Talk:ǂʼAmkoe language - Misplaced Pages

This article is rated Start-class on Misplaced Pages's content assessment scale.
It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:

Endangered languages (inactive)

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Endangered languages, a project which is currently considered to be inactive.Endangered languagesWikipedia:WikiProject Endangered languagesTemplate:WikiProject Endangered languagesEndangered languages

Languages Low‑importance

	Language portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Languages, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of languages on Misplaced Pages. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.LanguagesWikipedia:WikiProject LanguagesTemplate:WikiProject Languageslanguage
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Africa: Botswana Low‑importance

	Africa portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Africa, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Africa on Misplaced Pages. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.AfricaWikipedia:WikiProject AfricaTemplate:WikiProject AfricaAfrica
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.
	Botswana portal This article is supported by WikiProject Botswana (assessed as Low-importance).

How do you say it

How are we suppose to know how to say this word? please add some help.--HalaTruth(ሀላካሕ) 01:06, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

Follow the link at ǂ to get an idea. I don't know what you'd do for English; probably either ignore the click altogether, or substitute with /k/. — kwami (talk) 23:37, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

"more accurately ǂQhôã"

Says who? References needed for this, otherwise it looks like original research. 86.132.138.205 12:34, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Agreed. -128.61.124.56 (talk) 15:36, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Uvular click?

In the introduction, it says that this language has a Uvular click. Unfortunately, it was discovered around the 1950s that, to make a click, the back of the tongue touches the velum to close the mouth off while making the click. Velar clicks, for this reason, are anatomically impossible. The uvula is even behind the velum, making it (if this were possible) even more impossible. —Nay 3 March 2008

If the tongue touches the velum, then that's a velar click. kwami (talk) 21:48, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

But read what John Wells wrote about the velar click in his phonetic blog, recently. So I actually do agree with what Nay said above. Clicks naturally involve a second point of articulation, which is the velum, hence the common IPA practice of writing or (and so on) for the plain clicks. When I try to produce a "velar click", the outcome seems to be a velar implosive instead. — N-true (talk) 22:23, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, I think I misunderstood everything. I totally overlooked that the second articulation for clicks can also be uvular. — N-true (talk) 22:29, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, I remember that symbol. Hopefully the click article is clearer about what a 'velar/uvular click' means. If not, we need to clean it up. (Precisely for the reasons Wells gives, no-one uses the phrase 'velar click' to mean what turned k was supposed to represent.) kwami (talk) 22:57, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

If I understood well, the clicks themselves aren't uvular but the sounds that accompany them. But even so, sounds like are very hard to pronounce. I tried and still have a sore uvula. By the way, sounds a lot like you're kissing. Nice language, really :-). Steinbach (fka Caesarion) 09:50, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

The sound that accompanies it is the click. You can't have a click without at least two places of articulation. If Nǀu is representative of southern Africa, is a uvular click, and is a uvular click-plosive contour. kwami (talk) 20:55, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

Recordings?

This article needs audio recordings of the language. Hurry- the language will be extinct soon, and Wikipaedia will survive forever.

-128.61.124.56 (talk) 15:39, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Kwami!!!

Hi Kwami, please contact me! you were deleting the stuff that I recently added to this page. I edited it since lots of things are very inaccurate in this article. I'm conducting a broad-scale research on this language myself and I'd like to update this page according to the recent state of the research. or do you do research on this language as well? in this case we should probably get to know each other anyway :) have a nice day! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Moromisicka (talk • contribs) 16:03, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

I didn't delete it, I moved it to Kx'a languages, where IMO it belongs. Sorry I wasn't clear. Taivo objected that the citation is bad, but I was able to confirm and even found the pdf online, which I linked. You might want to take a look at Taivo's objection on my talk page to see if there's a problem. (He says that vol. 79 does not yet exist: are there two journals by this name?)

No, I haven't worked on this language, unfortunately! Best of luck to you: IMO this is a top priority among the world's languages.

