User talk:Mr KEBAB/2017

Archives: 2016 – 2017

Luxembourgish phonemic transcriptions

Hi, I've seen that you've edited the IPA transcriptions of several Luxembourgish words to include both phonemic and phonetic versions. That's fine, but could you please at least be consistent? For example, [ə] is an allophone of /e/, and not the other way round as you have done in some of your edits. So, for example, aarmséileg should be /aːʀmˈzɜɪ̯leχ/, [aːmˈzɜɪ̯ləɕ] whereas you have put /aːʀmˈzɜɪ̯ləχ/, [aːmˈzɜɪ̯ləɕ]. The w:Luxembourgish phonology article (which you have made many edits to!) makes this quite clear. Cheers, BigDom 07:18, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

@BigDom Yeah, my bad, and I'll fix them. I could've sworn that the phonemic symbol was /ə/ because it's far more common an allophone, and also because that's how I write it in my own transcriptions. Thanks for writing here by the way, if you just edited my transcriptionś I'd probably miss that. Mr KEBAB (talk) 08:36, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

@BigDom Yep, done. Thanks for fixing some of them yourself. Mr KEBAB (talk) 08:40, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

BTW, proper differentiation between phonemes and allophones isn't stupid. It's important. Take bezweiwelen for example. There's no */w/-/v/ contrast in Luxembourgish (certainly not in native words, there may be very few minimal pairs when you count loanwords), therefore we can't write */bəˈt͡swɑɪ̯vələn/. Mr KEBAB (talk) 09:44, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

Yeah, sorry for my "stupid" over-reaction, please accept my apologies. Thanks for going through and fixing those. Cheers, BigDom 10:32, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

@BigDom No problem. Maybe you're concerned with rhymes, but we don't necessarily have to change their transcription to phonemic. Danish, for example, uses phonetic notation in its rhyme pages. All of this isn't a very huge issue by the way. Users that can read IPA and who have already read w:Luxembourgish phonology will quickly figure out that we're using phonetic transcription here, even though the symbols are enclosed within phonemic slashes. Plus, I've already seen some sources (not on Luxembourgish but English) that use a mixed phonetic-phonemic notation, in which case the choice between slashes and brackets is arbitrary. But I'd much rather follow the official IPA guidelines, that's why I'm doing this.

By the way, how should we treat words like Bierg? Is the correct phonemic transcription /biə̯ʀχ/ or /biːʀχ/? Judging by the presence of the length mark in phonemic transcription, /biːʀχ/ is far more likely to me. Can the phonemic centering diphthongs /iə̯, uə̯/ ever precede the /ʀ/? Or maybe /iə̯/ is actually phonetically identical to non-prevocalic /iːʀ/? We transcribe Wierderbuch as /ˈviə̯dəˌbuχ/. Mr KEBAB (talk) 11:11, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

That's an interesting question - I think I'm happy to go along with what you said. The Wierderbuch transcription looks like a mistake by the way - it should be iːə̯ (long vowel). BigDom 07:25, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

@BigDom Okay, I fixed both. Mr KEBAB (talk) 14:21, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

There's no distinction between [iːə̯] and [iə̯]. Phonemically it should probably be /viə̯(ʀ)dəʀˌbuχ/. There first "r" is only relevant insofar as some speakers may still have a consonant. (Just like "schwaarz" can be [ʃβaːts] or [ʃβaːχts].) Otherwise "ier" and "ie" are pronounced the same. In other words, Wierder is homophone to Wieder.

Regarding your Dutch edits

It is true that checked vowels in Dutch are preferably spelt so that they do not end a syllable break, but -ch- forms an exception: la-chen, wi-che-la-rij, etc. But this doesn't mean at all that these vowels are always phonetically checked. Here are some examples from a different source that doesn't present these vowels as checked in their IPA: [1] [2] [3]

Also, I was curious how you would describe your Babel level for Dutch. Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 09:09, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

@Lingo Bingo Dingo First of all, I don't appreciate being reverted before having a chance to explain my edits, even if you're a native speaker and you provide a source. My edits weren't obvious untruths but alternative analyses.

I checked the Phonology of Dutch by Geert Booij, and here's what I found on page 31:

[W]ord-final syllables cannot end in a short vowel. (Exceptions are some exclamations such as hè [ɦɛ] (...), and French loan-words such as cachet [kajˈʃɛ] 'id.' (...)) On the other hand, word-internal rhymes ending in a short vowel seem to be admissible: adder [ˈɑdər] 'snake' (...).

I must admit that it makes little sense to me to syllabify words such as adder as /ˈɑ.dər/ when /ɑ/ can't normally occur in a word-final position. I'd much rather write /ˈɑd.ər/ to be consistent, but we should follow what reputable sources say and Booij's book is certainly one of them. My bad.

How is my proficiency in Dutch (or whether I speak it at all) relevant to the matter at hand? There's an abundance of papers on Dutch phonology written in English. You don't have to speak a word of Dutch to know something (or a lot) about its phonology and/or phonetics. That's something which is true of all major languages by the way. Mr KEBAB (talk) 11:53, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Okay, glad that's cleared up. From the top of my head checked vowels can't be the final phoneme of a word of an affix (though that does occur in dialects as a realisation of long vowels, e.g. in my dialect [ɑ] for /aː/ is quite common), but it's otherwise not uncommon.

My own preference in wiki etiquette is that I rather be corrected quickly than have a minor mistake remain, but I'll keep in mind that you dislike hasty reverts. Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 12:37, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

@Lingo Bingo Dingo Ok, but phonetic realizations of phonemes are an entirely different thing. /ɑ/ is an abstract symbol covering both phonetic extremes: the fully front [a] found in Groningen on one hand and the near-open back rounded [ɒ] found in Leiden and Rotterdam on the other, and anything in-between, including the Standard Dutch [ɑ] (fully open and perhaps slightly less back than the cardinal [ɑ]) and [ä] (found in some Belgian Standard Dutch speakers). Phonology concerns itself with phonemes alone, but phonetic evidence may be occasionally used to support phonological statements. In this case however, it's irrelevant.

That's fair enough. I was talking mainly about tuig van de richel, in which we basically had an edit war. Mr KEBAB (talk) 13:06, 6 October 2017 (UTC)