User talk:Landroving Linguist

Hello

Great to see you contributing! I hope you like it here at Wikipedia; we could really use the help of some experts on the Agaw languages and other Ethiopia-related pages. There is a WikiProject on Ethiopia, by the way. You can find the page here. Its purpose is to coordinate the expansion of Ethiopia-related articles, though we could use more contributors (as a result, progress is slow). Anyway, welcome! — ዮም | (Yom) | Talk • contribs • Ethiopia 13:51, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Inijbara

Hi, I don't mean to dampen your enthusiasm (& I thank you for contributing the picture of Injibara), but Injibara isn't large enough to be included in the template of the list of Ethiopian cities, so I remobved it. Right now the unwritten rule is that the settlement needs to be at least 20,000, & seeing just how many cities are listed in that template, that number might need to be raised. If you have any questions about this -- or anything else related to Ethipia, Wikipedia, or even life in general, feel free to contact me. -- llywrch 21:16, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

• I agree that you want to free the list of Ethiopian cities from local interest clutter. Still I think that Injibara belongs on that list, for the following reasons:

1. It is politically important. It is not only the capital of Banja Woreda, but also of Awi Zone, and as such on the same level as (for example) Debre Marqos.
2. It is bigger than 20,000 inhabitants. Unfortunately, the Central Statistics Data don't show this, for whatever reason. It is a fast growing city with at least 20,000 inhabitants. My estimate goes more towards 30,000 inhabitants, but I admit that I have no written source to prove this... --Landroving Linguist 10:03, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

You make some good points. Right now, the list is based on published population stats (which I admit may be soon outdated; I have a sense that the CSA is in the process of a national census, but likewise I admit that I have no proof of this), but if I had a pubished, official (or even semi-official) list of Zonal capitals I'd probably use that & a population criteria: the definition of a town (albeit a Western one) includes much more than just the number of inhabitants. -- llywrch 20:44, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Re: Woreda Capital

You wrote:

Thanks for copy-editing my stuff - I know it needs it. However, I feel a little uneasy when you consistently call the place of a wereda administration a capital. Even for a zonal administration it sounds a bit pompous. I would agree to call a regional administrative center a capital, but for lower levels I am looking for a better term, which explains my wordiness in some of the entries.

I'll admit that I'm not entirely happy with the use of the word "capital" -- even though some of the authors of the various Oromia Regional economic surveys use that word. For example, if a woreda is the equivalent of a county in the US, then we should talk about "seats", not "capitals". However, my intention is to keep the terminology consistent out of consideration for non-native English speakers: having had the experience of struggling with outdated school-German while in Germany, I know just how important keeping the language as simple and predictable as possible. That is why I force these entries into a banally repetiively -- if not stereotypical -- format, so to make it easier on the person reading the article with (for example) an Amharic-English dictionary, who may be looking up each word in the article. A person outside the English-speaking world can be very educated yet still need help understanding English, especially if she/he doesn't use it every day. (I'm certain that if I had to speak or write German in the next fifteen minutes on any topic, I'd fail spectacularly.)

So while I'm willing to accept a better choice (maybe "administrative center", if that is not too imposing?), I'd prefer that we find as broad of a consensus as possible then change every instance of "capital" to the new term. -- llywrch 20:44, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Good point. Let's stick to capitals then. And that will also be a guideline for me while wording other Ethiopia related entries: Keep it simple! -- Landroving Linguist 08:58, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Re: Benishangul-Gumaz

Actually, I was responsible for the "Benishangul-Shamuz" error -- I added it back in the days when I knew far less than I do now about Ethiopia, & was often confused. Unfortunately, I don't always go back & check my work, so I'm sure many more of my errors can be found in Wikipedia. :-( I fixed it, but don't be shy: if you find a mistake like that, feel free to jump in. (Just make sure you have a good explanation.) llywrch 22:44, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Please help-Amharic language request