I think the iso code should stay. The Taa dialect of this name would use the Taa iso code. — kwami (talk) 23:19, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

"Two"

We can never be certain of how many other languages actually have or have had bilabial clicks because the languages of southern Africa have neither all been described nor all been adequately described. Statements such as "only two other languages have bilabial clicks" are not accurate. They imply that 1) we have a perfect and complete knowledge of all the languages of southern Africa and 2) the researcher making the statement has perfect or complete knowledge of all the descriptions of those languages. It is simply poor linguistic practice to make such statements because we do not have such a perfect and complete knowledge. Heck, we don't even have perfect or adequate descriptions of all the languages of Europe, so to make such claims about an area so imperfectly and unevenly described as southern Africa is disingenuous. --Taivo (talk) 09:42, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

But it isn't "have or have had", it's "have". And there are only a few KS languages (and Bantu languages with clicks), and bilabial clicks are a rare enough feature that they're one of the first things remarked upon. We say that Basque "is the last remaining descendant of the pre-Indo-European languages of Western Europe". Would you object that we shouldn't because there might be another which no-one has yet discovered? Or that we shouldn't say that Basque is an isolate because it may have relatives that have gone unnoticed? — kwami (talk) 10:19, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

It's a very different case talking about Basque, where there is quite adequate documentation of the surrounding languages and language area, but there is not sufficient documentation for southern Africa. There are at least a half dozen languages in that area that are very poorly documented and might very well provide counterexamples. In addition, there is still confusion about what the enumeration of language versus dialect in southern Africa is. There is simply no firm foundation for "two" other than one author's enumeration of languages and one author's sample set. It's like the various claims based on UPSID made after its publication. UPSID was a limited data set, yet that didn't stop some linguists from claiming X, Y, and Z about the presence of absence of phonetic elements in the world's languages. --Taivo (talk) 10:58, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

We have a RS, from among those doing the most field work in the area. You could dig up half a dozen more that say the same thing. There is no dispute over the language/dialect question for any of the three languages. There are no languages in the area so inadequately documented that we would have missed phonemic bilabial clicks. On the off chance that another language turns up, we would correct the statement, just as we would if Basque is linked to another language. — kwami (talk) 11:11, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

The religion of "reliable source" must always be tempered with common sense, kwami, and you know it. I would be willing to reword to something like "less than half a dozen", but to put a fixed number to such a linguistic claim is simply disingenous. For example, these languages have labial clicks: Xoo, Nhuki/Khomani, Xam, Hua, Xegwi based on reliable sources. Now I don't know how Miller divides these up into "two", but we could also list the sources for these five and get a different statement (Traill, Doke, Bleek, Ruhlen). "Less than a handful" or even "less than half a dozen" are acceptable, but fixing our vision on "two" is not appropriate. --Taivo (talk) 11:32, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

I'll agree to that when you agree that we should say there are less than half a dozen language isolates in Europe.

Yes, common sense. But for that you need to understand the material, which you obviously do not, hopefully because you simply haven't bothered to read it. Of the languages you cite, three have bilabial clicks. The other two (and quite a few others) had them, but they're extinct. And no, Miller does not divide them up into two, she counts the two (besides ǂHoan) that have bilabial clicks. You're engaging in OR on a subject that you are inadequately prepared for. — kwami (talk) 12:16, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

I love your assumptions that I don't know anything about this issue. Shall I assume that you are equally ignorant? Unless you're Miller or Vossen in the real world... "Two" was the wrong number in my statement above (based on forgetting that "two more" actually means "three"), but the point is the same. And where did Miller or you specify "not extinct"? Recently extinct languages are just as valid for making linguistic generalizations as any other if we have the data for them. In this case, we do, indeed, have data for two extinct languages that also had labial clicks, so the statement "only two others" is an exaggeration and implies "no other". That's not the case. If you want to specify "two other living and two more extinct" that's fine with me. But in statements that imply linguistic definiteness, it's unscientific to exclude recently extinct languages especially when we have data to support the issue from them. --Taivo (talk) 12:34, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

Based on the exact quote from Miller that you provided in one of the other two places we've been discussing, I've clarified the statement in the article to avoid the exaggerated scarcity implied in the previous wording by including the full statement of Miller's about recently extinct languages as well. --Taivo (talk) 12:52, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

It's not exaggerated. There are only three languages with these sounds, and even that is a bit of an overstatement, since one of them is no longer being spoken. That's pretty scarce. — kwami (talk) 12:59, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

