User talk:Morgan Wright

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[edit] Welcome!

Hello, Morgan Wright, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome!  RJFJR 18:14, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Jimmy Cavallo article

please do not delete due to the anti-plagiarism laws or copyright infringement laws. I am the author of the essay this was pasted from, and in fact I am the author of the entire website www.hoyhoy.com which is my website and domain. I am donating this essay to Wikipedia. Citations verifying the truthfullness of information in this essay will all come back to me, since I wrote the liner notes for 3 of the 4 Jimmy Cavallo CD's that have been issued in the past 10 years, and Jimmy himself has read them, of course, and verified all information himself before these CD's were issued.

Hello - What you're going to need to do to make sure your article isn't deleted is add a statement to the work on your website saying that you release the content of this article under the terms of the GFDL, which goes beyond simply allowing Wikipedia the right to use the work. Please see WP:CV and WP:GFDL. Such a statement would likely include "I hereby release the contents of this article under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License." Once that is there you should be good to go, however keep in mind that your work will likely be edited, possibly mercilessly, to fit the tone of similar biographical articles on Wikipedia. Feel free to be a part of that process, and good luck! - skrshawk ( Talk | Contribs ) 18:39, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

Ok that's a good idea. It's such a good idea, I beat you to it. Go to www.hoyhoy.com/cavallo.htm and see the note I just added at the very bottom, giving permission for Wiki to use the text. Why not, everybody else has (it's the liner notes for 2 different CD's and part of a third one, nobody paid me they just said thank you)Morgan Wright 18:48, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

The website address has been changed to www.hyzercreek.com/hoyhoy/cavallo.htm

Morgan Wright 09:11, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Dog contributions

G'day Morgan. Your contributions to the Dog article are... thought-provoking. Unfortunately, unless you can back them up with appropriate citations (provide reputable sources), they are -- at best -- speculative. Gordon | Talk, 5 October 2006 @12:18 UTC

[edit] Broncs and such

Hi Morgan, Didn't mean to be snarky about the bronc versus bronco thing. (I am actually on vacation in the land "down under" as we speak)...my comments about usage were not intended to argue that one form or another is the "right" informal term, but rather to explain the regional dialect as a term of art. "Bronco" is archaic in the actual west where the term "bronc" is most frequently used. Anyone saying "bronco" in the American west labels themselves immediately as a "dude," just like people look at me like I am an idiot here in your country for saying words like "flashlight" instead of "torch"! <smile> And yes, we know about introduced species, we have lovely fish called Carp that destroy the habitat of Trout, we have nasty weeds that chopke out native species. Yes, the damage introduced species can do is real problem, isn't it? Your country is beautiful and it is sad that people sometimes mess things up. Oh, FYI Remember to sign your posts with the four tildes (~) so that we can link more easily to your talk page. Montanabw 23:04, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Midwest Accent

Hi, and thanks for you interest in the subject! Linguists reject the idea of a "General American" accent, because it can be applied to almost any rhotic accent without noticeable regional influences, and unfortunately the General American accent doesn't reflect that. I've been meaning to re-write the article, but I haven't really had the time. About your assertion that speakers from the rural Northeast have the same accent as Midwesterners: that isn't really true. Upstate New York has undergone the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, so the accent found in that region is similar to that found in Northern Ohio, Michigan, Northern Illinois, and parts of Wisconsin, but the "General American" article isn't about that region. Western PA has its own accent, centered around Pittsburgh, and Eastern PA is part of the Mid-Atlantic dialect region. Western New England alternately shows signs of the Northern Cities Shift and the Boston or New York City accents, depending on geography. You may be interested in looking at the Teslur Project or the Phonological Atlas of North America (here's chapter eleven, which has a lot of good maps, although it's rather technical [1].) Concerning the spread of the dialect, you need to provide sources for the inclusion of the information, rather than have me provide sources for its exclusion. Dialects and accents are dynamic; for example, the accent of New York City was traditionally rhotic, but the influence of New Englanders moving into the city made it non-rhotic. The Boston accent underwent the bath-trap split, and is now moving away from it, through the influence of television, and the Northern Cities Shift is relatively recent, having been going on for about forty of fifty years. It doesn't make sense to say that a Northeastern accent went to Iowa and has remained unchanged for 100 or 150 years. Still, it's a fascinating subject, isn't it?

