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Did you know nomination[edit]

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Cielquiparle talk 05:27, 17 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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  • ... that Weise's law was first proposed as a solution to an imbalance between Ancient Greek and Sanskrit cognates? Source: "If we examine the Indian [Sanskrit] words beginning with guttural + r or l and compare them with their Greek reflexes, we will notice that all those which have retained the guttural in Indian intact show guttural + ρ, whereas Greek guttural + λ only occurs regularly when the palatal sibilants [ś], j, h appear in Indian. The absence of exceptions in this rule automatically prohibits the assumption that coincidence prevailed here. Of course, this excludes cases where r (or l) is not immediately after the guttural, but there is a vowel in between, although the rule stated above often applies here too." Source, in German, center of page beginning with "Wenn wir nämlich die..."
    • Reviewed:
    • Comment: This is my first DYK nomination; please let me know if there is anything amiss.

Created by ThaesOfereode (talk). Self-nominated at 03:16, 20 February 2024 (UTC). Post-promotion hook changes for this nom will be logged at Template talk:Did you know nominations/Weise's law; consider watching this nomination, if it is successful, until the hook appears on the Main Page.[reply]

  • For a first nomination, this is remarkable well polished! The article is new enough, certainly long enough, is well-written and presentable, and has a breadth of reliable sources used throughout. No QPQ required. The hook is a bit properly cited and is in the article, but it is a bit dense and vague. I'm not a linguist, and knowing what an imbalance between cognates means is beyond me, even after reading the article. Please let me know if this is not correct, but would the following Alternate hook be accurate:
  • Thank you for a great article; please drop me a ping when you respond to the small hook concern! Fritzmann (message me) 12:58, 21 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    • Thank you for the kind words; I'm glad my hard work has paid off! Regarding your concern, I agree that the term "imbalance" is problematic for the hook. I like your rewrite, but instead of the final word "languages", I think it would be more accurate to use either "cognates" (ideal) or "etymologies". If you believe those are still to technical, I could suggest either linking "cognates", like either:
    • or simply rewriting the hook as:
    • Let me know what you think. I think ALT3 is the strongest, but at the end of the day, all of these express the same ultimate idea; I think any of these proposed options would work just fine. Ping: User:Fritzmann2002 // ThaesOfereode (talk) 15:22, 21 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    • My personal preference is for ALT4, but I fully agree that any of them are runnable. I will leave it to the promoter to take their choice of three very good options. Congratulations, and I hope to see you back at DYK soon! Fritzmann (message me) 16:03, 21 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
To Prep 6

GA Review[edit]

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Reviewing
This review is transcluded from Talk:Weise's law/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Nominator: ThaesOfereode (talk · contribs) 18:15, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Reviewer: UndercoverClassicist (talk · contribs) 10:38, 4 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]