While the number "three" is not technically an exaggeration since it is the accurate number for living languages, by not including the fact that it is supplemented by two or more recently extinct languages, it leaves a false sense that it is three and only three and there is no evidence for more. Five is still an extremely small number of languages, so there's no need to make the reader think the evidence is scantier than it already is. --Taivo (talk) 13:11, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

I still don't understand how you read past tense into present tense. The following statements are wrong, according to that reasoning: Basque is an isolate. The US has 50 states. Obama is President. Do we really need to explain that "is" means "is", because someone might think it means "always was"? — kwami (talk) 13:21, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

But linguists use the present tense to include data from extinct languages all the time. We don't write grammars of extinct languages in the past tense. "Most Old Occitan nouns and adjectives are declined...", for example, from the first "extinct" language grammar I pulled off the shelf behind me. Or "Ancient South Arabian shares the fundamental common feature..." from an article in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages. Even in reconstructed languages we use the present tense, "There is a single word for the 'body' in general, *kréps..." from a book on Proto-Indo-European. It's simply a reflection of the fact that we have data on those languages, therefore we can use the present tense to talk about them. So when a linguist writes "is" that is virtually always interpreted to mean "in all the data we have, whether the language is still spoken or not". So here the interpretation is "in all the languages for which we have data." In the linguistic literature, it's not the presence of speakers that governs the present tense, but the presence of data. --Taivo (talk) 13:32, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

So, (assuming we accept the claim of these sources), Etruscan "is" a language isolate, and Basque is therefore not the only language isolate in Europe.

It's different when positioning ourselves within the context of a language. That's just the historical present, as in any form of narration. But we wouldn't say that Proto-Indo-European "is" spoken in the Ukraine, and when listing how many languages are spoken in France, we wouldn't include Old Occitan, because those claims would be outside the context of the narrative of the language. Yes, once we've established a narrative about |Xam, we can say that it "has" bilabial clicks. But it the context of this article, it would be incorrect to count |Xam among the languages which have them. — kwami (talk) 14:36, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

Your example is inocorrect. This isn't about the "historical present". It's about focusing on data versus speakers. Thus the comment about "Proto-Indo-European is spoken" is false because that statement focuses on the speakers, which, as I clearly delineated above, would be where past tense is always used for extinct languages. Indeed, it would be incorrect in any discourse situation to say "Proto-Indo-European is spoken". But notice how authors deal with comments are are related to extant data and not speakers without establishing a "historical present": "East Germanic, this subbranch consists of Gothic..." (not "consisted); "There is a third group of languages within the Germanic family...: East Germanic" (not "was"), "Latin is the chief representative of the Italic group..." (not "was" and this is the very first sentence of the paper). In these examples, the language as part of a classification is the issue, irrespective of the existence of speakers. "A transparent inflectional example is provided by the forms for 'leave' and for 'see'...in Ancient Greek" (not "was" because the data is the focus, first mention of Ancient Greek); "In Tunica, last spoken in Louisiana, all nouns are classified..." (not "were", notice the distinction between "spoken", governing past tense, and "data", governing present tense). Even focusing on sound, "There are labial, alveolar, velar..." in a discussion of Alsea, an extinct language. You're just simply wrong that some kind of "historical present" is the key. It's not. The focus is on the "data", and since the data still exist, then the present is the appropriate tense. When the focus is on the speakers, obviously, the past tense is always used--no "historical present" is allowed. Thus the sentence "Etruscan is another language isolate of Europe (data focus), which was spoken in northern Italy (speaker focus)" is perfectly grammatical and appropriate. In this particular article's case, the focus is on the data--the existence of a particular phonological element within a consonant inventory--thus it can, and should, govern the present tense, as the data are in existence. --Taivo (talk) 16:53, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

I partially agree, apart from your only non-invented contrast between "past" and "present" tense (Tunica) actually being a contrast between passive and active voice, but note that "Etruscan is another language isolate of Europe" would potentially conflict with "Basque is the only language isolate in Europe". Yes, within the narrative of the data, present tense is used even for extinct languages. It's a POV shift, whether you choose to call it historical present or gnomic or just present tense (since those distinctions are not grammaticalized in English). But without that POV shift, present tense means at present. "Basque is the only language isolate in Europe" is perfectly correct without the shift; "Etruscan is another language isolate of Europe" is only acceptable once we establish that we're speaking historically. If I were to say the latter out of the blue, I would be corrected: 'oh, you mean it used to be'. Likewise, "labial clicks are found in only two other languages" is correct and unambiguous, as we haven't established a historical context, and are therefore speaking of the present situation. To say there "are" found in 2–4 other languages is just as wrong without that context as saying Etruscan "is" an isolate of Europe. A historical context is fine too, but it's pragmatically marked and needs to first be established.

