Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Turkish language

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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was promoted 20:25, 7 May 2007.

Turkish language

[edit]

This was nominated by User:Uannis, but I will try to add some context to this nomination. Turkish Language is already a Good Article, User:AtilimGunesBaydin and a number of other editors have undertaken a signficant rewrite and expansion up to its current state. I have not been involved in this article, but I believe it is very well written, informative and well referenced. Unfortunately, it seems Atilim is on a break at the moment, so I have left note on WP:Turkey for people to deal with any suggestions raised here. Thanks, --A.Garnet 12:13, 17 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Very Beatiful article:)--Uannis 15:15, 15 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comments. Some remarks:
  • Please, fix your inline citations from section "Vocabulary" and on. You are inconsistent. Until this section you correctly put inline citations after the pm per WP:MoS. But then, you do exactly the opposite.
  • "A great many of these new words, particularly IT terms, received widespread acceptance, but the association is occasionally criticized for coining words that obviously seem or sound like "invented"." Citicized by whom? Please cite.
  • "It is also worthy of note that ..." Uncyclopedic. Please, check this.
  • "It is critical to note that ..." Again words to avoid. I tend to believe that an overall massaging of the prose in the article is needed. Maybe some help for the League of Copyeditors would be very useful here.
  • "Turkish is characterized by vowel harmony". "The most distinguishing characteristics of Turkish in comparison to most other languages are vowel harmony" I read almost the same sentence 2 times in the text, and then comes the section about "vowel harmony" itself. Personally, I get a sense of repetitive prose. But again it may be a personal preference...
  • "having exactly the same literal meaning are used to express slightly different meanings". Here, the prose could also be a bit better.
  • "The effect of Atatürk's introduction of the adapted Roman alphabet was a dramatic increase in literacy from Third World levels to nearly one hundred percent." Cite please. We need sources for such statistics.
  • "Therefore, the preferred vocabulary, to some degree, is also indicative of the adoption of or resistance to Atatürk's Reforms which took place more than 70 years ago." I would also like to have a citation for this assertion as well.
As a conclusion, I would say that it is a very nice article, but there are some minor flaws (which would have probably been fixed if a peer-review had taken place prior to the FA nom - unless such a peer-review took place, and I just miss it). In any case, I do not yet object, because the article is indeed well-written and well-worked, and I believe that most problems can be fixed during this FAC's live.--Yannismarou 08:44, 18 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, I have sent an email to Atilim about this, but I will also try to take a look as soon as I can to fix the outstanding problems. Baristarim 11:29, 18 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Mild oppose. Don't mean to be mean, but this is very table-ish and listy, many subsections are extremely short (the article is somewhat too segmented) and should be joined together, and to be honest I don't find the level of referencing sufficient — you need more in-line citations and more main references. It could be just me, of course, but I've got somewhat higher citation standards. Also, there are some minor formatting issues, e.g. the way a hyphen is used instead of an m-dash throughout, linked years, incorrect italicization, citations before punctuation (should be after), etc., plus all things Yannismarou mentioned. Don't get me wrong, it's a good article, but I believe it needs just a little more work to be up to FA standards. Todor→Bozhinov 09:07, 19 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    • "X Language" articles tend to be that way - having tables for different cases and declensions. I don't think this article is unusual in that respect. Raul654 20:07, 20 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
      • It's perfectly normal, yes. But to be an FA, it shouldn't be usual, it should be our best work — you know that better than me :) Anyway, if it being somewhat table-ish really is the only problem, I'd support, but there's a lot else to do. Todor→Bozhinov 15:39, 21 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
      • I completely agree with Todor on this one. Most of the content we have on grammar is presented as endless lists of declensions, bone-dry, technical jargon and crufty tables. That doesn't mean we should deal with it in FACs. A tad more prose would be preferable. Peter Isotalo 17:24, 21 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Object; the "Grammar" section is completely unsourced. The section on dialects is really sparse too, especially considering there's no article Turkish dialects where they're covered. How do the dialects differ from the standard and from each other? There could be more discussion of Turkish phonology, too, again especially in the absence of an article Turkish phonology. In addition to the phoneme inventory and vowel harmony, for example, there could be a discussion of final devoicing, which plays by quite unusual rules in Turkish; and a discussion of stress, which is unusual in having different rules for proper nouns than for the rest of the lexicon; and a discussion of the alternation between k and ğ that's found only in words of a certain number of syllables (I can't remember the details now -- either it occurs in monosyllabic