Taking a look. I've done very little in the way of phonology since undergrad a long time ago, but can at least comment on clarity, prose and so forth. Initial comments below. UndercoverClassicist T·C 10:38, 4 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @UndercoverClassicist: First, thanks for taking the time to do the GA. I've taken a cursory look at your GAR and I've begun fixing some of the minor ones. I hope to get to the others tonight or tomorrow. Either way, I will ping you when I think they have been adequately addressed. ThaesOfereode (talk) 11:23, 4 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
General matters
  • The article needs to be accessible, per the GA criteria, to a suitably broad audience. Here, that means people without a background in linguistics, and who can only read the Latin alphabet. There are a few things throughout that would benefit from some more attention on this front -- some examples:
    • The article frequently uses linguistic changes as chronological markers, such as it is believed that the change must have occurred prior to the centum-satem division: these should have dates supplied. If there's debate as to when these things happened, say so, perhaps in a footnote, but try to give the reader some broad sense of when we're talking about. Our own article on the "split" says that most linguists no longer treat it as an event at all, though I'd need to do some reading before I can really take a view on that.
    • It would be helpful to set out in rough terms the relationships between IE languages: a "family tree" as an illustration would be useful. In particular, it would help to clarify the distinction between a centum and a satem language, and why this is so important.
    • As far as possible, technical sections should be written in terms which non-specialists can understand: this might include glossing some key terms, adding footnotes, or writing the sentence in simpler but vaguer terms first. See for instance:
      • the law commonly affects zero-grade stems which often receive epenthetic vowels in daughter languages
      • Because the palatovelar sounds underwent assibilation in the satem languages while the plain velars did not, the merging of palatovelars with plain velars explains why these words have plain velar reflexes in words that share a common Indo-European root containing a palatovelar
Reply to "General matters"
  • I have expanded the general accessibility of the article a bit (the particular examples are totally valid criticisms; they are exceptionally dense and needed rectification), but, now that I have fixed some particularly dense language, I think the audience is appropriate for the topic at hand. This is an extremely technical and comfortably postgraduate-level topic (its principal sources are Kloekhorst, Kortlandt, and Beekes; none of whom would be mentioned in an intro to historical linguistics course except possibly Beekes) and it is described at a level readable to anyone with a basic undergraduate linguistics background in accordance with WP:ONEDOWN (namely, that "articles on postgraduate topics can be aimed at readers with some undergraduate background"). A linguistics 101 class would learn terms relating to places of articulation, manners of articulation, and basic IPA and an intro to historical linguistics class would learn terms like assibilation and conditioned change. No one would need to know a script other than the Latin alphabet to read this article, since the Sanskrit text is functionally cosmetic. My concern is that too much explanation runs the risk of violating WP:SS. Sufficiently technical terms are linked for users with less experience and more complex terms have now been put into phrasing that I think linguistics undergraduate students would be able to fully understand after one historical linguistics class.
  • WP:ONEDOWN is a little controversial, and has been discussed at length elsewhere (from memory, at FAC talk): it was difficult to get much consensus, but generally understood that it conflicts with the GA and FA standards, particularly as far as "appropriately broad audience" is concerned. One of the major issues was that there are plenty of ways (TFA, ITN, DYK, Random Article...) that a reader might come onto any given article haphazardly, rather than consciously seeking it out via higher-level articles. Most of that doesn't really apply to GA, and there is of course a tension that you can make things "clearer" by explaining them, but making the article too verbose then makes it difficult to understand in another way. I don't think we can really give a hard-and-fast rule here, but it's worth being aware of the trade-off and evaluating whether we're on the right side of it in each situation. UndercoverClassicist T·C 06:31, 6 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    • I didn't realize WP:ONEDOWN was controversial in that way. Still, I'm willing to try and lower the barrier of entry here, but I want to be cognizant of not getting too verbose and ending up with a page that looks more like a summary of phonetics or historical linguistics. ThaesOfereode (talk) 00:18, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    • Re: chronological markers – I think this is a generally good suggestion, particularly for the splitting of Anatolian languages and the latest possible event zone for the law (i.e., the splintering of Proto-Indo-Iranian), so I have cited those. With respect to the centum–satem division, as I think you've started to uncover, this is extremely problematic in terms of sourcing. For one, there are two competing theories: a theory that centers on the split of the two languages chronologically (i.e., phylogenetically) and another that centers on "wave" theory (i.e., that one or two language families may have developed satem features while others adopted them through language contact). The latter has been around since at least the 1870s, as far as I know, but Kloekhorst – being the principal source for this topic – I think clearly does not appear to back that, given that he continually categorizes languages as centum or satem based on phylogeny (i.e., a "genetic" relationship) rather than typology (i.e., a characteristic relationship), and he is a reputable source on IE linguistics. During a cursory search, I was unable to find a reputable or source that would pin the date, likely because the wave theory has fairly solid evidence and these dates are mostly developed through deduction; in other words, it appears that the jury may be out on which theory is correct and I haven't found any source supporting the phylogenetic theory that gives a date.
  • Yes, I thought this might be the case. Does any give it even roughly: as in "some time before the Bronze Age" or similar? I'm thinking of just giving people who know very little about the topic a rough sense that it was "a very long time ago" but not "unimaginably ancient". This might be anathema, but The Horse, the Wheel and Language has a diagram on p. 57 here, which gives a terminus ante quem dates of 2000 BCE at the latest. UndercoverClassicist T·C 09:07, 6 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • So this is referencing some pretty controversial or deprecated theories of phylogeny. I know Italo-Celtic is (was?) receiving some renewed study, but Germano-Balto-Slavic hasn't been a common suggestion in over a hundred years (the suggestion I'm familiar with is from 1861). Greco-Armenian... I'm not sure I've ever seen that in a serious paper. Though, as I noted in the article, Kortlandt did consider Albanian to be a "transitional dialect" between Balto-Slavic and Armenian, which I had never heard before I read his paper. So it's possible that a paper supporting these conclusions is out there and I admittedly haven't kept up with the literature on that end. That said, given the other more concrete dates here and the generally unsettled state of "phylogenetic vs. wave" discourse, is it really wise to add the dates for the split? I don't think it's too much to ask the reader to guess "somewhere between 4500 BC and 3000 BC" based on context. ThaesOfereode (talk) 00:18, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    • Re: clarifying the distinction between a centum and a satem language, and why it is important – I think I summed this up with The law affects the palatovelar consonants of the Proto-Indo-European language: *ḱ *ǵ *ǵʰ. In the satem languages, as well as in Albanian and Armenian, these sounds became fricatives rather than remaining as stops. This effectively sums up the distinction, I think.
