Talk:Luganda tones

Capital letters in headings

A reviewer has questioned the use of capital letters in headings such as 'Near Past tense'. The explanation is that in this article I have followed the convention of using a capital letter for the names of tenses, and it would be inconsistent not to use them in the headings also. Kanjuzi (talk) 11:48, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

Overly-detailed?

An anonymous reviewer has tagged this article as 'overly detailed'. Is it more detailed than, say, the article on Chinese classifiers (a featured article) with its ancillary List of Chinese classifiers and the various other articles on different aspects of Chinese grammar? Or than the articles on Old Norse or Proto-Germanic language or Indo-European vocabulary? Why don't they receive an 'overly-detailed' tag? Is it one rule for European and Asian languages and another for African ones? I object strongly to these tags. It is not 'overly detailed'. It has no more detail than many other linguistic articles or indeed many other articles altogether. With less detail it would be less useful. Reviewers must divest themselves of the idea that African languages deserve a less thorough treatment than European ones. Kanjuzi (talk) 06:39, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

@Kanjuzi: It's really the same as your other tonal article, Chichewa tones. At that article, someone noted that it was a bit over-detailed and intricate and you acknowledged it, so I'm not seeing why you aren't here. If you assume the role of a typical Wikipedia reader not familiar or an expert on Luganda, they might find the content of the article excessively detailed. CatcherStorm ^talk 19:33, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

@CatcherStorm: Well, actually I don't think either article is over-detailed - at any rate it isn't any more detailed or more intricate than those other articles I mentioned. What perhaps you and the other reviewer mean to say is that the number of people who may be interested in reading about Luganda is smaller than the number who may want to read an article on Indo-European or Chinese. True! By the same token, the number of people who buy size twelve shoes is smaller than the number who buy size ten. But does that mean that size twelve shoes should be any less well made? I don't speak Chinese myself, but as a linguist what I find fascinating about those articles is the completeness and the level of detail. When I am learning about Luganda, I don't want to be told 'There are ten noun classes: here are examples of two of them and there are eight others'; I want to know the complete set. The article Four tones (Chinese) not only describes the four tones of Mandarin but those of 26 other dialects too. How detailed is that? But I for one wouldn't want the author to cut it down to just half a dozen. Luganda tones certainly are very complicated - even more so than Chichewa - but surely that very complication is what makes them interesting. If people want just a 'taster' on tones in Luganda, they will find it in the main article. If they want to know more, this new article will supply the details. Kanjuzi (talk) 20:39, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

What you fail to understand is that Wikipedia is merely an encyclopedia. This is not the place for a college or graduate level textbook or a linguistic journal article. Your assumption about how people supposedly feel about African languages is incivil and highly offensive. You will not win too many allies or friends here by saying such things. 70.124.133.228 (talk) 22:06, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Have a look at WP:NOTJOURNAL and WP:OSE. 70.124.133.228 (talk) 22:18, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Come on, that isn't really fair! But I apologise if I came over as uncivil, which was not my intention. My point was merely this, that a reader who is learning Chinese or learning about Chinese will find a series of articles documenting every aspect of its phonology and grammar (to the extent even of describing the tones in 27 different dialects!). By comparison with that, this article does not seem particularly detailed, even though the number of people learning about Chinese is obviously much greater. But I would argue that Luganda tones, because they have been well documented in secondary sources, are of interest not merely to the handful of people who want to learn the language but to phoneticists and linguists in general. For example, the authors of one article (Dutcher and Paster) write: "Luganda is a good language to test the predictions of competing models of contour tone distribution because it has both contour tones and closed syllables ... The existence of [such] syllables is crucial to testing the model, and these are absent in most Bantu languages..." To give another example, Larry Hyman, one of the leading experts in African linguistics, has written at least six articles on Luganda tones. It therefore seems to me justified that this topic should be given a fairly full treatment, with some details of the complexities. Even as it is it is far from complete, for example; it mentions only six tenses, out of the many that exist in Luganda. If it were a textbook, it would describe them all. Nor is it a journal article, since it says nothing new that has not been documented before. Moreover, I have tried to present it in a way that avoids jargon and which is accessible not merely to college graduates, as you imply, but to any educated person. Kanjuzi (talk) 06:42, 31 December 2015 (UTC) Actually it seems I miscounted - Professor Hyman has written at least ten articles on Luganda, as appears from the bibliography of this recent article [1]. Incidentally, if you look at Hyman and Katamba's article you can see that there is a big difference between this Wikipedia article and an article in a linguistics journal both in style and content. The linguistics journal article is much more complex, and is full of abbreviations and jargon. Kanjuzi (talk) 08:51, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