Hello! The Wikipedia:Graphic Lab is working on artwork related to Ethiopia, and we need some help to get the proper Amharic language text into the artwork. Please visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Graphic_Lab/Images_to_improve#Ethiopia_Scout_Association and see if you can help! Thanking you in advance, Chris 07:27, 30 June 2007 (UTC)

Re: Ethiopian towns & cities

About Injibara...well, you caught me in the middle of a category re-organization. Or creation. With the last dozen settlement articles I've created, I've become more & more uncomfortable calling the tiny communities "cities" when they are little more than overgrown villages at best. So my plan right now, while I'm creating the rest of these entries, is to label any settlement with a population over 50,000 as a "city" (especially if it provides urban services like a bank, post office, college, etc.), those with a population over 1,000 (or is the administrative center of a woreda or Zone) as a "town", & the rest will be labelled villages. By which time the new Ethiopian census ought to be published, & I can start all over again. :-/

The only reason I have not changed the categories of Manbuk or Mankush is that I haven't gotten to them yet. And I'm not picking on Injibara: the reason I haven't made some of the other "cities" into "towns" yet (like Alamata or Humera) is because of that (IMHO) stupid "Cities of Ethiopia" template, which also needs to be pared down to about 20 entries before I can change the categories of any more.

I expected some upset folks about these changes, but I honestly thought I'd hear from one of the few Afars with an account on the Internet (there have been at least one -- who made some quite useful contribution to articles on Afar history & culture) who would complain, "Why did you make Diche Oto and Gewane towns when other Ethiopian settlements of the same size are still called cities?" I'm just trying to avoid making anyone think I'm targeting his or her people for unfair treatment, when the real cause is just a lack of time on my part.

Anyway, I apologize for any insult you may have felt. Feel free to "promote" Injibara, or "demote" Manbuk & Mankush -- or both. I just wanted a few entries from every Region for the time being until I get far enough along in labelling new settlements or communities that I feel its time I should go back & fix the older articles. -- llywrch 21:19, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

Re: Dengel Ber. I took the elevation from the Nordic Africa Institute, & the infobox of Lake Tana states its elevation as 1788; IMHO, 2 meters is sufficient to be dry. However, the text states the lake is 1840 meters; I'm not sure which is correct, but I do know the depth of the lake varies. I guess this is a situation where details should be left out until more research is done.

As for your question about the roads -- my intent was to add to what might be expected. But is what the expected means of access to a town or village in Ethiopia is -- that I don't know how to handle. Should an article on a settlement always state that a given town has a paved road, a rutted track suitable only for 4-wheel drive -- or only a footpath? If so, how would one find this information? I don't know the answer -- but I'm not so worried about the problem of original research on this topic. -- llywrch (talk) 23:14, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

No problem; I'm more interested in getting the details right than being right, so to speak. FWIW, I've felt our exchange has been a pleasant conversation -- at least in comparison with some I've had on Wikipedia. Lastly, from my research your GPS readings for elevation are about as accurate as the ones in the published sources; draw what conclusions you want from that observation. -- llywrch (talk) 16:40, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