Anyway, we're off on a tangent that would be okay on our talk pages, but no longer has anything to do with improving the article, and so is inappropriate here. — kwami (talk) 04:51, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

As a last comment, you're still trying to shoehorn this into some sort of model that isn't accurate. Etruscan does, indeed, exist. It exists as a set of data. Those extinct Khoisan languages still exist--as sets of data. The data have not ceased to exist. The languages have not ceased to exist, but they are no longer spoken. When a language goes extinct without recording, then it does cease to exist. But as long as that language exists in a set of data, it exists, it's just no longer spoken. That's why you look at every classificatory linguistics text and you'll find present tense used to say things like Latin is the ancestor of Romance--"is" because Latin exists as a data set, it's just no longer spoken. Thus, as here, when talking about phonemic segments, saying bilabials are found in X languages, where X comprises languages that are and are not still spoken, is perfectly acceptable because there is a data set labelled "Xam" that still includes that sound. While Xam isn't spoken anymore we still have a data set that can be referenced with a present tense verb and in which exists a bilabial click. The click is right there in the data set. --Taivo (talk) 06:19, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

Etruscan as a language does not exist. There are merely traces of it. Saying it still exists is like saying a person still exists because there's a photo of them in their obituary. A data set is not a language. The language ceases to exist when there is no longer anyone capable of using it. Otherwise, why should we care about language extinction? To tell our readers that it still "is" would be misleading at best, about the same as speaking of dead people in the present tense (fine in context, not out of context). Anyway, this discussion is I'm sure of no interest to the readers of this page, which is supposed to be about improving the article. — kwami (talk) 01:49, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Since, then, you claim that Latin does not exist, I will insist that you consistently use only past tense to refer to anything about the language, the phonemic system, etc. --Taivo (talk) 02:32, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

You're being silly. People still know and use Latin. And you've apparently missed the point that present tense is acceptable once one has established the appropriate context. — kwami (talk) 02:57, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

And you've apparently missed the point that a language doesn't cease to exist as long as there are records of it, because people could still learn it again if they wished. It may have no speakers, but it's not "gone". Consider the Beatles. They're gone. They don't sing their songs anymore (we'll ignore Paul for the sake of the point). But if we want to talk about the lyrics or music of "Hey, Jude" we certainly wouldn't say "Hey, Jude" had. Just because the Beatles don't sing "Hey, Jude" anymore doesn't mean that it no longer exists as a piece of music. Languages, once recorded, exist outside the community of speakers just like the music of the Beatles, once recorded, exists outside John, Paul, George, and Ringo. --Taivo (talk) 05:41, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

None of those languages could be brought back. The data doesn't exist. (Even Hebrew, with its extensive literature, is arguably a different language than its modern reconstruction.) No one can learn them again; any attempt would be an artificial language project based on tidbits of data and filling in the blanks with their relatives. It would be like creating a "dinosaur" by breeding chickens until they looked like what we think a dinosaur should look like. Anyway, if they could be brought back, they'd be a language again once they were brought back and people started speaking them again.

