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I've been copyediting the article and I can't figure out the intended meaning of the following: "in Chatino in which the last syllable of polysyllables have stress tone is also only distinguished on the last syllable". Does it mean the stress tone is only distinguished in the last syllable? In that case, I'd change it to something like "in Chatino in which the last syllable of polysyllables has a stress tone which is only distinguished on the last syllable". I'm not familiar with the topic so if I've changed the meaning of anything, just tell me. Graham 87 06:11, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
I made a change to the article and wanted to explain why. Previously the article said: "Many other systems have only three tones registers. Some allow level tones and contour tones (for example Tlapanec) and others only contour tones (for example Texmelucan Zapotec)." However, the image included that explains the Texmelucan Zapotec system shows that it does have a level tone (tone 3). So I have changed the wording to: "Many other systems have only three tones levels, such as Tlapanec and Texmelucan Zapotec." Moreover I changed "register" to "level" because I believe it is more appropriate here. Also, no reference is included for where the data on Texmelucan came from. I could look around for a source if need be. Blillehaugen ( talk) 19:00, 17 May 2008 (UTC)
With only 350 words said to be held in common, this group might be largely or entirely phoney. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.154.0.236 ( talk) 13:21, 19 March 2012 (UTC)
I just realized that major sources such as Lyle Campbell and The Ethnologue both use the spelling without the hyphen, whereas the hyphenated spelling originally was mostly used by Maurice Swadesh and Joseph Greenberg. The non-hyphenated spelling is also still in the lead at google ngrams, though the hyphenated spelling has been steadily increasding since the millenium (perhaps this article cleated in 2005 contributed to that development). Should we move the article to the non-hyphenated spelling? (This question was suggested to me by the linguist Michael Swanton who specializes in the languages of the family) User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 00:19, 31 January 2014 (UTC)
An ip editor keeps inserting text to the effect that Otomanguean is not a generally accepted family, but without accompanying with citations - only vaguely suggesting that Cecil H Brown doubts it. All major authorities on Native American historical linguistics who have published on the issue, (including Lyle Campbell, Terrence Kaufman, Mauricio Mixco, William Poser) accept Otomanguean as a valid family and have done so since Suarez solid demonstration of Tlapanec's relation to the rest of the languages. Brown has not published anything substantial throwing the unity of Otomanguean into doubt, and refers to it as a family in his most recent publications (and he is not generally known as conservative in accepting family relations, in contrast to Campbell, Poser etc). So dont reinsert this without some very strong sources suggesting that the family is not well accepted. ·maunus · snunɐɯ· 20:58, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
I, Cecil H. Brown, have inserted the referred text that keeps getting deleted. I have probably not followed the protocol of Wikipedia changes and for this I apologize. In any case, the immediately above paragraph is not at all an accurate summary of that text. I do not assert that Otomanguean is not a generally accepted family, only that its status as a true language family has yet to be documented using the strict comparative methods of historical linguistics (I could cite books and articles in which this method is unambiguously explained). It is true that Campbell, Kaufman, and Poser accept Otomanguean as a family, but in the current article (without my text) there are no citations at all of works in which the comparative method is used in its standard, appropriate, and systematic manner to compile sound correspondences holding across languages of the proposed family. In addition, other than the Suarez article mentioned above which is limited in scope, compelling evidence is not forthcoming for the relationship based on shared grammatical features. In short, in the current Otomanguean wiki article there are NO CITATIONS of books or published papers in which the actual detailed comparative evidence for the Otomanguean family derived through the standard method of historical linguistics is described. This is not surprising since no such articles and books exist (other than the short paper by Suarez dealing with grammar). At the very least, this short-coming should be mentioned in the wiki article. That is what I attempted to do, but to no avail. 72.216.2.47 ( talk) 15:53, 25 May 2015 (UTC)Cecil