Did you actually read WP:OSE? You are avoiding the real issue: the current version violates Wikipedia policy, and the fact that other articles also violate it is no excuse. 70.124.133.228 (talk) 08:04, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

This is not the first article that you have been advised about excessive detail. Refer to the Chichewa tones article. That article is still tagged because the problem has not been solved, nearly 3 months later. Your persistence in violating policy is becoming disruptive. 70.124.133.228 (talk) 08:12, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Yes I did indeed read the OSE article, as well as Wikipedia's Inclusion Policy which my article is said to have violated. Concerning textbook style the latter says 'The purpose of Wikipedia is to present facts, not to teach subject matter. It is not appropriate to create or edit articles that read as textbooks, with leading questions and systematic problem solutions as examples.' This, as far as I can see, i.e. simply presenting facts, is what I have done; and I have also done my best to present everything in terms an ordinary non-specialist can understand, explaining technical terms in the article itself. To me it seems that this article on Luganda tones seems to fit in very much with the general style and length of Wikipedia articles about other languages. I would be grateful therefore if you could point out for me please one or two specific examples of where you think my article is too detailed or intricate. Or in what way precisely does it differ from a linguistic article of the style which Wikipedia would find acceptable? Personally, as a Wikipedia reader interested in linguistics, I find the longer and more detailed articles are also the more useful ones. As for the companion article on Chichewa tones, as you can see I have recently shortened it by some 3000 bytes and will no doubt shorten it some more very soon. But it would be helpful if other readers were to express an opinion on which parts of it are too detailed. Kanjuzi (talk) 12:22, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

My apologies, by the way, for the tone of my first paragraph above. When looked at again in the light of day, it does seem rather aggressive. Kanjuzi (talk) 14:36, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

The article has now been simplified and reduced by some 4600 bytes, but without I hope, losing anything important. In this connection it may be asked, by those who think there is too much detail, that though it may be justifiable to give details of half a dozen main tenses, is it really necessary to include relative clause intonations as well? In fact, these are very important in Luganda, since many sentences which have an ordinary verb in English have a relative clause verb in Luganda in order to express focus. For example, a sentence such as 'I'm cooking beans' might be expressed as 'what I'm cooking is beans'; and 'who came?' would be expressed as 'it is which ones who came?'. For this reason I think that to omit them would be to lose a great deal and it is necessary to keep them in. Kanjuzi (talk) 12:40, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Lang tags

@Kanjuzi: Greetings! Thanks for adding the {{lang}} tags to this article last year; I hadn't noticed that in the history since I was dealing with a large number of articles. I recently ran another spell check from a database dump, and the following showed up and don't look like English words; I assumed they weren't tagged.

àá, áń, ttóóró, ggwéé, àá, atéma, omutî, ggwáaní, yugáńda, kkénya, emmére, emmére, gâ, enyáńja, aawwe, yó, kyá, -aá, báá

-- Beland (talk) 06:12, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

@Beland: One or two of those are Luganda words which were missed, and I can add the missing tags, but others are not proper Luganda words but show the pronunciation of the word if this differs from the spelling. For example, Ugáńda né Kénya (pronounced yugáńda né kkénya) 'Uganda and Kenya'. How should these pronunciations be dealt with in a Wiki article? Can you advise? Kanjuzi (talk) 09:47, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

@Kanjuzi: Ah, interesting question. I poked around a bit and found Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation which seems to prefer {{IPA}} for non-English words. It looks like that can accommodate tones, though I'm not sure the respellings currently in the article are strictly IPA. If you need to use a non-IPA respelling system, {{not a typo}} is a good generic fallback tag, though using IPA will probably cause screen readers to make the right sounds. -- Beland (talk) 15:45, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

@Beland: Thanks very much. I'll get round to it as soon as the term ends. Kanjuzi (talk) 06:25, 12 June 2020 (UTC)