Beatles songs aren't the same as the Beatles. They aren't going to be writing any more. Beethoven's 9th may be the EU anthem, but there will never be a Beethoven's 11th. Churchill isn't still alive just because we have recordings of his speeches. Anyway, we're debating what "is" is, which is not the point of this page. If you really want to continue, let's do it on your or my talk page. — kwami (talk) 07:21, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

consonant notes

C's like !Xoo except lacking pre-voicing, + areal features such as dental --> palatal

labial p b m w

palato-alveolar ts dz tsh ts' tsx s r (= l/__V+high)

+ tc dj tch tc' tcx tcx' l

palatal ky gy kyh ky' kyx c ɲ y

velar k g kh (k') kx' x

uvular q qh q' nG

glottal ' h

p mostly loans, b & m rare as initials

palatals from dentals; Tshila dialect still has dentals. shift of t, d to palatal is an areal feature. said to be stops in Traill (1980).

of nasals, 2 init but only m finally

palatal c much more common than pal-alv. s

exact places of artic not known

"the initial aspirate (meaning /h/? follows enumeration of glottal h & ') is frequently absorbed into the vowel"

clicks: Gruber has 13 series, !k !g n!g '!n n!n !x !x' !q !qh !q' n!q (= N!G?) !h !'

Bell & Collins (2001) note asp is really a 3-way contrast: velar (simul. !h), uvular (delayed !qh), & (prenasalized) delayed, similar to |Gui. & suggest n!g is really allophone of !G

Vowels a e i o u, modal, breathy, laryngealized, and pharyngealized. all may be nasal (d this mean all modal, or all all?)

Cannonical CVCV roots, where C2 may only be b, m, r, n. V1 is normally a or o; o --> u before high V2; a --> e or i if C1 is dental or palatal or if V2 is high (a quirk borrowed from |Gui?)

per Gruber (1973), there are five stem (word) tones, level high, mid, low, bottom & low rising. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kwamikagami (talk • contribs)

Honken (2013) is the definitive list, which I've inserted in the article. --Taivo (talk) 14:09, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

Honken (2013), which is what the notes above are from, is from the late 1990s, before Collins did his work, and is based on Gruber (1973). I don't have access to Collins & Gruber (2013), but that would be worth looking at. — kwami (talk) 22:47, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

Sources

The content presented here bases on old unpublished sources containing data that have been revised already! 194.94.96.194 (talk) 08:25, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Unfortunately, it's the best we have. Do you have access to a more recent analysis? Is anything more recent published? I'd love for someone who knows what they're doing to revise this article. I consider it a linguistic priority and have been frustrated by how little info I can dig up on it. — kwami (talk) 17:39, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Reverted your 'disputed' tag. If you're too lazy to bother saying what you dispute, then the tag is useless. Come on, this is getting ridiculous. — kwami (talk) 17:49, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Mother tongue

Hi Kwami. If the children are speaking a langugage other than the language of their parents, can it be said to be a "mother tongue"? Regards, Rui ''Gabriel'' Correia (talk) 21:37, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

For one, it is not a "tongue", but a "language". "Native language" or "first language" are better terms. As for your question, it would be the native language of the parents, but not their children. --JorisvS (talk) 22:26, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

"Mother tongue" is a common idiom, and therefor correct. No-one's going to misunderstand it. ("Language", after all, is just a derivation of "tongue".)

Sure it's fairly common and, although that really is irrelevant, "language" is indeed etymologically derived from Latin "lingue" (tongue), but languages are not tongues, and the existence and commonness of the word "language" grants a way to use different words for these different things, which makes "language" the professionally correct word to use. --JorisvS (talk) 08:17, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

I believe so, but it probably depends on the source. I've seen sources that distinguish between "mother tongue" and "native language", but don't remember the details. A native language is not the same as one's first language. — kwami (talk) 03:32, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

First language has details on that. For most people, in most areas of the world, they are synomous. --JorisvS (talk) 08:17, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

JorisvS, I beg to differ, but "mother tongue" is a well established concept and has its place alongside other equally valid terms like "native language", each with its specific professional application. Obviously you haven't worked much in early education or adult basic education, especially in countries like most in Africa where formal education is in a foreign language. Kindly take a look at the use of the term by PROFESSIONALS, here, filtered by filetype to return only PDFs to cut out unprofessional things like the neighbour's blog. Rui ''Gabriel'' Correia (talk) 10:12, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

Aside from that it not a tongue and not actually related to mothers, tell me what would be good usage... --JorisvS (talk) 10:57, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