words but not polysyllabic ones, or vice versa). Also, while Yannismarou didn't technically object because of the prose problems he noted, I do also object on those grounds as well as the ones I just mentioned. —Angr 21:38, 19 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    • I agree that the article is a bit too sparse in terms of citations, but saying that the grammar section is "completely unsourced" is just churlish. I mean, it presents only the most basic of facts and it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the source is Lewis' Turkish Grammar. Most of the grammar info can be extrapolated even from the simplests of textbooks on general grammar. I've never read any work that is specific to Turkish, Turkic languages or even Altaic languages, but still found nothing I hadn't seen many times before. Peter Isotalo 17:24, 21 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
      • That's irrelevant. Everything has to be sourced. If a featured article candidate were going to claim that English plurals are most commonly formed by adding -s, I'd want to see a source for it. —Angr 17:58, 21 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
        • Simply saying that it's irrelevant whether the sources are blatantly obvious without dinky footnotes or not isn't going to make anyone the wiser. Try to actually limit your footnote demands for stuff that really matters. The way you present your case, makes it seem like a shrubbery-demand. Peter Isotalo 19:09, 21 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
          • Angr's objection is actionable, since he refers to specific sections and adequately specifies the problems he finds. And arguments like "Try to actually limit your footnote demands for stuff that really matters" are not convincing enough as previous FAC and FARC discussions have indicated. Angr provides examples of what he regards as an article flaw and explains why this "stuff really matters".--Yannismarou 14:23, 22 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
            • The example given by Angr, that the statement "English plurals are most commonly formed by adding -s" would make him demand a footnote, pretty much speaks for itself. He'd most likely get laughed at if he suggested this anywhere else. I can't think of any context where this kind of extremely basic (or base, even) information would be questioned, except by vandals, trolls or children. It's on about the same level as "the Moon revolves around the Earth". Peter Isotalo 15:51, 22 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
              • Perhaps, but we aren't anywhere else. We're at Wikipedia, which has to fight twice as hard as any other encyclopedia to be taken half as seriously. No matter how blindingly obvious something seems to you (like the fact that foods rich people ate in the Middle Ages were forbidden to the poor), we have to be able to verifiably prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt, because we are the encyclopedia that anyone can anonymously edit or vandalize. —Angr 18:01, 22 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
                • The more we focus on these kind of piffling trivialities, which has never stopped a single vandal or a Siegenthaler from doing their thang, the more time we'll take from doing what we're supposed to be doing; writing good, accurate articles. I've added a citation to the beginning of the grammar section, and while I agree that there are sections that needs a little extra reference bolstering, we should at least agree that extremely basic facts can only merit extremely basic citation. Peter Isotalo 08:46, 23 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Object A very good language article overall, but it's not quite of FA standard:
  • The intro is a bit too short; not a word on history, and an extremely brief summary of what characterizes Turkish.
  • "Classification" is extremely minimal. It was two tiny paragraphs, one of which obviously belonged in the lead (I moved it there). There needs to be more information on how Turkish relates to the other Turkic languages, what they have in common and what makes Turkish unique.
  • There are a few difficult passages that need some work:
    • They can be made negative or impotential; they can also be made potential. – Huh? What does "(im)potential" actually mean here? Indulge us a bit here
    • Turkish spelling is highly phonetic, and the sounds of the individual letters exhibit few surprises, even for English speakers. Following International Phonetic Alphabet conventions on phonetic transcription, angle brackets < > here are used to enclose written letters, and brackets [ ] are used to enclose symbols that represent the sounds. Most writing-sound correspondences can be predicted by English speakers, with the following exceptions. The <c> denotes /dʒ/, like <j> in English jail. The <ç> denotes /tʃ/ like the <ch> in English church. The <j> represents /ʒ/ like the <g> in rouge, it is identical to French <j> and is mainly used in loanwords of French and Persian origin. The <ş> represents /ʃ/ like the <sh> in sheet. The <ı> represents /ɨ/, a sound which does not exist in English. The <ğ> denotes /ɣ/ which may be manifested by lengthening the precedent vowel and assimilating any subsequent vowel (e.g., soğuk ("cold") is pronounced [souk]). – This is really tedious. There's no need for this many examples in an overview article. Could we reduce this to one or two examples?
    • Turkish allows most adjectives to be used as nouns, in which case they are declined. – There might be an explanation for this in the text that follows, but it's very difficult to comprehend. Could the author of this explain the intent of that paragraph?
  • Where examples are given, these should be limited to at most two or three. Too many easily will dull the reader.
