Talk:Rama language

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[edit] Rama grammar

In response to a proposal over at the Endangered Languages Wikiproject, I am prepared to contribute a section on grammar to the article on Rama language. It will take me a few days or weeks depending on how much time I have available and also how much source material I can get hold of. If I could consult a full grammar I could produce a longer grammar sketch of the type I did in Miskito grammar, for example. I understand there is such a grammar but unfortunately I can't get hold of it unless it is available on-line anywhere or someone could provide me with some kind of access. Any help would be appreciated. If not, I'll do the best with what I find, and will at least provide some grammar notes, even if sketchy. (I'm posting this both on the Endangered languages project page and the Rama language discussion page.) --A R King 11:08, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

sounds really good Alan. Have you worked on Rama as well?·Maunus· ·ƛ· 11:14, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

No I haven't, Maunus. I would be working from whatever documentation I can get my hands on. I started searching the internet yesterday... Care to join me? --A R King 12:10, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

I have serached but I find it pretty scant. I have the articles by Colette Grinevald Craig and some notes from a lecture by her I once attended about Rama revitalization. I also find the Creole to be pretty interesting loooking though but even less documented it seems. ·Maunus· ·ƛ· 12:16, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

I'll get back to you on that as soon as we get Mayan languages sorted out. --A R King 16:03, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Just another note to let you all know I've been collecting and compiling material for a few days now and expect to start putting in a grammar section any time now. --A R King 08:42, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Update: I've started writing up the grammar section. At present my first priority is to get the relevant facts down in a coherent fashion. I'm sure the text can be improved afterwards. One thing with which I could use some help would be linking the technical terms used (like personal pronoun, object, postposition...) to their corresponding Wikipedia articles. But I suggest waiting a few days to do that for two reasons: (1) as I've learnt from experience, if that is done too hastily, before settling on the final shape of the text, a lot of the work on the links will be wasted as sentences get moved around, rephrased, deleted etc.; (2) I'm still going to be editing the text for a while so we should avoid edit conflicts. So while I would appreciate help with those links, it would be best not to start quite yet. Another point to explain is that the information I am putting in this section is based on the totality of the references used, looking not only at grammatical descriptions in the sources but also analysing the language corpus they contain too. To reference individual statements would be a nightmare for the editor and very off-putting for the reader too. In these cases I think it just has to be understood that the references given are the sources for the information, unless there are any specific points of controversy or doubt, which can of course be individually referenced - but not everything as a matter of course. (This applies to other grammatical sketches I have done here too - see Pipil grammar and Miskito grammar for example). Although work is still in progress I would of course appreciate feedback on how you think it's coming along and discussion of issues that may be perceived. --A R King 13:09, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Resources at the U of Texas

Hi folks,

As I mentioned at WP:ENLANG, there are a bunch of resources at http://www.ailla.utexas.org/search/view_resource.html?country_id=14&name=Nicaragua . (Free registration required) There's no grammar, but there is a dictionary with a preface, and a lot of information about the revitalization project that took place (not sure about the current status of that project). I think Nora Rigby, who seems to have been key in the process of revitalization, probably merits her own page. I have a bunch of random links you might want to look through tacked under my user page, here: User:Babbage/Rama Language most of the resources are in Spanish, and one is in Norwegian, oddly enough. (Can't read that one, myself...) If anyone doesn't read Spanish I could help translate or summarize the articles.

Perhaps we could get in touch with Colette Grinevald (née Craig) to see about whether some of the images at the utexas site could be released to the article? --babbage 20:35, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Unfortunately, it isn't good enough to release images for use within a Wikipedia article. The images have to be GFDL or fair-use licensed (or perhaps some other Creative Commons-type license), which means their creators relinquish the copyrights. The images can then be used and/or modified by anyone at any time for any purpose, including to sell for profit... *--Ling.Nut 21:11, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
Thank you for this information, babbage. It looks very useful and I will look further into it as soon as I have time. I'm giving priority to cleaning up Mayan languages right now, in response to a request from Maunus. By the way, I have just downloaded a Rama dictionary from the site but it has no preface or other preliminary matter so I take it this is not the same one. Are you referring to the one called "Elementary Rama Dictionary"? I started to download that one but the file is huge. Alan --A R King 16:02, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
Hi there, yeah, that's the file I'm talking about. It's a short preface; but it has a phonology, that's what I used to add the phonology tables. The reference is: Diccionario Elemental Rama, ed. C. Craig, N. Rigby, A. Assadi, and B. Tibbitts. Eugene: University of Oregon. .1988. I'm not sure about how to fit this into the harvrefcol notation system used in the current references; will look into that and add it. --babbage 21:36, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

(undent) Done. --Ling.Nut 00:48, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks Ling.Nut! babbage 04:48, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
You're welcome! Also, the syntax for the in-text citation (as opposed to the ref in the ref section, which is of course more detailed) is {{Harvcol|Craig|Rigby|Assadi|Tibbitts|1988}}, which produces (Craig et al. 1988) ...[not clickable on this talk page 'cause no ref section here, but clickable in article]. --Ling.Nut 13:03, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

I've added a reference to a linguistics article I found on the web about aspects of Rama grammar (by Colette Craig, surprise surprise!). I'm not sure about the syntax of the template either, so I've done the best I can, but I've probably done something wrong because it may be possible to set the editors separately, and then I imagine it will say "Eds." as it should, not "Ed.". If you could take a look please, Ling.Nut? --A R King 18:13, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Newspaper article