About Low Level Groups

Basically I'm going to take the next few years and work my way through ISO 639-3 and make sure there's at least a stub for every language. I'm not following Ethnologue's spelling, but ISO 639-3's spelling. In cases, where there is a full article with another (more acceptable) name, like for Blin I haven't changed the name but just made a note of the variant spelling in ISO 639-3. In the case of Kambaata, the existing article was no more than a rehash of Ethnologue 14th edition (pre-ISO 639-3). I'm trying to bring all the language articles that are in older formats up to newer Language template formats. As far as the low level adjustments made to Awngi, etc. I've deleted a subgroup where there was only one language unless there was some evidence that there may be other languages in that group. For example, for Qimant I left West as the final group because of the ambiguous nature of Qwara and Kayla. I deleted South from Awngi because it is the only language in the group. That's redundant and is basically a case where there used to be two languages listed in Ethnologue in the group (Awngi and Kunfal), but the two were collapsed into one language. Ethnologue simply hasn't cleaned up the tree yet (there is no difference between listing a "South" group with Awngi and Kunfal and listing "Awngi" as including Kunfal). This is not unusual for Ethnologue to have "historical" branches with only one daughter. There are, of course, cases where this is a bad idea--for example, where there are extinct languages that Ethnologue doesn't list that comprise the other members of a single-member subgroup (like, for example, Coahuiltecan). But that's not the case with Awngi, etc. If specialists want to keep the lower level groups, I don't have a vested interest in the matter. I'm just trying to clean things up and create standard templates. You might also notice that I have not used the "Lowland East Cushitic" node in the East Cushitic languages (for example, Saho) since it's not in Ethnologue (although whoever wrote the Afar article used it). I don't have any vested interest in any of these things. As I work my way through ISO 639-3 you'll see other language stubs pop up. I hope they're useful. (Taivo (talk) 08:00, 27 February 2008 (UTC))

I just noticed that you had written both the Awngi and Qimant articles. I hope I didn't offend. (Taivo (talk) 08:06, 27 February 2008 (UTC))

WikiProject Germany Invitation

Hello, Landroving Linguist! I'd like to call your attention to the WikiProject Germany and the German-speaking Wikipedians' notice board. I hope their links, sub-projects and discussions are interesting and even helpful to you. If not, I hope that new ones will be. Wikipedia:WikiProject Germany | watch Wikipedia:German-speaking Wikipedians' notice board | watch

--Zeitgespenst (talk) 00:55, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Ethnologue

Hi and thanks for your nice post! In the case you make about Low Saxon, I'm the first to agree. From a linguistic point of view, they are closer to Dutch. Similar examples abound, I'm definitely not claiming that Ethnologue is always wrong, just that it's wrong much too often... ;) My speciality are the Celtic languages I mentioned, those that I should have sourced from the start and will source in the next few days. Please let me outline their description of the Goidelic languages

• Irish Gaelic. Lots of errors and outdated information. The number of speakers is from the Irish census in 1983, although there have been three censuses since that. The areas where it is spoken are randomly picked and follow no apparent logic. The dialects are a complete mess with what looks like pure invention. I'll source it, but belive me when I say that I know what I'm talking about here :)
• Manx Gaelic. Ethnologue's information here is completely correct :)Incredible though it .
• Scottish Gaelic. The number of speakers is based on the last census although the year is wrong. The dialects are just silly. Two dialects that are already extinct are mentioned as the only two dialects of the language, while none of the living dialects seem to be known to Ethnologue.
• Hiberno-Scottish Gaelic. Ethnologue has invented a whole new language, I guess they are thinking of Middle Irish, similar to Middle German or Middle English but most definitely never a separate language from Irish.

This is just for a very small subgroup of languages, I plan to have a look at some further language families and see if I find any obvious errors. One that I've found already is the claim that Italian would be closer related to languages such as French than to the Corsican language - a language that every linguist I know of agrees that is very close to Tuscan dialects and thus closer to standard Italian than even many Italian dialects are. I might understand Ethnologue having a hard time on issues where linguist disagrees, but when they invent their own realities in opposition to a common academic view, I find it strange. Inventing new languages that never existed, using outdated data instead of new and readily available, listing only two minor dialects but missing all main ones, inventing new dialect families... I hope I've made my case for why I distrust Ethnologue and why many linguists feel it is so bad as to be more hurtful than helpful. The effects can be seen on Wikipedia, where some users - most definitely with the best intentions - have edited articles to reflect what Ethnologue writes. Well, this is getting long... :) As you've correctly pointed out, this needs to be sourced in the article and I'll gladly do my part of it! Cheers! JdeJ (talk) 19:43, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

