User talk:Stephen G. Brown

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[edit] Serbo-Croatian

Hi Joy,

Perhaps 17 million is the correct number, but I trust Ethnologue, which shows 21 million total for all countries as of 1999: < http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=SRC >. I also have an older Ethnologue figure (Grimes, 1992) that indicates 19 million speakers. I don't know where your 17 million comes from, but I suspect it's either old or qualified and limited in some way. I know I make the occasional mistake, but I do take pains to have accurate and up-to-date information whenever I write anything.

--Stephen 09:27, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, about Ethnologue, please see the last section of Talk:Serbo-Croatian language where this same matter is already discussed to an extent. --Joy [shallot] 12:17, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Stephen, I do appreciate your edits, but you either don't appear to have a Wikipedia account or the signature links are invalid. Please create an account if you don't have one, as you're now practically anonimous. Thus, I can't access you through your talk page, where such points normally belong:
- How is it that love has long accent in English? Even in the dialects where it does, loving certainly doesn't.
- Long unstressed syllables are not so common in English. Fifties is about the best I could manage.
- Lj is AFAIK (being also a lateral) a sonorant and thus is not normally marked as "voiced". As I know, voiced/voiceless distinction is not normally indicated for sonorants, as they don't have voiceless pairs.
- I dislike your edit on subject-verb agreement like "The majority of linguists think". As you have noticed, my English is not perfect, but AFAIK it's an open issue whether the verb should agree with the grammatical subject (majority) or logical subject (linguists), i.e. both variants are acceptable depending on the variant of English (and I strongly prefer the first). Is it an AmE/BrE issue or what? See this sci.lang thread.
Duja 09:00, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Duja, I'm logged in, and when I click on Preferences it has my name, nickname and e-mail address. It doesn't ask for any other info, and I don't know how to make my signature link any more valid. I tried clicking on the "Talk" following my name in the Watchlist, and it opened a talkpage (which includes a message from Joy).
Found it (apparently). I was seduced by the fact that your user page is empty, so on the link of your signature Wikipedia offers me to edit the page. You could spare a few words on yourself there, if only just to avoid such confusions.
As for "love," I was just trying to find an example to match the [á] in the table. This letter shows up better in the table than [í], I think. But you're the expert on S-C, and you should choose the English words you like best. But then I think you should change the vowel in the table from [á]/[à]/[â], etc., to the right vowel for your example.
English [i], however, seems like the best candidate for approximations, as 1) it remains [i] regardless of short/long and 2) I can't find many examples in English with long unstressed syllables (fifties has unstressed [i:] aka [ij] in AmE). OTOH, as you said, I can't find enough i's with diacritic marks in Unicode table (and they're ugly). However, I don't think that the current mismatch would confuse the reader.
Lj is unvoiced in some languages (such as some American Indian languages), and on the Lateral consonant page, it is listed as a "voiced palatal lateral." At the moment, it does not link to anything, but as soon as someone gets around to defining it, the link will be voiced palatal lateral. I was simply planning ahead.
But it doesn't match the current Wikipedia naming system for sonorants -- (cf. Bilabial nasal (m), lateral alveolar approximant (l), alveolar trill (r) ). I fail to see how it can possibly be unvoiced. Checking... Wikipedia pages on the subject are in a mess. Compare links from Approximant consonant and e.g. X-SAMPA -- the naming scheme is not systematic, leading to many missing links. I don't care if it's one way or another ("voiced" ommitted or not) as long as it's consistent.
And no, the construction "the majority of linguists is" is completely unacceptable in both American and British English. It is not an open issue at all. In this particular construction, the verb agrees not with the head noun "majority," but with the referent "linguists." The majority of people are blond, but the majority of the book is in English. Even if the word "lingists" were only implied, the verb would still HAVE to be in the plural: The majority were imprisoned; A majority are in favor of it.
I belong to a linguists' group (http://forums.compuserve.com/vlforums/default.asp?SRV=ForeignLanguage) that is very strong on English (American and British) grammar, style and usage, and if you like I could get some comments from some of them for you on this issue.
In fact, I have just looked "majority" up in my Fowlers Modern English Usage (Oxford), and he affirms that "majority" in this sense MUST have a plural verb. --Stephen 11:18, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Then, consider that matter settled (guess I'll have to re-check AUE FAQ ;-)). FYI, it's the opposite in SCr -- the grammatical subject agrees with the verb rather than logical one.
Duja 15:07, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Underlining

May I ask you to do the same with the óther sections in the article? And also with Bulgarian lexis? Or at least to tell me how I can do it myself, I am not really a formatting genius... VMORO 15:35, Mar 20, 2005 (UTC)~