I've had the privilege to see elsewhere that you enjoy these little pedantic games. Well, here is what, if I asked you you to define "language", "native", "first" you would problably ramble on as you do here, because you simply do not know what you are talking about. But that, is old news to you, I have seen it pointed out to you before on various occasions. But amuse us, tell us what is a "native language" and what it is related to. Rui ''Gabriel'' Correia (talk) 11:27, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

You've claimed I'm wrong and I simply asked you to enlighten me. You didn't. But I'll endulge you anyway: a "language", in this context: a specific complex, ordered system used to communicate information; "native" has a meaning close to "original", which makes "one's native language" the language one originally learned; "first"=preceding all others, which makes "one's first language" the language one learned first, and would make these terms synonymous. "Native" can have somewhat different connotations, which can make them slightly distinct in some contexts, whose details, as I already said, are at first language. You can disagree with me (I'm human, so can be wrong, just like everyone else), in which case I'd like a decent discussion with arguments, not being accused of pedantic games and being told I don't know what I'm talking about without any argument to back up such a strong claim. --JorisvS (talk) 13:06, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

Okay, so perhaps it was unfair of me. But this is the third time you and I 'meet' on talkpages and it never goes well. You might remember trying to argue that xyz is THE language spoken by the zyx people, instead of "is A language spoken by them...." That is where the referral to pedantic comes from.

Good to know that's where it came from. I said why I think something, and tend to respond well to good, coherent arguments, either by sharpening my argument or conceding the point. You should note that appeal to authority is a fallacious argument. --JorisvS (talk) 09:37, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Anyway: babies are aleady born with language - they cry, they grunt, they smile, etc etc. THAT would be their FIRST language. So technically "first language" is not right. A baby raised by a nanny who speaks a different language will pick up the nanny's language before picking up its own language (normally this is short-lived). If these kids are picking up language from outside sources, then it is not their "native language". So, "native language" is also technically not right. If a baby picks up a language from the person closest to it and who looks after it, such a nanny, it is coorect to refer to "mother" tongue, as in 99% of the case it is the mother that cares for the baby, as opposed to a nanny or another person. A baby born to a couple that each speaks a different language will always start speaking the mother's language first. THEREFORE, "mother tongue" is a valid scientific construction, which differs from both "native language" and "first language". Regards, Rui ''Gabriel'' Correia (talk) 05:58, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

I defined "language" like in the article. Babies' cries, grunts, etc. are communication, but not a complex system, and hence not a language. Women are likely to be emotionally closer to the baby than men, couldn't this be why babies typically pick up their mother's language first? --JorisvS (talk) 09:37, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

So, is the exact cut-off point between communicatio a d language? And yes, babies are emotionally closer to their mothers. And so they learn things - not just language - from their mother, hence the expression "to learn at the mother's breast". perhaps you have something in Dutch. Rui ''Gabriel'' Correia (talk) 14:10, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

The exact cut-off I don't know, but it does not matter here, because the only relevant communication is clearly not language. And so it is indeed not so much a matter of mothers, but of emotional attachment. What's the point of using "mother language"/"mother tongue" (you have yet to mention anything about why the word for the organ should be used)? --JorisvS (talk) 15:00, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Jorisv, we use English on WP, and "mother tongue" is English. It's not ambiguous, and it's used in linguistic RSs. The OED defines "tongue" as "the faculty of speech; the power of articulation or vocal expression or description; voice, speech; words, language." — kwami (talk) 17:16, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

But why use it? --JorisvS (talk) 18:09, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

Because "mother tongue" is what it's called. Some sources distinguish this from "native language": many people are natively bilingual, but often only one of those languages is their mother tongue. — kwami (talk) 01:31, 23 July 2015 (UTC)

The first is saying 'use it because it's used'. That's circular reasoning. What is supposed to constitute the difference between these? --JorisvS (talk) 09:18, 23 July 2015 (UTC)

Missing citation

Can someone please fix the error message in the references section? ("Cite error: The named reference Collins_2013 was invoked but never defined"). FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 00:18, 27 May 2015 (UTC)

Fix templates

Need to double check whether it was =Hoan or N!aqriaxe that shifted tX, tqX' to cX, cqX'. (Looks like I might've got it backwards.) Also, are !qx' and !q' truly collapsed in Sasi? That is the implication. — kwami (talk) 01:34, 23 July 2015 (UTC)

Categories: