Talk:Atlantic languages

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I was using preview extensively while working that up; I must have saved without noticing. Thanks for the compliment (and thanks for that welcome message a while back; I'm still getting used to Wikipedia, talk pages, etc.); obviously I've still got some stuff to flesh out. The consonant mutation and noun class sections need serious expansion/clean-up, but I'm dead tired right now.

Some issues I've been thinking about:

• The family tree takes up a lot of space, and it's not that big or complicated a family. Ideally, it would fit on one screen and the top level 3-way split would be visible.
  • I'm not sure I need as many individual entries as I've made. I collapsed some of the language complexes/dialect clusters down into single entries. There may be a couple more places that could be done.
  • We could put small groupings on one line. Thus, changing 1 to something like 2 or 3
    1. Nun
       • Kasanga language
       • Kobiana language
    2. Nun languages: Kasanga language, Kobiana language
    3. Kasanga language and Kobiana language

• Names - I tended to go with Ethnologue's names where they differed from (Wilson 1989), but I'm certainly not committed to them. Between consonant mutation and the Anglo/Francophone divide, these languages seem particularly prone to having loads of alternate names. We'll probably need a lot of redirect pages.
• Language vs. people - For better-known languages, Wikipedia usually has separate articles for the ethnic group and the language. I'm not sure that's necessarily appropriate for some of these languages; do we really need distinct Bainouk-Samik and Bainouk-Samik language articles? (Moreover, there may not always be a one-to-one mapping between cultures/peoples/ethnic groups and languages. Actually, further investigation suggests that may be the case here: according to Serer, speakers of the Cangin languages are part of the Serer ethnic group, while their languages are (apparently) more distantly related to the Serer-Sine language than Wolof is.) What's the best consistant way to handle this?
• For example, it shouldn't be too hard for me to put together a stubby article on the Temne, but it seems premature to make seperate language and people stubs. A single page covering the people and their language(s) seems like it would be more useful to readers until such time as we've got enough material for two. In this situation, which would be more sensible:
  • Changing the links on this page from Temne language to [[Temne|Temne language]] until such time as we split the language and culture information.
  • Leaving the links here alone and creating Temne language as a redirect to Temne. This is probably a bad/insane idea, but there's a certain consistancy about it. I like the idea that if you want to like to language X (say, in passing in a theoretical linguistics article), you just link to "X language" without worrying about whether there's a seperate language article or not. Plus, if the X language were ever split off, all such links would still work.

I'd like to figure out how to approach these issues sensibly, as other branches of N-C (and other families too) are in similar need of expansion and organization. (I'm kind of warming up to work on Kwa, which I know a little more about; Kwa is a bit larger, and Stewart's family tree for Kwa has more levels. There are lots of similar problems (e.g., various linguistic and ethnic meanings of 'Akan'), so I'm hoping to get clear on how to handle them.)

Finally, I renamed this page as (1) recent work seems to have settled on "Atlantic" over "West Atlantic" and (2) I don't think I've ever seen "Westatlantic" as one word anywhere else. (That doesn't mean no one uses it, but obviously it isn't the main term. Plus, I made a redirect page for "West Atlantic languages". Hope I didn't screw anything up. --Chris Johnson 01:23, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Whoah, that's a lot of questions! Let me try to answer some of them.

• Family tree — I think you're right; it would be good to visualize the 3-way split avoiding the clutter from individual languages. Another thing we could do, apart from your suggestions, is place the full list of languages at (indeed) List of Atlantic languages and refer to there from here; then we could use this article to outline the major subdivisions, and mention some individual languages as examples. Any thoughts on this?
• Names of individual languages — sticking to Ethnologue's names sounds OK to me, but I think it's important to mention Wilson's designation as well where the two differ.
• Language vs. people — According to WikiProject Languages, it is advisable to keep articles about languages at X language. It's also the most consistent way, I think, precisely because the occasional lack of a one-to-one mapping between people and language. But if you want to put something together on the Temne and you don't feel like writing much (say more that two paragraphs, which would qualify as a language stub) about Temne language, by all means start at Temne. Wait, that's not exactly what you were asking. Let me see... I'd say: redirect Temne language to Temne only if (1) there is not enough info to start Temne language itself, and only if (2) there is actually something about the language in the article about the people. In other words, only redirect when it makes sense for the user to get redirected. If one sticks to this, it is clear that the links on this page should stay as they are; a link will be blue if there is a reasonable language article ór a redirect to an ethno-article with at least something about the language; and it will be red if Wikipedia doesn't have info on the language at all. Remember that it is not bad to have a red link; red links are incentives to get people writing.

By the way, a relevant guideline may be 'Wikipedia is not paper' — we can afford having an article about the Bainouk-Samik and another one about their language.

• Finally, renaming it was a good idea.

Keep up the good work! — mark ✎ 20:17, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)