Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 00:09, 5 June 2005

Nohat, you are violating the 3-revert-rule. 70.177.90.39 00:09, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Archives

• Archive I – User talk:Nohat/archive 2005-02-22

AIM name?

Hello, I'm Jordan; you remember me as the one who offered some controversial suggestions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for English and "cot-caught" merger articles. I was wondering if you had an AIM screen name so we could continue our linguistic conversations.

See Misplaced Pages:Instant Messaging Wikipedians. Also, please feel free to create an account. You can read about why that's a good idea at wikipedia:why create an account?. Nohat 05:13, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Cornell lowest ranked school

You should be aware of this discussion:

USF seal

Thanks for fixing that picture for me! The seal was atop a building and I was at ground level; I'm afraid I didn't know how to fix it myself. Again, thank you. Mike H 08:18, Feb 28, 2005 (UTC)

Corrected perspective

Thanks for correcting the perspective on architectural images. I'm not the only one who appreciates it, though I might be the only one to tip you a note! --Wetman 09:23, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thanks! It's kind of fun, although I wish I had higher-resolution photos to work with. If you can point me to other photos that need it, I'll be glad to oblige, eventually. Nohat 09:27, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages Logo

You actually made the Misplaced Pages logo?! That's so cool! Great Job! What program did you use to make it?

- mathwizxp

Syntactic saturation

Hi, Nohat! I understand from your profile that you are interested in linguistics. "Syntactic saturation" is a long-time article request that seems to be unfillable. I can't find anything useful about it on Google, otherwise I'd write a stub myself; I would greatly appreciate it if you or any of the other linguists on Misplaced Pages might be able to help. -- The Anome 10:50, Mar 8, 2005 (UTC)

California English

When I added the link to California English, the article existed! It doesn't anymore; it must have been speedily deleted. But why? It was actually a pretty good article, I thought. Do you have any idea what happened? --Angr 08:20, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

See Misplaced Pages:Votes for deletion/Californian Accent. RickK 08:31, Mar 20, 2005 (UTC)

If underlined links are annoying you, you can click preferences at the top of the page, then click "Misc settings", and then uncheck the box marked "underline links". --Angr 19:07, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Typeface for the Arabic logo

Ahlan Nohat:

Elian referred me to you as I was enquiring about the name of the typeface used in creating the Arabic version of the logo. I originally wanted to create some banners and buttons, and now I'm interested in designing a leaflet and a high resolution version of the Arabic logo. Also, before I downloaded your high resolution Photoshop version, I had wondered if there is a vector format version of the globe.

I was also reading about the history of I must say that I prefer the current one to all the previous phases. --Alif 19:02, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I appreciate your reply.

I can see that the version currently in Misplaced Pages is different than the one :currently in use. Do you have any idea when did this happen or why?

Is the font file usable on Windows systems? Is it possible/legal for you to give me a copy of it?

Any other suggestions regarding this issue would be great.

And, regarding a scalable format, recently Adobe have incorporated 3D capabilities in Illustrator. I have no clue what/if it is useful for this case. --Alif 00:04, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Vowel sound samples

I noticed you uploaded sound samples for the vowel articles, but it appears that the sounds for Close-mid central unrounded vowel (Media:Vow-011a.wav) and Open-mid central rounded vowel (Media:Vow-019a.wav) are missing. Could you either upload these sounds or provide a link to where you got them? I need all the samples because I plan to add plots of their power spectral densities to the respective vowels articles (to see the different formants). CyborgTosser (Only half the battle) 01:55, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Swedish speakers

At RfC I listed:

• Talk:Rikssvenska, Talk:Swedish language, Talk:Swedish phonology, Talk:Voiceless dorso-palatal velar fricative, and most probably soon in more related articles, souring relations between contributors with conflicting attitudes and personalities (likely related, among other things, to the status of Finland-Swedish and the Mandatory Swedish education in Finland)

I guess this is a field where you can weight in as a moderating force.

