Talk:Beja language

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*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20070315190621/http://www.panafril10n.org:80/wikidoc/pmwiki.php/PanAfrLoc/Bedawi to http://www.panafril10n.org/wikidoc/pmwiki.php/PanAfrLoc/Bedawi
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20110719054149/http://www.kwedekind.de/index.htm to http://www.kwedekind.de/index.htm
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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Pathawi, please leave any other comments you may have here on the relevant talk page. I was able to independently confirm Cohen's 20% cognate ratio between Beja and the other Cushitic languages. I also found the open access link you alluded to at the bottom of the Wedekind & Musa url. However, it doesn't appear to mention either the Arabic transliteration or Ethnologue . Other than that, all seems okay. Soupforone (talk) 06:56, 12 November 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Wedekind & Musa

message: The citations for this article are a bit messy—in no small part my fault. I'd like to clean this up. I don't have a very strong opinion, but my inclination is to shift it to list-defined references, then do short citations throughout. Any thoughts from those who are watching this? Soupforone, you & I have had a couple back-&-forths, recently, which makes me think you might be the person most likely to have an opinion. What do you think?
Pathawi (talk) 17:05, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Looks great, you have my full support (although personally, I go for sfnp). Cushitic languages is still a mess in some parts, too (especially Cushitic languages#Extinct languages), maybe we clean up there together. –Austronesier (talk) 19:45, 25 May 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  Yeah, Cushitic could definitely use some work. I'd be very glad to collaborate with you on that. Pathawi (talk) 20:14, 25 May 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Citation Style

message: I'm going to lean a little bit on personal knowledge of Beja, here, as a researcher & speaker of the language. I'm not trying to incorporate anything unpublished into the article, however: The phoneme that contemporary Latin Beja orthography represents as "j" is an odd one. It is one of the phonemes that Beja-speakers identify as Arabic, and it does occur most frequently in loanwords. However, it also occurs in Beja words that have no clear Arabic etymon, & it often appears as a development out of an alveolar or retroflex stop followed by /i/. (i.e., [coronal][+voice] → /ʤ/ /_i, so diik often becomes jiik; dhiw'areeb for some people becomes jiw'areeb) It is unquestionably phonemic, & it is a single phoneme. For broad transcription principles, it should be represented by a single sign.
It's for cases like this that the IPA introduced a ʤ ligature for dʒ: A phoneme should not appear to be a cluster. &, in fact, Vanhove uses this ligature to represent this phoneme in her work—not the two separate signs d & ʒ. (This is true not just for Vanhove 2014, which predates the most recent version of the IPA, but also for Vanhove 2017.)
It is true that the sign ʤ appears on prior published versions of the IPA table & does not appear in the post-2005 charts. However, I cannot find anything from the International Phonetic Association which indicates that the ligatures are deprecated: This seems to be an inference by non-phonologists/non-phoneticians drawn from the absence of the ligatures from the more recent charts. In fact, the Association continues to use the ligatures in its journal. For phonemic descriptions published to the Association's Website over the past twelve months:
* that for A'ingae uses ⁿ͡dʒ (could have been ⁿ͡ʤ or even ⁿʤ)
* that for Malagasy uses tie bars (tho there is no d͡ʒ)
* that for Bajau uses two separate signs (tho, again, no dʒ)
* that for Bai uses ligatures (no ʤ)
* that for Kalasha employs ligatures (no ʤ)
* that for Kazakh employs ʤ (in a phonetic transcription of жолаушы as [ʤoɫɑwʃə]—the phoneme represented by Cyrillic ж is usually realised as [ʒ])
* that for Kejom uses a tie bar d͡ʒ
* that for Khuzestani Arabic uses the ligature ʤ
* that for Punjabi uses the ligature ʤ
* that for Scottish Gaelic uses two separate signs (tho no dʒ)
* that for Urarina uses two separate signs dʒ
* that for Xiangxiang Chinese uses two separate signs dʒ
So of the twelve languages for which some IPA member made a decision in the past year: Three used tie bars, five use ligatures, four use two separate signs. Where /ʤ/ itself is in question, three used ʤ, two used dʒ, one used d͡ʒ. If the International Phonetic Association has deprecated ligatures in general—or the ʤ ligature specifically—it hasn't done a great job of it.
Wedekind—in both 2004–2005 & 2007—mistakenly gives /j/ as the IPA sign for "j". I initially employed ɟ on this page, thinking that this was likely his intention (older IPA charts specify that ɟ may be used for ʤ). Vanhove uses the ligature ʤ both in 2014 and 2017. As the source you're drawing from uses the ligature, & as I can see no clear reason to believe that the International Phonetic Association has actually deprecated ligatures in general or this ligature specifically, it seems to me most appropriate to follow the usage of the researcher who does not appear to have maken a mistake.
Do you know of any explicit statement from the International Phonetic Association that the ligature is to be considered obsolete? Pathawi (talk) 20:23, 18 June 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: I did look it up—a little while ago. You can continue the conversation here if you like. There are multiple reasons that this page should use the ligature, but the clearest of them is that we should follow the sources when there's not a clear reason not to; in this case, the relevant sources are Vanhove (who uses the ligature) & Wedekind (who uses nothing). When the IPA has printed more language descriptions using the ligature than the two signs over the course of a year, & when we're clearly dealing with a phoneme rather than a cluster, it's not clear to me why the version you prefer could be more proper. Pathawi (talk) 19:43, 12 August 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  jʤdʒɟ… 

message: The reason why I support word breaks is because they organize the chart better, and gets rid of the excess space. It just makes it look nicer Fdom5997 (talk) 21:31, 18 June 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: They also introduce an element of disorder. This is the sort of thing I might want to do for my own print publication in which I would want to exert the greatest degree of control over the appearance & in which readers would not have digital access to the text. In a digital format, however, it means that "labio-dental" won't match a search for "labiodental". Pathawi (talk) 21:38, 18 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Phonological table word breaks 

message: This article draws on a number of scholarly sources concerning the Beja language. While it is not my personal preferred form, "Beja" is the form that is in overwhelming majority use in recent publications. "Bedawiye" does not have consistent use across publications. The name that we use throughout the text of the article should reflect the name used as the title of the article; the title of the article should reflect most common usage. Throwing in other names in places other than verbatim citations makes the text confusing.
As for the supposed name بجاوية—Ethnologue reports this as a representation of Bidhaawyeet. This is an obvious error, & I am asserting that WP:COMMONSENSE allows us to WP:IGNORE a (so-called) reliable source when it has made a clear mistake. I have not removed تُبڈاوِ‎ as a representation of  Tubdhaawi as there is no reason to think it is a mistake.
Finally: Ethnologue does not take precedence over other sources. Pathawi (talk) 01:19, 25 September 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: OK but why did you remove the other Arabic word? it looked nice it would be both. Cookiemonster1618 (talk) 01:24, 25 September 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: I removed بجاوية because it was definitely wrong. What other Arabic word? Pathawi (talk) 01:26, 25 September 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Wrong as in spelt or not the accurate Arabic name for the name of  Beja language? also in Arabic it would be بدويت I believe or بجاوي Cookiemonster1618 (talk) 01:36, 25 September 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: It is an Arabic name for the language. It is not an Arabic script representation of a Beja name for the language. In Sudan, people do often refer to the language in Arabic as بجاوية. The Arabic script representation of Bidhaawyeet would have been بِڈاوِيێت in a now-abandoned Arabisation. The only body that advocates an Arabic script representation of Bidhaawyeet now has not actually produced materials with enough detail to know how one would represent either /ɖ/ or /eː/, so we can only guess. Pathawi (talk) 01:46, 25 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ethnologue & Other Sources