Could I ask why you're adopting underlining? The Wikipedia standard when referring to a word rather than the thing it denotes is to use italics. Underlining looks ugly and could mislead people into thinking that it indicated a link - and even in the case of links, many users set their browser to suppress the underlining, for aesthetic reasons. Maybe the problem is that you think the "italic" version of Cyrillic looks too different from the upright version, but many other articles use it. rossb 10:41, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I've used underlining in this case because of the Cyrillic script. I've been reading and writing Cyrillic for longer than most people have been alive, so for me italicized Cyrillic presents no problem. However, italicized Cyrillic is difficult for anyone who is new or unaccustomed to it. We've already discussed this on Talk:Bulgarian_language, including possible solutions. Notice, for instance, how these Cyrillic letters appear in italics and other formats: вдигятопол, вдигятопол, вдигятопол, вдигятопол, вдигятопол.
We did the Bulgarian language page using italics at first, but the result was terrible ... and unreadible. You are welcome to do it a different way if you can think of a better one, but my opinion as a long-time professional typographer is that underlining is a vast improvement over italics in this case.
That other articles use Cyrillic italics does not strike me as a valid argument. Any article intended to be read by people who do not regularly use Cyrillic should not use Cyrillic italics, unless it's a discussion about Cyrillic italics. All those other articles should be changed.
As to users who set their browser to suppress underlining ... then they will simply see regular Cyrillic in contrast to the surrounding Roman text. It will be still much easier for them to read, and the appearance of the page will still be superior to one filled with a lot of Cyrillic italics.
The same holds true for words in any other language that uses some unusual letters. Italics tend to make them unreadable. For example, the Azerbaijani name for their own country: Azərbaycan Respublikası vs. Azərbaycan Respublikası ... italics kill the schwa. —Stephen 12:06, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I take your point about the unfamiliarity of italic Cyrillic. The m for T is pretty confusing, and on holiday in Ukraine last year I was quite puzzled as to what the backwards s might be. But I wonder why you rejected bold as an alternative? Certainly whenever I see underlining on a web page, I have an urge to click on it. More generally, since you're proposing something potentially affecting a number of articles, shouldn't this be discussed on Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)? By the way the italic schwa looks fine on my browswer (the much-maligned MSIE)rossb 13:19, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Well, the second thing we tried on the Bulgarian page after rejecting italics was ... bold. It was certainly an improvement as far as legibility, but it was grotesque ... too ugly for words. As far as I can see, the choice is between underlining and a font change.
It won't hurt anything if you click on an underlined word, and the lack of action will be a good indication that it's not a link. People quickly learn not to click on RED links (because they don't go anywhere worthwhile), and they will figure out underlined words just as quickly.
You must have a really good font if you can see an italic schwa. The fonts that came with my Windows 2000 and Word 2000 don't have that letter, or any other unusual Roman italics.
I have never visited the Village Pump, but I agree that it should be discussed, so that something can be done about the other pages. One page in particular that I've noticed is the Common phrases in various languages ... all those italics make it illegible and unusable, besides the way it looks. Italics on a monitor are even worse than italics on paper, and even on paper they should be used with extreme discretion and vanishingly seldom. Underlining is a far better tool, both for legibility and for esthetic appearance.
—Stephen 16:52, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Killer language

Hello, Stephen. I'm hoping you can take a look at Killer language. That article was marked for cleanup in mid October, but it isn't showing on October's cleanup list. I'm not sure if it ever was listed. Google gives 1,090 hits for "killer language," so I assume it is a term that is in actual use. Is there useful material in that article? Should it be cleaned up or should it redirect elsewhere? Thank you. SWAdair | Talk 06:50, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I had not seen this article before. It's an interesting outlook, if a bit strained. It discusses a problem that is both real and very serious, but I don't see how this view (of ascribing the death of one language to the "actions" of another, rather than to the laws, policies and practices of governments and societies) could be useful or effective. To solve the problem of dying languages, attitudes and laws have to be changed, and blaming English seems pointless to me. And in recent years, attitudes have indeed been changing (I'm not sure why), and minority dialects and languages are suddenly becoming respectable.
I suppose we could keep the article around for a while, since it seems to be popular. I'll clean it up a bit. —Stephen 09:32, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
  • Thank you. That article has been on my 2Bchecked list for a while. I'm just now getting around to working on the 2Bchecked list. Thank goodness you edit regularly -- it wasn't difficult to find you when I went looking for a linguist. Happy editing! SWAdair | Talk 09:44, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Re: IPA template