Cordially, Confiteordeo 11:03, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, it's pretty fascinating. I disagree that New Englanders moved into New York City and changed the accent to non-rhotic. Lots of people moved into New York City...Jews, Italians, and Irish being the biggest. I think New Englanders might be around # 178 on the list of groups moving to NYC, and the New Engand -ar is so different from the NYC -ar that we can forget the whole theory. Also the Northern Cities accent shift is food for a nice academic paper (that's what scholars do, right?) but incorrectly implies that northern cities like Syracuse, Utica, or Albany did something or other to change the accent from the rural areas, when the truth is that the rural accent around Syracuse, Utica or Albany is the same as that in the cities. People move back and forth all the time. You have to have a big city like NYC or Boston to have enough isolation to create a new accent. There is no variation in accent anywhere from eastern upstate NY (Albany), whether city, rural, or whatever, to Syracuse, because people move around too much and there is no isolation. The first change going west happens in Rochester, where o changes to a. So, "doctor" becomes "dactor," "contact" lenses becomes "cantact" lenses. I'm an optometrist, a dactor who fits cantacts whenever I'm in Rachester. Ha ha. I tell patients to turn their hat around and they turn their head around. e becomes a, so "head" sounds like "hat." I ask them, how do you say "head" and they say "heead." Buffalo gets worse, it has a Midwest accent, by everybody's opinion, and many Buffalo people think it's part of the Midwest. I think you are from Ohio, that's probably just like Buffalo. Believe it!Morgan Wright 16:02, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

With a few exceptions (like the NCS, which has been extensively studied,) it can be hard to pin down exactly how or why pronunciation changes occur. I've also heard that NYC speech became non-rhotic in the same way that Boston speech did; that is to say, the upper classes mimicked the non-rhoticity of London English (a phenomenon that happened at least a century after the founding of the colonies,) and this change eventually moved its way down the socioeconomic ladder. Albany hasn't undergone the NCS, but Utica, Syracuse, and their surrounding areas are included in the Phonological Atlas' isogloss of the shift, which goes as far east as Herkimer, Otsego, Delaware, and parts of Sullivan counties. However, even in Albany, /ʌ/ is more backed than /ɑ/, and /æ/ is being fronted, which is the first step of the shift. Regardless, these areas do not share the Omaha-Iowa-Quad Cities accent, which is really what is incorrectly referred to as "General American." I removed your assertion that the "GA" accent came from rural areas of the NE because it seems like original research, and the original version of the section made no claim about the origins of the accent. Since such things are so hard to pin-down, it's better not to say anything about it unless you have a really good source. I also added the citation needed tag because I don't believe that newscasters are specifically trained to speak "Standard Midwestern," which is another misleading term. Although I haven't done any research on it, it seems that there's quite a bit of dialectical variety on CNN and the other major networks. That is, many "standard" Northern accents are represented, not just "Standard Midwestern." Please let me know what you think of the current version of the article. Confiteordeo 18:21, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

One of the things that bugs me about the writers who claim that the Midwest accent is the standard American accent is their fishbowl view. They view their own accent as the correct one. What do you think somebody from Georgia or Texas would think of that? Is this another "to the victor goes the spoils" from the Civil War? The north gets to have the "correct" accent? The population of southern speakers is barely a minority, I'd hate to be from Louisiana and hear some egomaniac from Iowa talk about his accent being the right one. It's like the woman who says the toilet seat should be down, even though 50% of the population uses it the other way, she thinks her way is the right way. Newscasters generally speak with a northern accent, I can attest to that, but they come from all over, and how many of them are deliberately trained to speak like a Midwesterner? I can't imagine such a thing. Would a newscaster from Albany NY or Seattle, or LA, or Connecticut, where people all have basically the standarn northern accent, need to change to some sort of cornfield Nebraska twang? Hell no. The Midwestern accent is not really typical anyway, I lived in Michigan for a year and people have an unusual accent there, not the typical newscaster accent. They say everything is "the bomb," but they pronounce bomb as if it were spelled "bahm." Their accent may be the bahm, but is NOT the standard way to pronounce things in journalism. I would say that of all the places in the USA that have the most neutral speach, that journalists would try to emulate, this region where I live beats out the Midwest for neutrality. Eastern upstate NY, from Poughkeepsie to Syracuse. Also Connecticut, they have no trace of the New England weirdness that you see in Vermont or Maine, or most of Mass. And northwestern Mass has the Vermont accent. Very little of Mass is free of the weird New England thing. Worchester, forget it...very thick there. Probably the only accent-free part of Mass. is around Springfield, or southwestern Mass in general. That's like Connecticut, which is neutral. Unless you count eastern Connecticut, which is too close to Rhode Island, where everybody talks like Elmer Fudd. Pwovidence, Wode Iwand. So, the only neutral parts of New England are Central and Western Connecticut, and southwestern Mass. Forget Maine, they have the thickest accent of all. The Vermont accent is only found among the older people. Young kids in Vermont are not carrying this on at all. The old timers with their "Pepperidge Faam Remembas" accent with all the "ayaah," well that was a Swedish accent and the grandchildren of the Swedes don't talk that way anymore. Not at all. As for the NYC accent, that only goes as far north as Peekskill unless you count all the transplanted NYC folks, especially after September 11, who moved upstate by the millions lately. As far north as Poughkeepsie, there are a good number of NYC folks that moved up due to 9/11, but the native Poughkeepsie people have the basic American accent, and the children of the NYC folks lose their accent in one generation. North or west of Albany, there are very few NYC transplants and no accent at all, except for the rednecks. And what can you do about the rednecks? Morgan Wright 04:29, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Your recent edits to Albinism