Most complete freely-accessible discussion of Rama I've seen online so far here, in Spanish from a Nicaraguan newspaper. Loanwords, phonology, history, etc. We can't really use the article itself as a source, I guess, but, unusually enough for a newspaper article, it cites its sources in most places (I guess cuz it was written by an academic), sorta, though the full citations aren't there. Cheers, cab 23:54, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Hi cab, yeah, I thought it was interesting that that article gave a phonology as well. Notice that his list of phonemes, however, fails to mention /k/. (I imagine this was simply a typo.) In the preface to the dictionary at the U of Texas site, there is a complete phonology as well, which includes /k/. I started to convert the very nice phonology chart at Miskito to cover the Rama phonology, but the Mediawiki table markup makes me go entirely crosseyed... Anyway, I will make the task of creating a phoneme chart my first contribution to the article. --babbage 00:32, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Walter Lehmann

Craig cited it as 1911, but yeah, I think it might actually be the one published in 1920 (didn't see anything he published in 1911 when I googled it). cab 01:29, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Map

Hi folks,

This article is movin along, awesome!

I'd like to add a map of the places where Rama is spoken. I can do one as an SVG with Inkscape, but the problem is that I need a map that is 1) under a free license and 2) of sufficient resolution to show the little nooks and crannies around Bluefields lagoon so that the map will be meaningful. The maps at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Atlas_of_Nicaragua just don't have sufficient resolution. After asking in the IRC channel, it seems that even tracing an existing non-free map is a derivative work, so I can't just trace the map in the Craig dictionary, unfortunately (although that would be the source of the information). Any suggestions on how to get a detailed-enough outline map to start with? babbage 20:07, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

How about this one [1]? It's better resolution than those other ones. Also I think it is ok to trace it as long as it is different enough from the original that nobody would be able to see what its traced from. ·Maunus· ·ƛ· 11:50, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
Thanks a lot Maunus, that is just what I needed. babbage 19:29, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Rama grammar update

I think I'm done writing up the grammar (and also phonology and lexicon) sections. If anybody thinks they can improve on what I've done or wishes to discuss or question what's there, please feel free to go ahead as far as I'm concerned. I'm sure it's far from perfect, but with the limited materials I had access to and a reasonable limitation on the time I could put into it, this is what I've managed to produce for now. As I said in my posting at the top of this page, I made intensive use of the materials I have at hand, both descriptive and corpus, and it would have been pointless (and practically impossible) to give detailed references point by point. I've tried to cover that with a footnote, also discussing the "kind" of Rama primarily described here (i.e. following the earlier scholars or more recent work - I've opted for the latter). Having said that, by the way, it would still no doubt be useful to go through Lehmann's vocabulary looking for data to enlighten the description, but that looks like a biggish job, so for now at least I have had to pass on that one, except for the very occasional foray.

I don't think the footnote referred to looks right where I've stuck it at present, right on the heading of the Grammar section, but I couldn't figure out where to place it, so if someone has a better idea please be my guest and move it. It seems to me that the information in that note is important, yet doesn't belong in the body of the article either.

I'm slightly worried that the material I've put here might be thought too long. If it is, obviously one option would be to split it off as an article on Rama grammar. One reason I'd rather not do that, or not right now, is that as an article on Rama grammar I consider it rather too short, at least if thinking in terms of my other grammar sketches of languages in Wikipedia (Pipil grammar and Miskito grammar for now, with at least a couple of others somewhere in the pipeline). Another, perhaps better reason, is that at least for now, if we do that the Rama article will be back to being very short, although I don't deny a brief summary of what I've written could be retained in the language article in that case. Actually though I admit that another reason for not much liking the idea of removing a lot of the information from the article is my concern for the situation of languages such as Rama, which "need all the help they can get", and I think deserve it too, considering that in many other contexts they have only been greeted by prejudice and apathy. Such languages lack resources and furthermore the people who have the greatest right or need to access such resources are themselves very short of resources (of every kind). I would argue that the possibility that information in Wikipedia articles might help to provide for the needs of such people (directly or indirectly) and serve a practical purpose for them is important and fully compatible with Wikipedia's overall goals (and also significant as a way of countering systemic bias).

(If the grammar part of the article as it now stands needed to be shortened, I would suggest removing some of the examples from the last subsection (The Sentence). But for now I've left them in, for all the reasons I've just given.)

A couple of last thoughts. One is that there seems to be a grammar of Rama published that I haven't been able to see while compiling this sketch. It would be extremely interesting if I could (and might help me to correct a few mistakes too), but this is what I managed with what I had. If anyone out there can provide further materials, I will be delighted to look at them and attempt to incorporate the information they contain in the article. And lastly, someone mentioned the idea of trying to contact Colette Grinevald (formerly Craig) and asking for her assistance or input on the article. That would be fantastic of course. Maybe now's a good time to try that. --A R King 11:35, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

  • When the structure of the sentence is such that a citation is placed inside manually-placed parentheses (eg here, use Harvcolnb instead of Harvcol. The "nb" means "no braces."
  • The entire article is 33KB, which is perfectly acceptable. :-)
  • As for the footnote, yes it looks very awkward in its current position.. and the fact that there is a Grammar heading immediately preceded by another heading looks distracting too.. easy solution: come up with anywhere from one to three very general summarization-type sentences, placed directly under the Grammar heading. Sentences could mention typology, history, etc etc. Just extremely general summary sentences. After the very first sentence, place your footnote... --Ling.Nut 15:33, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, I've implemented your suggestions/corrections. --A R King 18:33, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] rama=king of ancient India

in the language infobox, ld1=Rama points Rama.--Ling.Nut 21:45, 30 March 2007 (UTC)