  • When constructions are explained, it would be better to use the type of notation used by linguists. See for example Gbe languages. Things like "hava ("air) + -da (locative suffix) = havada" just don't fit well in normal prose.
  • Does Turkish have a definite article? I can't tell from the current contents, yet the list of cases translates the various declensions of gün as "the day".
  • There's a rather unusual division of references into "specific" (for footnotes) and "general". What this means is unclear. What, if anything, have the "general" references been used for? How, for example, do the print references in the "specific" section differ from the print references in the "general" section? Both cite entire books, for example (which is fine, but it's just a bit odd as to why some have been classified as just "general". I would like to see a list of sources separate from the footnotes, and that goes for online sources as well. With that many sources, the reader needs to be able to get an overview of the inidividual works without having to go through the notes.
  • Not really an objection per se, but the article would really be great if someone could make a recording of Dostlar Beni Hatırlasın.
  • Please don't break up this post when replying to the individual criticisms.

Peter Isotalo 17:57, 21 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment It seems the article has had some extensive changes made since these objections (referring to all objectors). Can people please look again therefore to see if their objection still stands. Thanks, --A.Garnet 17:21, 24 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    • Is potential/impotential common linguistic terminology? I can't recall right now, but I think I've seen a different term for it. Disregard comment this if it's used in the sources.
    • "Classification" is still just two sentences, which is very meager. It doesn't seem like it would be all that difficult to add more information.
    • The lack of a definite article was cleared up, but the example using gün doesn't work very well when translated. Could it be exchanged for a word that would make more sense as "of/to/from the XXX" in English?
    • Any chance of seeing grammar notation in a style similar to the one used in Gbe languages?
    • I would still like to see the notes and the sources clearly separated. What I mean is a separate list of the sources so that one can get a quick overview of which ones that have been used, including the websites. Peter Isotalo 17:46, 24 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I can confirm that "potential" & "impotential" are standard terms, & are used by Lewis in his Turkish Grammar (p 151 of the 1967 1st ed). In any case I've glossed them as "can" & "cannot" respectively. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 22:09, 26 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support The article gives a good introduction to the Turkish language for its intended audience - non-Turkish speakers curious about the language. The section on grammar does a good job of presenting the specifics of Turkish grammar without going too much into details that would be only relevant to the linguist or student of the language. The article compares favorably with other X language articles. I believe the issues raised on this page can be answered within the FAC process and will also help cover some of the points. --Free smyrnan 04:32, 26 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support - good job! will use it to improve the Hungarian version of it. --Teemeah Gül Bahçesi 13:55, 26 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think most of the reviewers' objections are fixed. Therefore, I'll give the article my reluctant support, and I say reluctant, because 1) most but not all the issues Angr and Peter raised are adressed, 2) sections like "Language reform and Modern Turkish" could be better cited (though I know that Peter who regards me as an incompetent editor does not agree with me on this issue! Wrong estimation of Peter's stance per his comment in my talk page). The prose is definitely improved, but as a non-native English speaker I'm not sure if I can regard it as "brilliant" and "compelling". Anyway, for the next hope I'll not have the chance to comment again on the article; I hope that, until I return from my trip, it will be worthy of a full support vote (if not yet already promoted!).--Yannismarou 10:29, 27 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Object. Goodness, please clean up the external links per WP:EL, WP:NOT; Wiki is not a guide page to language courses. Should Modern Turkish be capitalized ? And it's not necessary to clutter the references with (HTML), which is the default (it is helpful to indicate non-standard formats like PDFs). Is there no language icon for Kurdish (there is inconstent usage of language icons in the refs). Can't any of those See also's be worked into the text? Overall, the presentation of this article is just listy and somewhat unprofessional. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:29, 27 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    Sandy, is the problem having too many links to language courses? I think there should be links to language courses, (Swedish language has them, too), but maybe not this many. There is a language icon for Kurdish ({{ku icon}})), but I don't see how this is any relevant. Three of the see also's are lists. The article is not small, we should not work Turkish alphabet into tex, imo. The other See also's are relevant. I am going to remove some external links now. Do you any more specific suggestions to the other parts of the article? Thanks a lot. DenizTC 15:52, 27 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    I've never quite understood this obsession with cleansing the See also-sections from links that can be found in the article. As long as the links are relevant and the section doesn't grow to unmanageable amounts, I can't for the life of me see what the problem is. Not everyone reads the entire article before moving on the to the see also-section, and they might not necessarily notice some of