Thanks for your interest in this article and efforts to improve it, but many of your changes have had to be reverted because there are no references cited to back them up. Please do not make factual changes to science articles without citations to reliable sources. See this talk page topic for a detailed explanation of the specific reverts. PS: The other editors of that article are well aware that the section in question is already lacking sources for much of its information, but adding unverified claims only worsens the situation; and while the article is under heavy development, especially with regard to source citations, as you can see it is from the article history, removing material that is in the process of being researched, as you did in several cases, is not helpful either. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 02:06, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

NB: I've responded at length to your reply on my Talk page. Super-short version: No disrespect intended; it's not about whether you are qualified or not, but rather about policy/process here. Replacing one unsourced thing with another unsourced thing is almost certain to get reverted by someone, because the original is presumed under WP:AGF to be valid, while WP:OR#Citing oneself (and see also footnote 1 on that page for further rationale) prevents us simply taking your word for the validity of your unsourced changes just because you happen to be a doctor in a relevant field and "know you are right". Wikipedia just doesn't work that way. Anyway, please see the longer reply. Your input would be actually genuinely valued on the article, it just needs to be sourced like everyone else's. No free pass for a medical degree.  :-) — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 08:35, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
PS: See also your #Midwest Accent and #Dog contributions threads above; three of the five (not counting the generic intro) topics on your talk page are saying the same thing to you: Please cite your sources, or expect reversions. It doesn't matter how much you think you know, or genuinely do, know about a topic, or what qualifications you have — that experience is invisible to the rest of the world in the articles you edit, which is why we have WP:V and WP:RS (and WP:N for that matter, which is really largely about source citations).  :-) — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 09:31, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
See Talk:Albinism#Section tagged-to-heck with "citation needed" specifics for a (long!) reply that I think will be consensus-building. (Short version is: Delete the unsourced stuff you are sure is bunk, but if your new additions can't be sourced "soon-ish" they'll probably get removed, too, on the same grounds. The article needs to be sourced or it's simply not trustable by anyone, since they can't be sure who edited/wrote what or on what basis.  :-)
PS: Somewhere in there you said something to the effect of "the original author of this article should..." Just FYI, for an article of this scope there really isn't (in any relevant way) any such thing as "the original author", as any non-trivial article may have been edited many hundreds, possible several thousand, times by hundreds (or more) editors, and the origial article text is long, long gone. What's way more relevant is the present active editorship (which 6 months from now will probably be radically different, and today is very different than it was 6 months ago.) "Original authors" are pretty much meaningless in Wikipedia unless the article is so insignificant that the original drafter remains the only major editor of it for a long time.
— SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 12:30, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

I waited long enough for citations and deleted. Nobody cited. Astigmatism is an optical disorder caused by aspherical curviture(s) of the cornea and/or anterior lens surface and/or posterior lens surface. None of this has anyhting to do with albinism. Citations can be found in the most rudimentary reference books, try Britannica for children or Current Science, 6th grade editions. The same can be said for hyperopia and myopia. These have nothing to do with albinism, so I 86'ed them too.Morgan Wright 02:56, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

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