The IPA template should not be used for a couple reasons. The template itself is misleading when used for anything other than IPA. Its tooltip says "This is an IPA-transcription...," which it is not. And as Michael Z. mentioned at the article's talk page, a better solution would be to use a different template specificially designed to handle Cyrillic text. For now, a better solution would be the Unicode template. In fact, Template talk:IPA even recommends this. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs, blog) 02:24, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

  • Yes, I was aware of the problems. It’s just that IPA was better than nothing at all. The Unicode template is an improvement over the IPA, and in fact that’s exactly what we’ve been doing in en.wiktionary.org articles for the past few weeks. —Stephen 07:45, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Thanks

Hi Stephen,

I just wanted to quickly thank you for your attentiveness in the Azerbaijan entry not allowing vandal Rovoam to get along with his sneaky vandalism. He introduced his "traditional" vandalism in this edit ([1]) (just above the "Line 66"), which unfortunately went unnoticed by User:Picapica ([2]), but you fixed it promptly [3]). In the past Rovoam tried to introduce similar sneaky vandalisms in Azerbaijanis (e.g. [4]), Azeri (e.g. [5]) and many other Azerbaijan-related and even unrelated entries, such as Ottoman Empire (e.g. [6]) or Ottoman Turks (e.g. [7]).

This person has been literally terrorizing various Azerbaijan and Turkey-related entries in WP, adding sneaky and blatant vandalisms of anti-Azeri and anti-Turk character. I am grateful to you along with many other editors, who track down and neutralize all his spurious edits.--Tabib 13:35, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)

  • You’re welcome, Tabib. We’re experience similar problems with some of the Slavic pages, especially those concerning the languages and peoples of Bulgaria and former Yugoslavia. Where I’m from, such ethnic and cultural bigotry was dealt with and virtually eliminated decades ago, and today we find it difficult to believe that these attitudes are still rampant in large parts of the world. —Stephen 06:46, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Unicode fonts

There has been a lot of discussion about {{unicode fonts}} and the order in which the fonts should be listed. What happens is that the browser (usually IE) scans the list and uses the first font it finds which is currently installed. This is why the rarer fonts are listed first: if a user has installed one of these it will be used. If you front-load the list with the more common, less populated, fonts then those users who have installed the less common better-populated fonts do not gain the benefit.

The article you asked about, Bulgarian language, looks fine to me. I note with interest that it actually uses {{unicode}} for "(Ѣ, ѣ)" and "(Ѫ, ѫ)": how do those now look to you?

That must be because you have some of those unusual fonts installed. I inserted the {{Unicode}} template into the Bulgarian page precisely so I could see the letters. Since the fonts were switched around, all I see in the above four letters are big, blank boxes. —Stephen 7 July 2005 13:12 (UTC)

If you are working extensively in cyrillic, there might be benefit in co-opting {{cyrillic}} (which currently REDIRECTs to {{Cyrillic alphabet}} for some reason) to specify fonts which are rich in cyrillic characters (as with {{polytonic}} for greek): would that help? HTH HAND --Phil | Talk July 7, 2005 10:59 (UTC)

Hmm. Perhaps I will make a new template using the "Unicode fonts" font order before they got switched around. The problem will be finding all of the instances of {{Unicode}} that I have inserted. I think there are quite a few of them...it will take a long time to find and change them.
As I understand it, Windows (or whatever program it is that handles this) only considers the first couple of fonts in a list. Fonts deep in the list might as well be taken out, because they are ignored. If you don’t have a font that comes early in the list, then you get the default font, which I believe is usually Times New Roman. However it works, these lists do not work on my machine unless my fonts are at the head of the list...and I only have the standard Windows set. —Stephen 7 July 2005 13:12 (UTC)

I have Code2000 which appears fairly close to the front of the list: maybe this would help since it claims to have good coverage of Cyrillic. You could also try here. --Phil | Talk July 7, 2005 15:39 (UTC)

[edit] Zlatiborian

Why you dissagree with Zlatiborian language?

[edit] Nahuatl wording

Hello, Stephen,

You recently worked on the Nahuatl page, and described your edit as consisting of minor wording changes. Most of the changes are, but this one struck me as relatively major, where you deleted the stuff I've italicized:

the devastating loss caused by the burning of thousands of Aztec manuscripts by some of the Catholic priests (it is also well known that many missionaries helped translate the texts before they were burnt and/or kept copies of them). (See Nahuatl transcription.)

(a) Seems a bit disingenuous to call that minor. (b) There's a bit of discussion on the Nahuatl talk page. See what you think.