Ouch, thanks for the reminder! You don't even have to wait a week, if I haven't put up the sources by tomorrow, feel free to take out the paragraph! :) JdeJ (talk) 08:47, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

I still haven't provided the sources, as one of the books I'm looking for is missing. For that reason, I've removed the paragraph for now. I will post it again once I've sourced it properly but it wouldn't be fair to keep it in so long after I promised to source it. I guess you're watching the article, but I will notify you in any case once I've edited and reposted the paragraph on linguistic mistakes. Cheers! JdeJ (talk) 07:59, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Awngi

Yes, I was worried that "palato-velar" was language specific. I think that it's possible to say in the article "palatal and velar consonants behave similarly phonologically." If Hertzron has a "palato-velar" column then I'd rather mention it in the prose than use it but maybe I'm being too oh-no-people-might-get-confused; who else would be reading this page but people familiar with the IPA?

My understanding with representing affricates is that using ligatures was formerly IPA practice but is no longer so. There are some languages (like Polish) that distinguish an affricate with a stop+fricative cluster. You can click on that link and see the tie-bar that's used with Polish affricates. This can look a little funny for Internet Explorer users but is still usable. I wouldn't think that we'd need to distinguish this with Awngi since it doesn't really have consonant clusters.— Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 07:54, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Sorry if I'm being nitpicky here. In Polish (and very formal Russian), the distinction between an affricate and a stop + fricative cluster is the amount of time it takes to produce. Cluster [ts] takes about twice as long as affricate [ts]. You say that sédza has a phonetic affricate... do you mean that phonetically it is [sédza] with a stop + fricative cluster or do you mean that it is actually an affricate with the same production time as, say, [tʃ]? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 20:02, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Amharic pronunciation (amharische Aussprache)

Hallo, ich habe Dich in de: als einen der wenigen aktiven Amharischkundigen ausfindig gemacht. Vielleicht wirfst Du mal einen Blick auf die de:Wikipedia Diskussion:WikiProjekt Äthiopien (Thema "Amharische Aussprache")? -- Hämbörger (talk) 17:44, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Legas

Hi. Landroving Linguist. I did read the talk page of Legas. If You want to get rid of the article, take it to AFD. As it stands, Category:Ethnic groups in Ethiopia is the best category. – Leo Laursen – ✍ ⌘ 07:13, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Komo, Kwama, & Nao/Mao languages

Hi, I've been adding some statistical information to the Benishangul-Gumuz articles (I discovered late last month that the CSA published the 1994 census of Ethiopia on their website), & suspect that I may have made a mess of things. Do you know the difference between these 3 languages? The 1994 census provides population numbers for the Mao-Komo special woreda for the Gumuz, Jebelawi (which I'm fairly certain is the same as Berta), Fadashi, Koma, Mao & Oromo languages. I assumed that their "Koma" was the same as Kwama language, but notice that the Kwama people is also known as "Mao", & that the article Komo language exists. Help! I'm in over my head here! -- llywrch (talk) 22:53, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback. I'll probably modify my identifications of CSA names with the actual ethnic groups (whether the CSA was accurate or not) further in these articles, but I've long accepted that this is all tentative until more reliable information comes along.

As for the date of the census, the problem is that the CSA has several different censuses up on their website. You're probably thinking of their preliminary & first draft versions of the 2007 census -- which does not yet go into the detail that I hope they provide. (One most important omission is there are no population numbers for towns.) However, if you poke around a bit, you will find that they scanned then put into pdf format all of the 1994 census reports & made them available for download. The information may be dated, but it is very comprehensive (moreso than anything else I've managed to find), more timely than many other sources (some Wikipedia articles draw from Library of Congress articles written around 1990), & gives a Wikipedia user a yardstick to evaluate more recent data against (e.g., population growth). And as a last consideration for adding this material to Wikipedia articles, I have found that downloading these pdf files is very time-consuming: the CSA website is very slow for most of the day (we are talking the equivalent of 2400 baud dialup speeds), which could discourage the casual use that leads people into becoming fascinated with this African country. -- llywrch (talk) 20:25, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

