User talk:Lvovmauro

I haven't really worked with Tübatulabal, and I can't afford to access articles behind paywalls, but I have one source you may not be aware of: C Hart Merriam was a naturalist who also worked with American Indian languages (I guess he considered them part of the "fauna"). He was really bad at transcribing the words (he stubbornly refused to learn phonetic transcription), but he was a taxonomist who really knew the local flora and fauna. You can't use his data to add a word, but it comes in real handy if you already have a word recorded by a taxonomic illiterate that's too vague. Unfortunately, his notes contain only one word for acorn, which looks like his version of /waʔant/ or /wahant/. Of the oaks he mentions here, the Black Oaks Quercus kelloggi (not californica) were considered the best by all the indigenous peoples throughout California, albeit restricted to higher up in the mountains and not bearing well every year. From the description, I would guess that wohont would be one of the other species, though I would expect Quercus chrysolepis and at least one of the scrub oaks that have been split off from Quercus dumosa in the area. Of course, the scrub oaks were universally despised for food and may have been ignored by his informants on purpose...

To sum up: if it isn't a general term for all acorns (my hunch), it would probably be Quercus wislizenii or Quercus douglasii.

As for comparanda, there's a good candidate here: Pinus sabiniana is probably the most common pine in that area, and he records that one as "wo-hănól". I'm not sure about the first o, but he tends to use breves for schwa-like sounds, so the ă is probably /ɨ/ or what he heard as a reduced-syllable schwa. The last syllable seems to some kind of a suffix for trees- look at the difference between the word for the pine nut and the nut pine further down (that's the "Tübatul-" in Tübatulabal, and has cognates throughout Northern Uto-Aztecan), so it might be a direct descendant of Proto-Uto-Aztecan *wokon. If you can find it in the Voegelin dictionary, that would be much better than a vague word for acorns. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:00, 23 September 2018 (UTC)Reply

Discussion moved from User talk:Chuck Entz.

Voegelin has waʔant (“acorn sp.”) as well as wohont (“little hard acorns”), so the former is probably the one that corresponds to Merriam's "wah-ahntʹ". I notice that Merriam also lists "wo-huntʹ" twice with the meaning "Digger pine nut", so I'm guesing that's the correct meaning and Voegelin was wrong to describe it as a kind of acorn.

Voegelin doesn't have anything corresponding to Merriam's "wo-hănól" (which, looking closely, I think is actually "wo-hŏ-nolʹ"), but he does have wohombo·l (“bull pine”) corresponding to Merriam's "waw-hum-bahl" ("Ponderosa pine"). They're probably both derived from wohont. --Lvovmauro (talk) 04:04, 23 September 2018 (UTC)Reply

Let's keep this on one talk page- I have this page on my watchlist, and you can always use {{ping|Chuck Entz}} if you're in a hurry. I get lots of messages from people whose edits I reverted, so it's easier to keep track of the conversation here.

You may be right about wohont, but there's also the possibility that it can refer to both acorns and Pinus sabiniana nuts. There seems to be a whole family of terms for nut-bearing trees, and the combination of Merriam's phonetic incompetence and Voegelin's reliance on common names makes it hard to be sure. Chuck Entz (talk) 05:10, 23 September 2018 (UTC)Reply

Actually, now that I look at Voegelin's grammar, it turns out he has ŏʹwôhôʹnt ("the digger pine nuts in one place", p. 57). It's strange that the dictionary (which was published later) would be less clear than the grammar. --Lvovmauro (talk) 07:47, 23 September 2018 (UTC)Reply

What did you intend here? DTLHS (talk) 01:23, 23 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

Hi, although we use asterisks when we link to reconstruction entries using templates like {{l}} and {{m}}, the page titles themselves shouldn't have asterisks. I am therefore moving your Proto-Oto-Manguean pages to equivalents without the asterisk. Thanks! —Mahāgaja · talk 09:42, 9 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

Proto-Oto-Manguean entries are supposed to have double asterisks. Linking to an entry using two asterisks results in a single asterisk in the page title, and I don't know any way around that. --Lvovmauro (talk) 11:01, 9 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

Why are they supposed to have double asterisks? No other proto-language I know of does that. —Mahāgaja · talk 13:25, 12 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

I had assumed it was to indicate that the reconstructions were tentative. But checking the source, it turns out it's just to distinguish between higher and lower level protolanguages. So it doesn't actually matter so much. --Lvovmauro (talk) 01:25, 13 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

RMaung (WMF) 14:34, 9 September 2019 (UTC)Reply

RMaung (WMF) 19:14, 20 September 2019 (UTC)Reply

RMaung (WMF) 17:04, 4 October 2019 (UTC)Reply

There's an editor I've been watching for a long time, Phonchana (talk • contribs • global account info • deleted contribs • nuke • abuse filter log • page moves • block • block log • active blocks). He has a history (not just with this account) of editing out of his depth in a wide variety of languages and subjects, and with using templates and labels to make things unnecessarily complicated and technical. Lately he's been working on proper nouns derived from Latin American indigenous languages. Based on his history, I would expect a general pattern of trying to push his meager knowledge and sources farther than they merit, with serious mistakes randomly scattered through otherwise decent work. I've been able to catch a couple of errors- but this isn't my area of expertise. Would you be so kind as to look through his recent edits? Thanks! Chuck Entz (talk) 01:42, 22 February 2020 (UTC)Reply

Also, please check his other account, Theo.phonchana (talk • contribs • global account info • deleted contribs • nuke • abuse filter log • page moves • block • block log • active blocks). Thanks! Chuck Entz (talk) 01:45, 22 February 2020 (UTC)Reply