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

A completely superfluous list of nouns in an encyclopedia. The articles themselves serve literally no purpose except to duplicate information in the corresponding language articles. And like Adamsky pointed out, a lot of them just seem completely bogus. I'm also a bit worried about the prescriptive nature of these articles, since the usage of this words is not particularly common. I.e. to refer to an English speaker as an "Anglophone" isn't particularly common, despite the fact that it's one of the more well-known words. Never mind obscurities like "Lusophone".

I can't help pointing out that -phone, is far, far more common in various language-unrelated words assembled from Greek components, such as "telephone".

Peter ^Isotalo 08:04, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Peter, your redirections of various artcles that deal with "-phone" to the language-article they refer to are not entirely justified. This is because of the meaning intended: Hispanophone, which you have redirected to Spanish language does not mean "Spanish language". Rather it means something like "sphere of Spanish-speaking predominance" or "user of Spanish", usually referring more to societies, geographic areas, organizations, companies or TV-stations, etc, than to the actual physical human beings that use this language. And so, even though these two articles are necessarily within the same Wiki-category, the subtle distinction in meaning merits two seperate entries in our encyclopedia. Compare Francophone, Francophonie, French language and French people. --Big Adamsky 15:54, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

It's entirely justified and I think you've misunderstood the point here. It's not a matter of subtleties of meaning, just different concepts and terms, one of which has no use on its own in an encyclopedia. "Hispanophone" in an encylopedia can only refer to a noun which can mean only "a speaker of Spanish". As an adjective it needs a noun, stated or assumed, and adjectives are the domain of dictionaries with no exceptions. Adjectives are concepts that need to be described as part of a language, not as the equivalent of a type of monkey, a poem or a scientific theory. But disagreement of meaning aside, a group of people who only has the language in common, and which isn't considered a separate ethnic group has no merit as or even need for a separate article. I can't think of any information that couldn't or shouldn't be covered in the language article rather than "XXX-phone". At least not relevant encyclopedic info...

Peter ^Isotalo 17:38, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

I see your point, but I still disagree. That would be like saying that the Lusofonia, the British Commonwealth and the Arab League should be redirected to a long article on linguistics and phonetics, instead of political and cultural cooperation. There are numerous articles that read only one or two sentences because most relevant information can be found in a broader "mother article", but the article are still retained in their own right because they deal with some particularity within a wider subject or category. --Big Adamsky 19:05, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

The idea that loosely associated articles that belong under other topics should be merged with language articles is your suggestion, not mine, and I don't find the parallel at all logical. An organization, nation-state or ethnic group are all very concrete separate subjects in an encyclopedia; obscure or almost bogus terms for speakers of a language are not. There is simply no information about a group of speakers of a particular language that merits a separate article (in an encyclopedia) because the information is only relevant to the language article itself. And let's not forget the rather dubious idea of forcing the rather contrived and peacocky "-phone" terms as being the only proper linguistic terms in the first place.

Peter ^Isotalo 14:33, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

Good point, Peter. You've managed to change my mind. ':-J'

--Big Adamsky 20:40, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

Let me try to change your mind back Big Man Adamsky. The argument "because the information is only relevant to the language article" is bogus. There are hundreds of articles "only relevant to" English language. But no sensible person is going to suggest to make the all-in-one wonder. The topic "People that speak English language in everyday life" is not the same as "English language". More often than not the fact that someone cannot write more than already written speaks rather of someone's ignorance rather than about lack of material. mikka (t) 21:45, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Loss of information forbidden

Whatever your decision was, the implementation was utterly against the common sense and spirit and rules of wikipedia. Simply converting a number of articles into redirects resulted in destruction of information I found quite useful, missing elsewhere, and way beyond the scope of a dicdef. I suggest you to refresh the understanding of the policy Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a dictionary. mikka (t) 21:39, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Of course, I would never defend algonquinophone or hungarophone. But some "-phony" words bear a certain cultural-historical context, and deserve elaboration. For example, didn't it come to your mind that all reasonable "-phone" artciles are related to languages of major colonialism? mikka (t) 21:52, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

All words have a cultural history of some sort. It's unavoidable in something regularly used by humans. Other than that I see nothing in this list of articles but an attempt to circumvent WP:NOT by adding information to a dicdef which shouldn't be in it in the first place. At least not in Wikipedia. There's pretty much no difference between this group of articles and a collection of wiktionary entries about Quentin Tarantino movies; both would obviously be in the wrong wikiproject. Please go ahead and try it out and see what the wiktionarians have to say.

Peter ^Isotalo 22:18, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

Very nice of you to turn the table. What you call "circumvent WP:NOT" I call "salvaging an encyclopedic article from a dicdef". Your opinion "which shouldn't be" is just yor opinion which happens to differ from opinions of some other people. In my opinion these artices have more riht to be here than fictional biographies of secondary Tekken characters. (and I have no say about Tarantino; I even dont know who the hell is he; I dont care, but if someone cares, fine with me) mikka (t) 23:09, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

My impression of trying to explain exactly why a dicdef is always a dicdef no matter how much trivia you put in it is that a lot of wikipedians haven't bothered to disturb a single brain cell as to the reason for us having sister projects. The idea seems to be that if it doesn't exist on (English) Wikipedia, it's will be lost in internet limbo forever. Seriously, Mikkalai, have you ever sat down and tried to ponder over why dictionaries and encyclopedias are kept separate in the first place?

If Wikipedia was intended to be a completely sulf-sustained information database, we might as well not bother with writing articles ourselves; we could simply make a big-ass backup of the entire internet, sprinkle it with printed references and be done with it.

Peter ^Isotalo 00:06, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

You obviously fail to see the difference between a "word" and a "notion" described by the word. Usage of denigrating language ("trivia") does not improve your argumentation. As for the "if intended" part, I strongly suggest you to read "straw man" and other articles from logical fallacy series. mikka (t) 00:46, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Of course, I am aware of my own limited knowledge. Since we in a direct opposition here, let me remind you of yet another wikipedia policy you seem to ignore: deletion of articles (including moving to wiktionary) is not someone's whim, but handled by WP:AFD. Feel free to list these articles for deletion. I will not particularly suffer, if most people will agree with you. Cheers. mikka (t) 00:59, 15 February 2006 (UTC)