SIL link

I reinserted the link because while the article has thankfully changed from its earlier days as a long list of dubious and often uncited charges against SIL, it now mentions a controversy while giving practically no information about said controversy in the article or in any links. Whle Colby is in the references section, there is no actual information from or citation of that book in the main text, hence my putting the link link back in, as it at least says something about the charges (and ones concerning SIL, as opposed to some of the other former links which tried to smear SIL by guilt-by-association techniques). In any case, it's not a big deal with me. Ergative rlt (talk) 19:27, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

You're welcome

I stumbled on the first map at the LL-Map website, & thought this was a useful resource I hadn't encountered before, & figured that others might not have known about it either. -- llywrch (talk) 19:25, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Nice language pages

I was impressed by the Awingi, Majang and Qimant pages. Nice work. Lingamish (talk) 12:33, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

Schnoebelen & the Shabo language

I noticed your recent edits to Shabo language, but the link you provided to Shnoebelen's paper didn't work. Were you trying to link to this publication or this one? (Or maybe even this one, although this last one is at the Stanford U's website.) -- llywrch (talk) 22:44, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

No problem. I enjoyed reading Shnoebelen's papers; thanks for the pointers. -- llywrch (talk) 05:48, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

The Gambela Region & other things

Hi -- Yes, I'm working (slowly) at updating the subdivisions of not only the Gambela Region but all parts of Ethiopia. At the moment I'm furthest along with the parts which changed the least -- Afar, Tigray, & Amhara -- & have taken a break from untangling Oromia & the SNNPR. (I was surprised to discover two new zones in Oromia in the 2007 census which have yet to appear, IFAIK, on any maps!) Gambela, however, is perhaps in the worst shape, so I've skipped ahead to it. (Which link did I make dead? I tried to fix them all, I'd appreciate knowing which I missed.) As for your comment at Talk:Shabo language, yes I did see it. But I saw it late in the evening my time, & have been composing my thoughts for my response. -- llywrch (talk) 16:18, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Semitic map

Thanks, Well if you look closely at legend you will see that Arabic corresponds with >100 Million. I could make it look even larger but it will end up dominating the centre of the map. Rafy talk 14:15, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

Love history & culture? Get involved in WikiProject World Digital Library!

World Digital Library Wikipedia Partnership - We need you!

Hi Landroving Linguist! I'm the Wikipedian In Residence at the World Digital Library, a project of the Library of Congress and UNESCO. I'm recruiting Wikipedians who are passionate about history & culture to participate in improving Wikipedia using the WDL's vast free online resources. Participants can earn our awesome WDL barnstar and help to disseminate free knowledge from over 100 libraries in 7 different languages. Multilingual editors are welcome! (But being multilingual is not a requirement.) Please sign up to participate here. Thanks for editing Wikipedia and I look forward to working with you! SarahStierch (talk) 22:19, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

Afroasiatic languages

All the numbers that I've posted have a source linked to them where the number of speakers can be verified, as do all Wikipedia articles, so wouldn't it make sense to take all those numbers into account.198.205.24.201 (talk) 15:58, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

Well, as an example, I checked the Arabic 420 million number that you cited first, and indeed there was a source for that number, but this source only stated 293 million. That's why you can't quote Wikipedia in Wikipedia. There are too many pages which are maintained by sloppy editors. Landroving Linguist (talk) 09:17, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

Priest

Any particular reason why you removed the picture of the paddling priest from the Lake Tana page? Landroving Linguist (talk) 12:39, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Hi Landroving Linguist. The file was low quality and a non-sequitur, so I replaced it with one of the lacustrine churches that are actually mentioned in the text. Best regards, Middayexpress (talk) 16:46, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Language-population update project

Hi. The 18th edition of Ethnologue just came out, and if we divide up our language articles among us, it won't take long to update them. I would appreciate it if you could help out, even if it's just a few articles (5,000 articles is a lot for just me), but I won't be insulted if you delete this request.

