Category talk:Proto-Algonquian language

I take issue with the use of <ç x l ɬ> in reconstructions, especially the last. IMO, Goddard's The West-to-East Cline in Algonquian Dialectology (Ives Goddard, 1994) makes a very good case for reconstructing these as <r s r θ>. There is some justification in using <ç x l> since these are the values reconstructed by Bloomfield and repeated in most of the Algonquianist literature; however, virtually nobody in the field except Paul Proulx reconstructs *ɬ for Bloomfield's *θ. That Ritwan shows /ɬ/ in most correspondences with Algonquian *θ (see Proulx 1984) is, I think, irrelevant; this page lists Proto-Algonquian forms, *not* Proto-Algic ones.

I am therefore taking the liberty of editing Wiktionary's entries for reconstructed Proto-Algonquian roots and formatives to better reflect the scholarly consensus.

Fearfuljesuit (talk) 12:07, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

As the creator of most of Wiktionary's proto-Algonquian entries, I used ɬ because (a) it's unclear which of the two sounds (ɬ or θ) was actually present, but (b) Proulx reconstructs ɬ in Proto-Algic, as you note, so there's a consistency to also using it also in Proto-Algonquian. I am agreeable to switching the pages around to put θ as the lemma and ɬ as the redirect, however (but not just blanking the ɬ pages as you did); I'll do this using an assistance software called AutoWikiBrowser so as to find and update all the appendices and all the entries that link to them fairly quickly. :) You may notice that pages with ç are mostly redirects to other spellings already, but not all to spellings with r! Sometimes, when a word which had been reconstructed with the 'placeholder' ç is reconstructed with greater specificity, a different consonant such as s is reconstructed, as in *meskwi, which complicates the assumption that all ç should just redirect to r. - -sche (discuss) 22:02, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

Sounds good, and I apologize for trying to salt the earth (didn't realize there was an automatic bot to do this sort of thing, but it's no surprise that there's one that can do that). Point taken on *ç. On reflection, given that the vast, vast majority of Algonquianist literature uses *l, *ç, *x, it seems best to use them in Wiktionary entries even if there are good reasons to suppose that the letters used are not the most accurate representations of the actual sounds- Pentland and Aubin's dictionaries, Bloomfield's papers, and even most of Goddard's writings prior to West-to-East-Cline use them (unlike, as noted above, *θ). It strikes me that there is precedent on Wiktionary in Latin entries, which use <v> for Latin /w/, even though it suggests a value of /v/ and might more accurately be written <u> (and, of course, the Romans did not distinguish them in writing). Fearfuljesuit (talk) 19:18, 4 March 2016 (UTC)