Regards!
--Johan Magnus 09:59, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Dr Zen enforcement / stricken portions

Thanks for removing those - I was going to do so when putting that there, but must've forgotten to do so. -- Grunt 🇪🇺 00:50, 2005 Mar 27 (UTC)

Sandbox

I saw you clean out the Sandbox... would you prefer the Sandbot to clean the sandbox more often or less often? -- AllyUnion (talk) 09:16, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Macedonian Misplaced Pages

I have seen that you have posted on some discussions on the macedonian wikipedia ( www.mk.wikipedia.org ) regarding the logo of the macedonian wikipedia. Are you somehow involved in the making of the national logos? Because there is a little mistake with our wikipedia logo (Vikipedija: Slobodnata Encikopedija - Википедија - Слободната Енциклопедија)... although it is gramatically correct, it is unusual to use the -ta article in macedonian(it has a somewhat a bulgarian spirit in when it's put in that way)... so could you please change the picture and replace it with Vikipedija: Slobodna Enciklopedija (Википедија: Слободна Енциклопедија)... without 'TA'... our logo should be exactly as the Serbian one... although our languages differ much. However if you're not in the logo business, could you please instruct me how it is possible to change it? :) thank you for reading.

Syllabification

Thanks for catching the misuse. You're right about that. Poor attempt at irony, I guess.

Nice SPUI diagram

Thanks for making the diagram - looks good. --SPUI (talk) 10:00, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Zurich

Zürich has been nominated on Misplaced Pages:Requested moves for a page move to Zurich. Perhapse you might like to express your opinion about this proposed move on talk:Zürich. Philip Baird Shearer 09:53, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Pronunciation files

Hey. I've been checking out the sound files you've provided for various sounds. Are all of them by Ladefoged? There's also a reference to UCLA in the image files, but I don't quite see the meaning. Is it a URL? It would be nice to get some files of higher quality for some of the fricatives. Are there any more files like this available? Peter Isotalo 18:40, Apr 8, 2005 (UTC)

I replaced one of Ladefoged's recordings with one of my own at uvular trill. Hope you don't mind, but you can see my motivation on the talk page. I also recorded a few ejective consonants.

As for the sound files. A lot of the fricatives like voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative and voiceless palatal fricative are hard to tell apart. The velar fricatives are even more difficult to discern from one another, even in the cases where I'm actually familiar with the sounds. There's also the problem of the copyright, since I would like to start building a proper collection of pronunciation files at Commons, and I assume there would be a problem uploading the UCLA-files there with the current copyright.

Would you mind if I made recordings of the sounds that I do feel I can pronounce properly to replace those of Ladefoged's that are of very low quality? Peter Isotalo 21:14, Apr 14, 2005 (UTC)

Absolutely it would be better to have recordings that are GFDL than the somewhat ambiguous situation with the Ladefoged recordings. The benefit of the Ladefoged recordings is that there were recorded in a proper studio, so the noise floor of the recordings is very low (although the resolution is admittedly somewhat poor). If you add your own recordings, I hope you will understand if I am hesitant to replace the Ladefoged recordings if they are very noisy or otherwise amateurish. On the other hand, if you have access to a recording studio, then I'd be thrilled to replace those sounds. Nohat 21:51, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Well, what do you think of these?

uvular ejective

Swedish "sje"-sound

uvular trill

Peter Isotalo 22:14, Apr 14, 2005 (UTC)

Sound pretty good to me. :-) Nohat 22:20, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Ok, I replaced a bunch of files, mostly fricatives. Just check my contributions if you want to check out the sound quality. I don't have that much experience of recording sounds myself and my equipment is rather modest. I also posted a suggestion to start improving the phonetics articles. Have a look at the talk page if you're interested. Peter Isotalo 17:04, Apr 15, 2005 (UTC)

Vowel charts

Hello! If my information is correct you drew these two diagrams:

Media:Ipa-chart-vowels.png

Media:Dutch-monophthongs.png

The axes on the IPA diagram are clearly labeled: front-back, close-open, with roundedness in place (not given an axis).

The axes on the second diagram are not mentioned. Noting the dissimilarities between the diagrams I can't help but wonder what's on the axes. What does the location of a vowel in this diagram mean? As a native speaker of Dutch I could maybe guess, but someone else might try to use the IPA chart as a reference and find them incompatible...