--Lavintzin 14:02, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

The original statement that the manuscripts were burnt by the Catholic priests simply meant that the destruction was carried out by them as a group...it does not say or imply that each and every priest took part in or even condoned the destruction. The addition of "some of" does not change the meaning, but it's superfluous and I think the original wording is better style. As for the part about "well known," that adds a spin that the statement does not merit. If it's well known, you don't need to say so. As for "helping translate", I believe their help was pretty minor...if it had been significant, then the destruction and loss would not have been so great. (Anyway, it goes without saying that some of the priests helped to some extent, since they were the ones who spoke and wrote good Spanish.) Also, their "kept copies" were depressingly few. To me, the "stuff italicized" seems nothing more than whitewash, and does not represent important information. The only parts of it that seem reasonable are redundant, since it already says that, but worded better.
Instead of putting something as airy as the stuff italicized, it would be much better to write that "some of the priests managed to save XX manuscripts from the destruction" and that "some of the priests managed to get XX manuscripts accurately translated" (substituting the correct number for XX, of course). That would be useful information. —Stephen 11:28, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] chimp language

Hi Stephen,

I reverted your reversion of me. The wording of that paragraph implies that not all human languages are 'language' in the normal linguistic sense. It may be that chimp sign has some degree of syntax, though I believe that's a very controversial claim. But even if it does, it doesn't approach the most basic human pidgins, let alone any native language.

kwami 08:16, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

Then I believe you’ve misunderstood the wording in that paragraph. There was no implication whatever that any human language is not ‘language’ in any normal linguistic sense. You stated that you were reverting my "unsubstantiated claim that some human language is as syntactically impoverished as chimp sign." I made no such claim, and the original wording said nothing of the sort. What you’re saying is that Kanzi’s signing was no more language than dogs barking or pigs grunting, and that the original claims that some human languages are nothing more than that. In fact, what it said is that all human languages ARE languages, and that Kanzi’s signing goes far beyond barking and grunting and actually approaches what we consider true language.
The original said that Kanzi’s signing has semantics ... in fact, it does, and I’ve never heard of any study that disputes that. The original also said that Kanzi’s syntax is much simpler than most human languages. The only thing that I can imagine you disagreeing with is the word "most." However, some trade languages (jargons, not pidgins) start out very poorly as languages go. If a jargon reaches the stage of a pidgin, then certainly it has a more complex syntax than Kanzi’s.
What you said is this: "While animal communication has debated levels of semantics, it has not been shown to have syntax in the sense that human languages do." The original wording was correct when it said simply that "animal communication has semantics" ... but you assert that it has "debated levels" of semantics, yet you’ve given no evidence, documentation or explanation of the debate. Next you stated that "it has not been shown to have syntax in the sense that human languages do." That’s a very wishy-washy way to put it...it’s as meaningless as saying that Korean has not been shown to have syntax in the sense that English does. But it leaves one the impression that you’re claiming that it has been shown that Kanzi’s signing does NOT have syntax in the sense that human languages do. Forgetting for the moment the open-ended negative, if you’re going to make that claim, then you should be able to describe Kanzi’s syntax and clarify how it is fundamentally different from the syntax of all human language, including jargons. I’ve never read a study that supports what you’ve written.
Let me ask you if you are fluent in Ameslan or a comparable human sign language. I learned Ameslan at a young age and I know its intricacies and the ways it differs from spoken languages. You really have to know a human sign language of this type in order to judge Kanzi’s communication reasonably.
The bottom line is that the original wording was simple, correct and not in dispute, except for the word "most" (and I believe that some jargons may justify the use of "most"). But what you’ve changed it to IS in dispute, and I don’t think there is any evidence to support it. —Stephen 11:09, 10 December 2005 (UTC)
From what I've read, fluent ASL signers who have witnessed the interactions tend to be highly dubious of the claims of chimp language. This isn't an area I've followed for a while, though, so I don't have refs for my claims. I'd be happy if for now we just removed the word 'most'. Jargons as you describe them are marginal as languages, and not what comes to mind when the phrase 'human language' is mentioned, so that if we say 'most' human languages are more complex, not a few readers will come away with the idea that there are tribes in the Amazon with languages more primitive than what chimanzees use. kwami 21:08, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Bulgars

Thanks for the help in clearing up the Bulgar dispute. I was under the impression that the Iranian theory was a nationalist claim, as that is what the posters above me indicated, and they were the only ones who cited sources. Most contributors here aren't professionals, so it's sometimes hard to tell whether you're dealing with crank theories.--Rob117 22:21, 24 January 2006 (UTC)