A largely complete list of articles to be updated is at Category:Language articles citing Ethnologue 17. The priority articles are in Category:Language articles with old Ethnologue 17 speaker data. These are the 10% that have population figures at least 25 years old.

Probably 90% of the time, Ethnologue has not changed their figures between the 17th and 18th editions, so all we need to do is change "e17" to "e18" in the reference (ref) field of the language info box. That will change the citation for the artcle to the current edition. Please put the data in the proper fields, or the info box will flag it as needing editorial review. The other relevant fields are "speakers" (the number of native speakers in all countries), "date" (the date of the reference or census that Ethnologue uses, not the date of Ethnologue!), and sometimes "speakers2". Our convention has been to enter e.g. "1990 census" when a census is used, as other data can be much older than the publication date. Sometimes a citation elsewhere in the article depends on the e17 entry, in which case you will need to change "name=e17" to "name=e18" in the reference tag (assuming the 18th edition still supports the cited claim).

Remember, we want the *total* number of native speakers, which is often not the first figure given by Ethnologue. Sometimes the data is too incompatible to add together (e.g. a figure from the 1950s for one country, and a figure from 2006 for another), in which case it should be presented that way. That's one use for the "speakers2" field. If you're not sure, just ask, or skip that article.

Data should not be displayed with more than two, or at most three, significant figures. Sometimes it should be rounded off to just one significant figure, e.g. when some of the component data used by Ethnologue has been approximated with one figure (200,000, 3 million, etc.) and the other data has greater precision. For example, a figure of 200,000 for one country and 4,230 for another is really just 200,000 in total, as the 4,230 is within the margin of rounding off in the 200,000. If you want to retain the spurious precision of the number in Ethnologue, you might want to use the {{sigfig}} template. (First parameter in this template is for the data, second is for the number of figures to round it off to.)

Dates will often need to be a range of all the country data in the Ethnologue article. When entering the date range, I often ignore dates from countries that have only a few percent of the population, as often 10% or so of the population isn't even separately listed by Ethnologue and so is undated anyway.

If Ethnologue does not provide a date for the bulk of the population, just enter "no date" in the date field. But if the population figure is undated, and hasn't changed between the 17th & 18th editions of Ethnologue, please leave the ref field set to "e17", and maybe add a comment to keep it so that other editors don't change it. In cases like this, the edition of Ethnologue that the data first appeared in may be our only indication of how old it is. We still cite the 14th edition in a couple dozen articles, so our readers can see that the data is getting old.

The articles in the categories linked above are over 90% of the job. There are probably also articles that do not currently cite Ethnologue, but which we might want to update with the 18th edition. I'll need to generate another category to capture those, probably after most of the Ethnologue 17 citations are taken care of.

Jump in at the WP:LANG talk page if you have any comments or concerns. Thanks for any help you can give!

— kwami (talk) 02:40, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!

Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:35, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Error

Sorry about that, I saw that (2015) was changed to (2015a) which drew suspicion as an potentially non-constructive edit, until I saw it was for the references. I will undo the revert for you. Cheers - Wikih101 (talk) 19:51, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject Languages