I hope you can enlighten me on this. Cordially yours, Shinobu 01:03, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I drew that diagram based on a similar diagram which appears in The Handbook of the International Phonetic Association. The slighty variant location of the vowel sounds represents the fact that the actual position of the tongue and the resultant formants in the produced vowel vary slightly from the "standard" positions as described by the International Phonetic Alphabet. For example the Dutch sound (as in fuut) is significantly more centralized than the Dutch sound (as in biet). In fact, the IPA symbol is probably a more accurate transcription of the sound. However, is used for phonological reasons—in the sound system of Dutch, it works in a way that is parallel to — in particular there is not a 3-way contrast in backness in Dutch, so there is no reason to posit that the vowel of fuut is both rounded and centralized, as rounded is sufficient to describe the phonology of the vowel. I hope this explains it. Feel free to ask me if any of this is unclear, as it very may be, considering I've just had a couple glasses of wine :-). Nohat 03:47, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Okay, that makes sense. If Dutch "uu" resembles more IPA than IPA then I think that should be symbol used, but that's only my personal opinion I guess. It would be less confusing, though. Also it might still be nice to "put something on the axes" so to speak. Maybe some mention of all this could be made in the text. I'll think about it some more time. (And give my coffee some time.) It would be nice if the vowels were somehow hyperlinked to pronunciations as sound files. Shinobu 13:37, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The vowel /o/ (in Dutch orthography usually spelled oo in closed syllable, o in open one) is missing from the chart. It occurs in Dutch in contrast with /ɔ/ (spelled o, always in closed syllable, often before doubled consonant). You can find an example in the table in the article. The IPA manual shows it in the diagram as start of a diphthong, but in the example text there you can see it occurring as a pure vowel. −Woodstone 19:13, 2005 Apr 14 (UTC)

The diagrams were drawn based on one from The Handbook of the International Phonetic Association, which says that the Dutch /o/ phoneme is actually realized as a narrow closing diphthong. This is supported by Geert Booij's authoritative The Phonology of Dutch, as well as most other phonetic analyses of Dutch. Nohat 20:04, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The IPA manual shows the /o/ used in English, which has in effect a much bigger glide than the Dutch one. The German /o/ is shown as well, wich is quite similar to the Dutch one. The example text in the IPA manual shows all occurring /o/ as /oː/ not as /ou/ or /oʊ/. I'm afraid the handbook is not consistent. But no matter, I just saw the diphthongs are shown in additional chart in the Dutch language article. −Woodstone 20:53, 2005 Apr 14 (UTC)

A lot of Dutch hardly "glide" the /o/, if at all, especially when speaking fast. To me personally "gliding" the /o/ sounds like a city-dialect in most cases.

I've listened to the sound files on the pages for u, ʉ and y. Unfortunately the examples for ʉ don't seem to contain the same sound... the first sound sample sounds kind of like a dark u ("hoed"), the Swedish sample starts out with something very similar to an ʏ ("hut"), but lighter, a bit like an y ("fuut") even and slightly diphtongized. (Examples in Dutch.)

My apologies for flooding your talk page with strange questions. I hope you can answer them. Regards, Shinobu 22:50, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

Tkorrovi vs Paul Beardsell

User Chinasaur moved comments from Misplaced Pages talk:Requests for arbitration/Tkorrovi vs. Paul Beardsell, remaining his there and moving mine , just after I put a link on an evidence page to that page because it contains important information. Also, he moved a question about his nationality to my talk page . I understand the reason, but I demand for me an equal right, to remove mentioning my nationality against my will by Matthew Stannard from that page (unfortunately cannot provide diff, as the commentary was moved that after).Tkorrovi 02:54, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Bot

I am trying to complete Ranks and Insignia of NATO. As you can see airforce and navy are basicaly untouched. I have the images but lack the patience to upload them (as we are talking about 500-700+ images) . I was wondering if a bot could be usefull. --Cool Cat 15:35, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