      • It does and it doesn't: I do think these sounds became fricatives rather than remaining as stops would be clearer if we gave the IPA for these as well. I'm not sure there's many readers who know what a fricative is but don't know what a satem language is. UndercoverClassicist T·C 06:31, 6 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
        • I'm not sure IPA will make it clearer (is IPA commonly used outside linguistics? I have linguistics books that play fast and loose with IPA!) and even if it did, I don't think there's full agreement on what the palatovelar series actually was. I think it's generally assumed to be palatal stops, but they easily could have been palatalized velars. Holopainen (2021) discusses the relative rarity of palatal stops becoming plain velar stops and that there are some arguments that palatovelar stops in general may have been a satem development, unique to those languages. In other words, "palatovelar" seems like more of a placeholder than a specific place of articulation, so I'm reluctant to put it in IPA. Moreover, if palatovelars are unique to the satem languages, I haven't read anything re: actual pronunciation value, since Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian linguists use different notations that don't account for a post-PIE, Proto-Balto-Slavo-Indo-Iranian language. Holopainen cites Lipp (2009), but I haven't read it to determine if it even provides a pronunciation for said family. Even then, it might breach WP:FRINGE since a two-way velar distinction (plain vs. labialized) is extremely controversial. ThaesOfereode (talk) 16:25, 6 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
          I think I might be a few steps behind you: I just wanted a plain-language definition of "fricatives" ("sounds like /s/ and /z/", or similar) UndercoverClassicist T·C 16:31, 6 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
          Damn. I really wrote all that over a misunderstanding. Yeah, I can definitely do that. My bad. ThaesOfereode (talk) 16:34, 6 June 2024 (UTC) — Done[reply]
Smaller nit-picks
  • centum–satem divide and similar use an endash, not a hyphen.
    • Done.
  • Text in non-English languages should be in language templates, and italicised if in the Latin alphabet.
    • I think I got all of them.
  • Quotations (Despite having "been largely forgotten by the scholarly world" need their author and a bit of context given in the body text.
    • Done.
  • Glosses (մերձ merj, "near, close to" use single quotes, not double.
    • Done.
  • The navbox for IE sound laws gives (I think) thirteen different sound laws: why do we single out the boukólos rule for the "See also"?
    • The boukólos rule is singled out because it is nearly a direct correlation of Weise's law in the centum languages, dealing with a different set of dorsal consonants; that is, Weise's law deals with a change affecting the palatovelar sounds which have a drastic effect in the satem languages and no effect in the centum, while the boukólos rule affects the labiovelar sounds which have a drastic effect in the centum languages and no effect in the satem.
      • Any chance of explaining that briefly in the article? UndercoverClassicist T·C 06:31, 6 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
        • I don't mind doing so, but I think it's off-topic and probably violates WP:NOTSEEALSO, namely: "As a general rule, the 'See also' section should not repeat links that appear in the article's body." ThaesOfereode (talk) 00:18, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
          I expected the explanation to be in the See also section. The short description there doesn't mention that it's a counterpart in the centum langauges: I think your explanation here of why it's relevant is much better than the one we already have. UndercoverClassicist T·C 06:49, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Image review
  • None present: under the GA criteria, it is preferred for articles to be illustrated if possible. As above, I think an IE family tree (perhaps with some dates) and perhaps separately an chart of centum vs. satem languages would be extremely useful additions. Are there any images of Weise himself or his publications you could use? If feeling particularly creative, a visualisation of the sound change in action would be excellent.
    • I looked for an image of Weise before and not even Google turned anything up. I found his epitaph in Eisenberg that I think should suffice. There is a scan of the title page of his Syntax der Altenburger Mundart ('Syntax of the Altenburg Dialect', 1900), but I figured the epitaph was better. Happy to use either though, to be honest. With respect to images, I have added triptych of the assibilation process – from palatal stop, to postalveolar affricate, to alveolar sibilant. Another user has done a wonderful job illustrating it and I think it fits the bill. Similarly, in chronology, to illustrate the geographic divide, I have added a map which distinguishes (uncontroversial) PIE daughter families by centum and satem categorization.
      • Nice images. Could we add the IPA to the caption for (e.g.) "palatal stop"? On another note, we don't seem to italicise centum or satem: is that intentional? Sources seem to be divided but the MoS would generally advise italics for non-English words. UndercoverClassicist T·C 06:31, 6 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
        • Thanks! I've added the IPA. As for italics for centum–satem: when I wrote this, I was still getting used to the MOS and probably just matched the convention used on the actual centum–satem page, which doesn't italicize it. I prefer without italicization because I feel like that's probably more common in the literature (though I don't know for sure if that's true or not), it's likely to get confused with other language text which is italicized throughout the text, and it's a term that's been technicalized; if it still retained some semantic relationship to 'hundred', there would be no question (such as using fait accompli or amigo), but given its usage in English, it seems unnecessary. That said, I'll defer to you; many authors prefer to italicize it, including Kloekhorst and Kortlandt. ThaesOfereode (talk) 15:30, 6 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
          The general rule, especially at GA, is that almost anything goes as long as it's consistent: I think that should be our principle here. If you think it's best deitalicised, go ahead -- just make sure it's always deitalicised in the same context. UndercoverClassicist T·C 16:26, 6 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
          Agreed. It looks like all instances of both terms are fully unitalicized throughout the page, so I will leave them as is. ThaesOfereode (talk) 16:29, 6 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Source review

To follow, once the above is sorted.

Response to volley 1

@UndercoverClassicist: I think I've fixed up several issues that you've brought up and have at least begun discussions for everything else. I'm looking forward to your comments and getting this page to GA. I hope you find what I've changed (and argued) satisfactory. Let me know what you think.

Response to volley 2

@UndercoverClassicist: I've responded substantially again. Let me know your thoughts. ThaesOfereode (talk) 00:18, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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