Thank you for the information about WikiProject Languages recently. Please tell me what "regardless of the number of speakers" means for my updates. If a language is currently spoken, then "high" is the importance, and I have fixed the languages I set otherwise. What about long extinct languages, like Linear A or recently extinct? What about currently spoken dialects, like Aachen dialect? What about constructed languages, like Nal Bino? Please clarify for me. --DThomsen8 (talk) 22:15, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for reacting in this way! Your request prompted me to look for the place that defines the importance scale for the project, and embarrassingly I cannot find it any more. It is certainly not available on the project page. I'm pretty sure I have seen it there at some stage, although years ago, but since it is not there any more, I cannot uphold the claim I made on your talk page. From my (admittedly twisted) memory I recall that basically all language varieties with their own ISO 639-3 code should get high importance. Dialects of such languages would get mid importance. I don't recall how extinct languages fared in that system, and constructed languages, including Quenya and Klingon, also had a set importance rate, but I don't recall which one. So, all being told, as there is now no record anywhere of how the scale works, you can probably follow your own intuition (countless ISO-3 language pages did not have any rating for years, or lower than 'high', so whatever the rule was, it was not followed in practice). You may ignore my objection on your talk page until the project decides on a new documented importance scale for its articles. Best wishes, Landroving Linguist (talk) 21:02, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

Languages of Ethiopia

Hello Landroving Linguist,

Some years ago you wrote:

That's a matter of perspective. The Classical Arabic, which most users with a religious background would know in Ethiopia, is from a language use perspective as dead as Latin - or as alive. It is a different matter with Sudanese Arabic, which is used as a second language by various speakers in Western Ethiopia. That, of course, is very much a living language. So maybe it would make sense to mention Sudanese Arabic on this page. Trouble is, I am not aware of any published sources. Landroving Linguist (talk) 14:18, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

Some days ago, you deleted the sentences:

There are three different types of Arabic used in Ethiopia, namely Modern Standard Arabic, Sudanese Arabic and Yemeni Arabic. Modern Standard Arabic is used by educated speakers of Colloquial Arabic, Sudanese Arabic is used by fewer than 100,000 people in Ethiopia and Yemeni Arabic is used by 10,000 people who live in coastal areas.

The sources for these information were mentioned. May I ask you why did you delete these sentences?

Kind regards, — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.79.44.163 (talk) 12:03, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

Dear 87.79.44.163, thanks for asking! As you were introducing three different varieties of Arabic, my response will necessarily have three parts. For all three varieties it applies that none of them appears to be spoken as a mother tongue in Ethiopia, and the article, in the place where you inserted your text, was dealing with mother tongues only. The next paragraph mentions important second languages in Ethiopia, and includes Arabic among English and Italian. I think this is a balanced treatment of Arabic, as it is certainly not more important than English as a second language in Ethiopia, but more important than Italian. Now, to Classical Arabic: What I have said in the passage you quoted is still my position: it is a language with limited religious use, and as such not actually well known by many people in Ethiopia - at most religious specialists have a good passive knowledge. It should not be mentioned as a living language here. Yemen Arabic, according to the sources you cite, belongs to the coastlands of what then was Ethiopia, which means that it now belongs to Eritrea. Eritrea became independent after the publication of the Ethnologue version the UNHCR site refers to. This leaves Sudanese Arabic, which, as I stated above, I believe (and know) to be used as a second language by people around Assosa. I just don't have a written source for it. The sources quoted by the UNHCR on that matter are oral statements by diplomats, who cannot be used as the kind of secondary source that we value here on Wikipedia (the UNHCR source actually only states that based on their information the use of Arabic is possible in Ogaden and Oromo; they further put heavy disclaimers on this, saying that this is by no means authoritative). This brings us to an important principle of Wikipedia: That we can only include information for which there are good secondary sources. This means that often I cannot include information that I know to be true (like that Arabic is spoken as a second language around Assosa), simply because I cannot support this with a good source. Also I need to make sure that a source that appears to be good really supports my claim. Ethnologue 1992 supported the claim that Yemen Arabic was used in Ethiopian coastlands. But since Ethiopia lost its coastlands since, I cannot use that source any more for that claim relating to the Ethiopia of 2016. I hope this helps as an explanation why I deleted these lines. Remember that Arabic is listed as an important second language in the article, and this is as it should be. Best wishes, Landroving Linguist (talk) 07:31, 2 November 2016 (UTC)