IPA consonants for Thai

Hi Nohat. I typed the IPA consonant table for Thai. You might have a look in Thai language. I am wondering about , which appears in the IPA handbook in the Thai section as a velar approximant, whereas in the general tables it is set apart as a voiced labial-velar approximant. Any idea why that could be? The Thai /w/ does not seem much different from the English one to me (perhaps slightly more affricated). −Woodstone 22:03, 2005 Apr 17 (UTC)

It probably has to do with roundedness. If Thai is not rounded, or not very rounded, or its roundedness is not relevant to Thai phonology, it may make sense to group it as a pure velar. As for why they would use the symbol w instead of the normal velar approximant symbol, it may just be the principle of using normal Roman letters where possible. I don't have the handbook in front of me, so I can't see for myself at the moment. That's my guess. Nohat 22:06, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Your final logo variant

Hi Nohat, I'm trying to gather together the source material necessary to reproduce an exact duplicate of the current international Misplaced Pages logo from scratch. You seem to have changed Paulus Magnus' POV-Ray stuff quite a bit; is there anyplace on Meta where the source files for the current logo are stored? I'm also trying to track down the exact variants of Garamond that are used in the text for the English logo. Thanks for any help you can provide. silsor 08:06, Apr 19, 2005 (UTC)

Oh, and I'm also looking for the characters used on the current logo. At one point you had a list of characters here but I don't think those are the ones on the current puzzle globe. Also, what font are they in? silsor 08:08, Apr 19, 2005 (UTC)

It's not Garamond, it's Hoefler Text. I will have time to look around on my computer for the source files possibly tomorrow. E-mail me via the e-mail this user feature and I'll send the files in an attached reply. The characters on the globe are in a variety of fonts. I don't recall them all specifically :-/. They're probably mostly characters from the default fonts for those scripts that come with Mac OS X. I will see if my original files contain that information. Nohat 08:30, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Okay, I tracked down Hoefler Text fonts, I can match up the text perfectly except for kerning (I assume it's a little different in Mac OS X, but I can adjust it manually). In case you didn't get my email, my address is jbonham@mail.utm.utoronto.ca. silsor 00:41, Apr 20, 2005 (UTC)

The kerning was adjusted manually. I'm in PDT, so it will be a little bit before I get home and can get the files. Nohat 02:00, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

This is just a ping to see what's going on :) silsor 14:22, Apr 30, 2005 (UTC)

I'm interested in a copy of the source files of the logo too. --Alif 19:47, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

The characters on Misplaced Pages logos

Hello, Nohat. Thank you for your nice Misplaced Pages logos. Now then, I have some requests and questions about your logos. I want to be excused for my broken English. I'm a native speaker of Japanese, not of English. :-) A part of the following topics may overlap with upper topic by silsor.

• On the common part (globe) of Misplaced Pages logos, there are characters look like Japanese katakana "ワィ", and I think that these are misspell. The correct spelling is "ウィ". In Japanese, "Misplaced Pages" spells "ウィキペディア". "ワィ" can't be pronounced. It looks strange. This topic was taken up in Japanese Village pump. I would be very grateful if you would modify it.
• There is a character looks like Chinese character "祖" on the globe. But in Chinese, "Misplaced Pages" spells "维基百科". Therefore, I think that it is more natural that "维" is written. The characters written on the globe are the first characters of "Misplaced Pages" in many different languages, aren't they? Or there are any different standards for the choice of characters?
• I read m:Final logo variants/Nohat, and noticed that the current logos of Misplaced Pages in various languages is version X through fine distinctions of characters on globe between version X and version XI. Why isn't version XI used? Is it for any reason or other? I made some draft logos for Japanese Misplaced Pages and put they to the vote now, and the common part of they is version X. Should I change the common part for Version XI? Enirac Sum 16:15, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Hi. There have been several suggestions over time for minor changes to the character set selection on the puzzle sphere logo. They have all been reasonable requests, as yours are, but at this time, making a new set of logos for every Misplaced Pages for a small number of minor changes is not something I'm willing to invest time in—it will require hundreds of hours of work, and if I make changes for you, then everyone else will start demanding changes, and when I refuse, as inevitably I will have to, because I have other demands on my time, I fear others will start making changes on their own, comprimising the aesthetic integrity of the logo, which to me is paramount, above even glyph selection. However, I have been considering spearheading a cross-linguistic effort to select a new set of glyphs, with input from the different language communities, which was not unfortunately not forthcoming at the time of the original logo design. I am hesitant to do even this because I fear that the process might be co-opted by some strong personalities who lack the requisite aesthetic sensitivities and who might want to introduce radical change to the logo, which is something that I am really opposed to. So, not much is likely to happen in this area unless a plan can be developed for updating the logo that can be certainly limited in scope to just changing the glyphs.