those very relevant links. Peter Isotalo 16:17, 27 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Sandy! I changed "Modern Turkish" into "modern Turkish" throughout the article for consistency. I don't agree with you that the external links section is in a situation requiring cleanup: Three links to highly relevant language profile sites (Rosetta Project, the Ethnologue and the Language Museum) required by the Wikiproject Languages guideline; an online dictionary link; one respectable media link to BBC Turkish (for a demonstration of what the language looks and sounds like); three links to language learning sources; and links to Turkish editions of Wikimedia projects. All are justified and relevant, and the amount of links is reasonable. The "(Turkish)" entries in the references list are not language icons, they mark the cited sources in Turkish via the "language" parameter of the used WP:CITE templates. I don't understand why you are asking about a Kurdish notice: the article does not currently cite a Kurdish source. Atilim Gunes Baydin 00:55, 28 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I realized that there was an inconsistency in the Turkish language marks in the list of references (some sources in Turkish were marked with parameter "language=Turkish" while some were not), which I fixed. I hope this was the inconsistency you were referring to. Regards, Atilim Gunes Baydin 01:07, 28 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I went through the citations and removed the "language=Turkish" tags, which are treated differently in different citation templates and replaced them with the {{tr icon}}. I think this takes care of the inconsistency in language icons. There is no Kurdish source used in the article, the reference containing the word Kurdish is an English source, the chapter/section on Kurdish is mentioned. Also removed the redundant format=HTML tags. Free smyrnan 20:55, 28 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Object—1a. I have to swim against the tide above in which reviewers are gushing about the writing. Here are random examples of problems.
    • "The language traces its roots to Central Asia as a part of the Turkic language family, the first written records of which—Old Turkic engravings dicovered in the Orkhon Valley in Mongolia—date back nearly 1,200 years." Clumsy positioning of nested phrase.
    • "a drive to reform the language was undertaken"—Raises an important issue (centralised control of the language?), so at least change passive to active and reveal the agent (the government? an academy with the power to do so?). Even in the lead.
    • No noun classes? I'm sure it does, in a broad sense; you just need to speak to the right grammarians to determine the subtle grammatical treatment of certain types of noun. I can say this because it's true of just about every language. I'm not referring to gender/case/number here. Might be safer to provide more precise info here, or to remove it (retaining "grammatical gender") and deal with it in the body of the article.
    • "also includes"—"also" is redundant.
    • "About 40% of all Turkic language speakers"—Remove "all".
    • "The characteristic features of Turkish, like vowel harmony, agglutination, and lack of grammatical gender, are universal within the Turkic family as well as the Altaic languages." "Such as" is better in this formal register. "Within" and "as well as" are grammatically marked forms of "in" and "and". Unnecessary here, and the prose will be bleached by continued amplifications.
    • "between Turkish and other Oghuz languages"—Insert "the" before "Oghuz", since I think you mean all of them.
    • Would look better (and accord with some of the major style guide recommendations) to use en dashes without spaces for numerical ranges ("65 – 73.5 million" --> "65–73.5 million"); infobox too. BTW, please use consistent decimal places; here, "65.0" is required, or you can make them 65 and 74.

That's just at the top. Please find a copy-editor who's unfamiliar with the text to sift though it. This is particularly important in an article about language. People will disrespect it, otherwise. Tony 23:14, 27 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Tony, I just want to let you know that I implemented the changes you proposed except the following: 1. I don't get what's wrong or clumsy with the "traces its roots to Central Asia" sentence, possibly because my knowledge of English isn't good enough. 2. Turkish really has no noun classes even if this is somehow strange to you (please see the list of "languages without noun classes or grammatical genders" in noun class for others). I understand that these were just from the lead and the first section and the rest of the article is in need of attention for similar changes. Atilim Gunes Baydin 00:33, 28 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I posted a copy-edit request at the League of Copyeditors. Hopefully some fresh eyes will take a look at the prose. Free smyrnan 21:18, 28 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. The world map would be more useful if it is precisely indicated where are the areas of concentration of Turkish speakers in countries of Turkish diaspora. Check the maps for German language and French language. The current map might lead the reader to think that Turkish is spoken all over the US and Canada and Russia... CG 20:10, 29 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Hence my tongue-in-cheek comment on the Talk page. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 20:44, 29 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I agree, but the only data we currently have on Wikipedia is a (very well referenced) list of Turkish minority populations within countries (see Turkish diaspora), which forms the basis of the existing map. I'll be very happy to work on an improved map, but first we need a source, or several sources, detailing where these populations are concentrated within mentioned countries. I'll see what I can come up with. Atilim Gunes Baydin 20:57, 29 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.
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