Wikipedia

Aeusoes1

Joined 22 June 2005
This is a Wikipedia user page.

This is not an encyclopedia article but maybe it should be one. If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, and if you see your reflection, you are viewing a mirror. Be aware that the page may be taken out of context and that the user to whom this page belongs may have perished in the apocalypse of 2012. The original page is located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Aeusoes1.

I'm AE, a 2014 graduate of Southern Miss's Anthropology program (with an emphasis in Cultural Anthropology) and a 2009 graduate of Fresno State's Creative Writing program. My interests include Science Fiction, Linguistics, and Astronomy. On any given day, I'm probably more likely to make minor edits on existing articles than make major contributions.

Contributions

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I've taken a bit of attention to Non-native pronunciations of English, and Anglophone pronunciation of foreign languages. I hate those titles but can't think of better ones.

I started Swadesh list of Slavic languages and transcribed the Russian part into a narrow IPA transcription; created the articles for Iwam language, Yanesha' people,[1] Yanesha' language, ikanye, and yekanye[2]; expanded the diaphoneme and diasystem articles; and reorganized and verified information at Russian phonology, Catalan phonology, Spanish phonology, Swedish phonology, and fortis and lenis to their present organizational states. I've also contributed phonology information to Rotuman language, Pazeh language, Abau language, Gilbertese language, Jamaican Patois, Nauru language, and approximant consonant.

As much as I know about Russian phonology, I don't speak much of it.

I've also added some quality tables and information to language bioprogram theory and post-creole speech continuum.

Despite my seeming awareness of creole grammar, I don't speak any creoles... yet.

  The Original Barnstar
Awarded for generously giving of time and expertise (especially in the preparation of the new tables on the Romanized Popular Alphabet article). Nposs 05:41, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
  The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
Avvarded for useful contributions to the category of Lingüistics, specifically to the branch of Slavic languages (Russian, Belarusian, etc.) 序名三「Jyonasan」 TalkStalk 22:06, 4 September 2010 (UTC)
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IPA ligatures

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Similarly, I tend to remove IPA ligatures in the representation of affricate consonants (i.e. ʦ ʧ ʨ ʣ ʤ ʥ). The most important reason is that these are not official IPA; such ligatures used to be standard IPA practice. Another reason is consistency; for languages with other types of affricates (such as retroflex, alveolar lateral, labial, uvular or interdental affricates) there exist no ligaturing mechanism in unicode so that a dental sibilant affricate would be [ʦ] but a velar affricate would be [kx] and that's not fair.

But AE, you say (or, if you're being pithy, Æ), without such ligatures, readers may mistake an affricate for a plosive + fricative cluster. Remember that we're talking mostly about English speakers who have little conception of the distinction, though they certainly make it:

  • |kæt| ('domesticated feline') + |ʃɪt| ('fecal material') → [kʰæʔʃɪʔ] ('litterbox monuments')
  • |kætʃ| ('receive by grasping') + |ɪt| ('pronoun referential to non-human entity') → [kʰætʃɪʔ] ('exclamation from overzealous parents to their 9-year old little leagueer')

All right, all right. If making the distinction is that important to you, there is a remedy. No, not pot (though if you're getting your panties in a bunch over this, I'm sure it would only hurt your career). The best method is to use the tie bar such as with t͡s. Depending on your computer and browser, this may look like

  1. tús.
  2.  
  3. t□s


The second one is the way it's supposed to look. On my computer it's closest to this, though the tie bar is a little skewed to the right. If I had my way, I'd be putting it like this ts͡ but this would solve the issue for Internet Explorer users by transfering the problem over to users of Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, Mosaic, and Opera (oh, and more recent versions of Internet Explorer like the one that comes with Windows Vista). Naturally, this feeds a great consensus that Internet Explorer is wrong so the way we've been doing it at pages like Polish phonology, Russian phonology, voiced alveolar affricate, voiceless alveolar affricate, etc is t͡s or sometimes t​͡s (not to be confused by t ͡s).

So that's why I'm turning [ʦ] into [ts]. Join me, won't you?

The importance of citations

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It occasionally happens that I get chastized for removing unsourced statements. After all, it is said by my critics, we have {{fact}} tags.