Thanks for the response whomever you may be. There is in fact a published paper that throws doubt on the status of Otomanguean. This is: Catherine A. Callaghan and Wick R. Miller. 1962. Swadesh's Macro Mixtecan Hypothesis and English. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 18:278-285. This paper is in response to the following: Morris Swadesh. 1960. The Oto-Manguean hypothesis and Macro Mixtecan. International Journal of American Linguistics 26:79-111. Swadesh's Macro Mixtecan is an early version of the Otomanguen hypothesis in which all the currently recognized OM languages are proposed to be genetically linked plus Huavean. My objection to the Wikipedia page on Otomanguean is that no sources are cited that develop evidence in support of the proposal based on the standard comparative method of historical linguistics. That is a fact whether or not I have published an article citing it. So what is the Wikipedia article based on? It is clearly based on appeal to authority, i.e., that there are reasonably well-known linguistics, e.g., Campbell and Kaufman, that believe in the proposal and have said so in publications. So it does not take actual evidence supporting an idea before it gets a Wikipedia page. You mention that there are "lots of well accepted language families in the world for which there has not yet been published thorough comparative evidence." If that is so (and I think it is), then that should be mentioned in Wikipedia articles describing such groups. You also mention "published comparisons on the otomanguean level such as those by Josserand and Hopkins." To my knowledge, Hopkins has never published such a work (and I am very familiar with his writing on OM). Josserand's dissertation does systematically compare Mixtec languages to one another and reconstructs Proto-Mixtec vocabulary, but that is hardly a treatment on the "otomanguean level". And yes, there are unpublished papers by Kaufman that have been circulated (but I thought these do not count for Wikipedia). In fact, I carefully analyzed some of the evidence in Kaufman's papers (which do not follow the standard comparative method) and have come up with rough-draft responses that I have circulated to a number of well-known linguists including Kaufman. If Kaufman's unpublished papers are taken into consideration, shouldn't mine as well? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.216.2.47 ( talk) 16:10, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
Thanks again for the response. Otomanguean reminds me of the Eskimo snow-term myth, i.e., that the language has 100 words for snow (actually Eskimo is really a shallow language family). Someone way back put that in the literature (without supporting evidence), and many people, including well-respected scholars, picked up on it as God's truth and perpetuated it without looking at the actual evidence or, rather, lack of evidence. Finally, someone did look at the evidence and that, more or less, was the end of the myth (except for a few die hards that don't really know anything about Eskimo or lexicalization). The history of the Otomanguean proposal is similar, except that OM may actually someday be demonstrated a valid genetic group (although I doubt it from the evidence I've seen for it so far, including the much touted Suarez paper; it is much more likely to be a Sprachbund). Maybe I will find some time to publish a critique of Otomanguean, but I wish someone else younger and with more time than I have could do the job. The problem is that most people, myself included, really are more inclined to take on research projects with a positive rather than negative goal in mind. In the meantime, I will try to reword (with citations) at least one or two of my objections in such a way that it is acceptable to Wiki people such as yourself. If you can give me your name and email address, perhaps I can run it by you before attempting an edit. My email address is easily found by googling my full name (Cecil H. Brown). 72.216.2.47 ( talk) 22:35, 26 May 2015 (UTC)Cecil
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My deletion of text referring to Jolkesky's 2017 non-peer reviewed proposal for a genetic link between Paez and Zapotecan has been reverted by an anonymous editor. I believe that inclusion of this proposal is WP:UNDUE since its arguments have neither been peer-reviewed nor adopted by other researchers. Nasua Narica ( talk) 19:56, 8 July 2020 (UTC)
Minor correction: my deletion was not reverted, but instead claims from the same source were added elsewhere to the article. Nasua Narica ( talk) 19:58, 8 July 2020 (UTC)
The Wikipedia article Language acquisition contains the sentence "One such challenge is to explain how children acquire complex vowels in Otomanguean and other language" where "Otomanguean" redirects to the current article. However, if I search for "complex vowels" in the current article, I don't find anything. It would be good to either add a section on "complex vowels" to address the reference, or else update the reference in Language acquisition to be more clear. Thisisnotatest ( talk) 00:30, 10 October 2023 (UTC)