As for why version XI is not used, it is because version X was rolled out before version XI was completed, and there wasn't enough support for version XI to justify to the powers that were to replace X with XI. Nohat 17:03, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Hi, Nohat. I read the summary of the dialogue above on JA WP, and question came to me. If I recall corerctly now the Foundation has the copyright of Misplaced Pages logo, registered it as Trademark and now it is internationally protected by WIPO according to Madrid Treaty. My question from curiosity is, if you are delegated the right to change the Misplaced Pages logo. I am sorry if you take my question aggressive, but my intention is just clarification. Cheers, --Aphaea* 14:21, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The legal status of the logo's copyright is not currently well-defined. The image itself, since it has been uploaded to Misplaced Pages, is protected by the GFDL. It is my intention to grant all relevant rights to the Wikimedia Foundation. I am not certain, but I believe that the name "Misplaced Pages" has been registered as a trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation. However, to the best of my knowledge, the logo itself has not been registered as a trademark; however, it is a de facto trademark of the Foundation. The foundation has not delegated to me any rights regarding changing the logo; neither has it explicitly denied me those rights. From a practical point of view, I do not have the direct ability to change the logo because I don't have the permissions to change the file where the logo is placed. The only people who have that ability are the developers, who presumably take their orders from the board. I am not aware of any cases where the board has intervened in logo matters, however. I hope that the board respects my opinions and wishes regarding the logo enough that if they were going to authorize any changes to the logo, they would at least solicit my opinions and wishes before making them. In the end, however, they have final authority. Hope this answers your question. Nohat 16:52, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Thank you for your friendly explanation. Things seem to be complicated and I hope it would be clearer and simpler than now. Cheers, --Aphaea* 22:58, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your detailed explanation. Excuse me for my being late for gratitude to you. Enirac Sum 04:55, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

wrong name

hi,
when you created Flap consonant, you wrote that is a flap. but that’s not right. it is a tap. maybe you could correct this. thanx --213.209.71.43 18:17, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure that the IPA says that it can be called a flap or a tap. Nohat 18:51, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The Swedish phonetician Olle Engstrand describes the difference between flaps and taps in Fonetikens grunder (2004) pg. 149, a book on general and Swedish phonetics intended for university students (my translation):

"The phonetic distinction between taps and flaps has often been overlooked in literature. It is reasonable to reserve the term 'flap' for sounds where the active articulator sweeps forward and on its way touches the place of articulation so that brief contact is made. When producing taps, the brief contact is produced by the articulator moving perpendicular against and from the place of articulation. While Spanish and North American both are taps, Hindi and other languages have the retroflex flap in words like 'large'. The tounge starts in a sharply bent, apicopalatal position, is thrown forward, makes brief contact with the alveolar ridge and lands, sometimes clearly audible [this I , against the floor of the mouth."

He then goes on to describe examples of certain northern and central Swedish dialects that feature the retroflex flap as an allophone of /l/. My own variety of speech (slightly "Stockholmized" Central Standard Swedish) regularly features plenty of alveolar taps as realizations of /r/, but the retroflex flaps are quite well know in Swedish as distinctive marks of certain dialects, and it's very easy to relate to Engstrand's explanation when imitating these dialects. I think the two are destinct enough to be mentioned seperatly, though not in seperate articles.

Peter Isotalo 09:17, May 10, 2005 (UTC)

Consonant page conversion

Greetings, Nohat! I've noticed you've been manually converting the consonant pages to use the Infobox IPA template. I'm pretty sure I can write a bot to scrape the data out of the existing tables and replace them with the template. If you're interested, drop me a note on my talk page. :D IceKarma(talk) 23:48, 2005 Apr 26 (UTC)