However, we can't simply operate as though it's okay to have uncited information as long as it has a {{fact}} tag. Wikipedia has enough criticism about its accuracy without things like:

Increasing temperature is likely to lead to increasing precipitation[citation needed] but the effects on storms are less clear. Extratropical storms partly depend on the temperature gradient, which is predicted to weaken in the northern hemisphere as the polar region warms more than the rest of the hemisphere.[citation needed] Storm strength leading to extreme weather is increasing, such as the power dissipation index of hurricane intensity.[citation needed] Hurricane power dissipation is highly correlated with temperature, reflecting global warming.[citation needed] However, the increase in power dissipation in recent decades cannot be completely attributed to global warming.[citation needed] Hurricane modeling has produced similar results, finding that hurricanes, simulated under warmer, high-CO2 conditions, are more intense; models also show that hurricane frequency will be reduced.[citation needed] Worldwide, the proportion of hurricanes reaching categories 4 or 5 – with wind speeds above 56 metres per second – has risen from 20% in the 1970s to 35% in the 1990s.[citation needed] Precipitation hitting the US from hurricanes has increased by 7% over the twentieth century.[citation needed] The extent to which this is due to global warming as opposed to the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation is unclear. Some studies have found that the increase in sea surface temperature may be offset by an increase in wind shear, leading to little or no change in hurricane activity.[citation needed]


After a sufficiently long period (yes, there's a great deal of subjectivity in figuring out what this is) in which other editors have been given time to provide references, tagged info can be removed. I'll be the first to admit that I'm inconsistent in applying this, but I'm a lot less understanding of people crying foul when I delete uncited information than of people deleting uncited information where I wouldn't have.

The next common argument is that everybody–or anybody with a small amount of knowledge in the subject such as native speakers of a language or undergraduate students majoring in a particular field–knows the removed information to be true. There are two main problems with this. First, such people may be wrong.

Native speakers are able to provide a massive amount of expertise for their language but there are some things that native speakers are just not naturally conscious of or knowledgable in: phonetic particularities of vowels or consonants, theory (and the history thereof) of underlying structures, historical change, and the frequency of variations.

Undergraduate students, by default, have an incomplete knowledge of what they are studying. As such, they may have received what amounts to oversimplified lies-to-undergraduates; I've got a great linguistics textbook that talks about English's voiced plosives. Naturally, this doesn't mean that undergraduates won't know something accurate or with the proper caveats, but it is then in spite of their status as undergraduates not because of it.

Second, and more importantly, the specifics about what people know may be incorrect even if their general knowledge of the phenomenon is correct. This is the difference between common understanding (possibly the result of lies-to-undergraduates) and encyclopedic information. For instance, a common understanding is that French stresses the last syllable of a word. A deeper understanding of French shows, however, that stress is governed more by intonation unit level concerns so that battement is [batˈmɑ̃] but battement du cœur is [batmɑ̃ dy ˈkœːʁ]. Further caveats regarding e caduc (which is often unstressed) escape me currently but exhibit further complications that native speakers have brought up.

In brief, the common understanding can be wrong and is therefore unwelcome at an informative encyclopedia.

To be illustrative, I've made a table of instances I've come across where an unsourced common understanding statement was rephrased with a sourced statement. This table is expandable and if you can think of another example, you're welcome and add it.

original unsourced statement current sourced statement
Spanish phonology
[s] may become the approximant [ɹ] before a rhotic (israelita: [iɹraeˈlit̪a]). In some dialects, /s/ may become the approximant [ɹ] in the syllable coda (doscientos: [do̞ɹˈθje̞nto̞s] 'two hundred').[3]
In Andalusia, final /as/ becomes [ɑ]. /as/ and /ax/ → [æ̞] e.g. mas [mæ̞] ('plus').[4]
Stress is on the penultimate syllable unless the word ends in a liquid or -z, in which case it falls on the ultimate syllable. In words ending in vowels and /s/, stress most often falls on the penultimate syllable. In words ending in all other consonants, the stress more often falls on the ultimate syllable.[5]
In Spanish, the vowels "e" and "o" can become /i/ and /u/, respectively, in the relaxed pronunciation of a hiatus. Almohada ('Pillow') /alˈmuada/ and línea ('Line') /ˈlinia/. Non-syllabic /e/, /o/, and /a/ can be reduced to [ʝ], [w̝] and complete elision, respectively... the frequency (though not the presence) of this phenomenon differs amongst dialects, with a number having it occur rarely and others exhibiting it always.[6]
Russian phonology
[ɨ] and [i] are considered allophonic. Their isolated pronunciation is distinct... However, the two sounds tend to merge (tending to [ɪ]) when unstressed or when following the sibilant consonants... When unstressed, /i/ becomes near-close; that is, [ɨ̞] following a hard consonant and [ɪ] in most other environments.[7]
In the case of either <о> or <ё>, the vowel is fronted to [ø] between two palatalized consonants. Between palatalized consonants[8] or simply following a one,[9] /o/ is centralized to [ɵ̞]
Major phonological processes in the last thousand years have included... The development of /e/ into /o/ under stress Major phonological processes in the last thousand years have included... The development of stressed /e/ into /o/ when between a palatalized consonant and a plain one[10]
Non-native pronunciations of English
Occasional mispronunciation of final /m/ as [n], e.g. "welcome" -> "welcon." This is how it is pronounced in the few Spanish words ending in "m" (most notably, "álbum" and "réquiem"). The three nasal phonemes of Spanish neutralize in coda-position; speakers may invariably pronounce nasal consonants as homorganic to a following consonant; if word-final (as in welcome) common realizations include [n], deletion with nasalization of the preceding vowel, or [ŋ].[11]
Pronunciation of final /ŋ/, especially before non-velar consonants, as [n] (sing →seen), because [ŋ] is an allophone of /n/ before velar stops
Can you think of any more examples?

Notes

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  1. ^ translated from Spanish
  2. ^ merged to Vowel reduction in Russian
  3. ^ Recasens, Daniel (2004). "The effect of syllable position on consonant reduction (evidence fromCatalan consonant clusters)". Journal of Phonetics. 32: 435-453. citing Fougeron, C (1999). "UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics". 97: 1–73. {{cite journal}}: |chapter= ignored (help); Cite journal requires |journal= (help) and Browman, C.P.; Goldstein, L. (1995). Bell-Berti, F.; Raphael, L.J. (eds.). "Producing Speech: Contemporary issues for K Harris". New York: AIP: 9–33. {{cite journal}}: |chapter= ignored (help); Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  4. ^ Lloret, Maria-Rosa (2007). Bisetto, Antonietta; Barbieri, Francesco (eds.). "Proceedings of the XXXIII Incontro di Grammatica Generativa": 15-35. {{cite journal}}: |chapter= ignored (help); Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  5. ^ Eddington, David (2000). "Spanish Stress Assignment within the Analogical Modeling of Language" (PDF). Language. 76 (1): 92–109.
  6. ^ Bowen, J. Donald; Stockwell, Robert P. (1955). "The Phonemic Interpretation of Semivowels in Spanish". Language. 31 (2): 236–240.
  7. ^ Jones, Daniel; Dennis, Ward (1969). The Phonetics of Russian. Cambridge University Press. p. 37-38.
  8. ^ Jones, Daniel; Dennis, Ward (1969). The Phonetics of Russian. Cambridge University Press. p. 62.
  9. ^ Crosswhite, Katherine Margaret (2000). "Vowel Reduction in Russian: A Unified Accountof Standard, Dialectal, and 'Dissimilative' Patterns". University of Rochester Working Papers in the Language Sciences. 1 (1): 107–172. {{cite journal}}: External link in |title= (help)
  10. ^ Crosswhite, Katherine Margaret (2000). "Vowel Reduction in Russian: A Unified Accountof Standard, Dialectal, and 'Dissimilative' Patterns". University of Rochester Working Papers in the Language Sciences. 1 (1): 107–172. {{cite journal}}: External link in |title= (help)
  11. ^ MacDonald, Marguerite (1989). Bjarkman, Peter; Hammond, Robert (eds.). "American Spanish pronunciation: Theoretical and applied perspectives". Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press: 215–236. {{cite journal}}: |chapter= ignored (help); Cite journal requires |journal= (help); External link in |title= (help)

C&P

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This is a list of IPA symbols so that I can C&P with ease:

Important things

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These are a few of my favorite things.

{{need-IPA}}

When an article needs to use IPA rather than ad-hoc or confusing systems.

{{IPA notice}}

To let readers know you're using IPA.

{{Essay-entry}}, {{inappropriate tone}}

When an entry doesn't have the right tone.

{{cleanup-translation}}

When someone no speak-a good English.

{{Unreferenced}}

When there's little to no sourcing.

{{Nofootnotes}}

When there's sources but no citation

{{refimprove}}

When there's some sources, but a need for more.

{{Onesource}}

When it's based largely on one source.
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