Talk:Chevak Cupꞌik dialect

Requested move 25 January 2019

Chevak Cup’ik language → Chevak Cup'ik language – Reverse the redirect per WP:TSC - title has a "curly" apostrophe. This qualifies as a technical request (the redirect has no history) but I can foresee it being contested. Within the article, there are an equal number (27) of mentions of "Cup'ik" and "Cup'ik" so I see no subject-specific reason to use the curly apostrophe. 62.165.227.102 (talk) 16:09, 25 January 2019 (UTC) --Relisting. bd2412 T 21:50, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

• Seems reasonable, but let's first hear from Kwamikagami, who I remember recently seeing express an opinion to the contrary. – Uanfala (talk) 13:31, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

Neither is the proper formatting of the name because both contain punctuation. An apostrophe is fine for abbreviations like O'Malley and the English possessive, but here the <p'> is a letter and should be formatted as such. A test is to double click on a word and see if you get the whole thing. In either case above you only get "Cup". ISO is starting to switch over to proper Unicode, though that won't affect this name. If in the orthography a 9-shaped apostrophe is used, then we should use U+02BB <Cupʼik>. If a straight apostrophe is used, as it is in Micmac, then we should use the saltillo, U+A78C, for <Cupꞌik>. Double click on either of those, and you'll get the whole name.

Then question then is whether we use that character only in the article, or also for the title. Yes, WP:TSC says we should avoid such things. But that's not always our practice. In Oahu, for example, we don't use the ʻokina in the title, but do use it (Oʻahu) in the article. (I just corrected it to a proper ʻokina. It had been a quote mark.) But in ʻokina, we retain the ʻokina in the title as well. Perhaps, as with many other articles, if the word/name is common in English, we use the anglicized form, if not, we use native orthography.

But another issue is that Chevak Cupʼik is not a language, but a subdialect of Yupʼik (i.e., of the Central Alaskan Yupik language). So per the MOS for language article titles, we should move it to X dialect.

So, my suggestion for this article is that we either ignore it altogether, as we do at Oahu and Hawaii,

Chevak Cup’ik language → Chevak Cupik dialect

or we use proper orthography,

Chevak Cup’ik language → Chevak Cupʼik dialect or Chevak Cupꞌik dialect

I don't know which would be preferable. But in the article we should use one of the latter, depending on which appears to be best practice in print.

And of course all the other Yupik/Yupʼik/Yupꞌik articles should do the same. I believe Central Alaskan Yupik has the best established orthography for whether we use a 9-shaped (or 6-shaped?) 'apostrophe' or a saltillo. — kwami (talk) 21:28, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

"Yupik" may or may not have the 'apostrophe', and the difference can be meaningful. (See here. For example, Yupʼik ≡ Central Alaskan Yupik.) It looks like, informally, people just use the ASCII apostrophe and accept however their word-processor renders it. But if we're going to format the <p'> as a geminate consonant, we need to decide on one or the other. (The straight and 9-shaped characters are the only two variants I'm finding.) Jacobson's dictionary and grammar use the 9-shape, as does Transforming the Culture of Schools: Yupʼik Eskimo Examples. — kwami (talk) 21:44, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

@Kwamikagami: Thank you for that expertise, it is a pity this is not made clearer in the articles. You say that <p'> is a letter, which I take to mean in the same way that, say, "ll" was until recently considered a distinct letter in the Spanish orthography or "å" in Danish orthography. Yet Chevak Cup’ik language#Phonology, which lists the alphabet, doesn't have it as a separate letter and indeed that article makes no mention of what the apostrophe-like thing is or does. Central Alaskan Yup'ik language#Orthography specifically mentions the role of the apostrophe (not some other grapheme). I assumed these things were apostrophes because that is what the article tells me.

If the apostrophe-like thing can be important, why did you use the redirect Central Alaskan Yupik when the article is at Central Alaskan Yup'ik language? Is that article incorrectly named, with the apostrophe?

Since the 9-shaped glyph and ASCII glyph are the same semantically, we should prefer the ASCII glyph for the usual reasons at TSC. It's probably unwise to choose a more esoteric glyph, as many typefaces may not support it. How the glyph is rendered is a matter for the font designer and rendering engine.

94.21.204.175 (talk) 22:40, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

Actually, <p'> is a digraph. I was a bit sloppy in my wording. The 'apostrophe' indicates unpredictable gemination. In physical typesetting there is no difference between that and the punctuation mark, of course -- the distinction is meaningless for cast metal type, where only shape is defined -- so 'apostrophe' is an appropriate name for it. Unicode accepts that, calling calling both 'apostrophes', with <ʼ> the 'modifier letter apostrophe' vs plain 'apostrophe' for <'>. And in Cupʼik it is modifying a letter.

Unicode defines characters as letters or as punctuation marks, and the two classes behave differently. Here "Yup'ik" is a simple name, with no punctuation in it. Therefore using a Unicode punctuation symbol is inappropriate. Last year ISO changed all the clicks in language names from punctuation marks like <!> to proper Unicode, like <ǃ>. Again, a meaningless distinction for cast type (they look the same), but important in electronic texts. For one thing, if you put an exclamation mark in the middle of a word, it will break at the end of a line, something that won't happen with the click letter. This year ISO is going through all the names with ASCII <'> in them and replacing them with non-punctuation characters when appropriate. I expect Me'phaa will end up with a saltillo <ꞌ> of Mexican tradition, Ts'ün-Lao with the 6-shaped turned comma <ʻ> of the Wade-Giles convention, T'apo with the modifier apostrophe <ʼ> (since the <T'> is an ejective consonant), Hawai'i Creole English with the 'okina <ʻ> (people can get really upset about using the wrong character for 'okina), etc.

As for "Yupik" vs "Yup'ik", my impression is that "Yupik" is the generic name. They're all Yupik languages/dialects. "Yup'ik" is specifically the Central Alaskan variety of Yupik. Thus it seems to me that "Central Alaskan Yup'ik" is a bit of a tautology, since "Yup'ik" already means it's Central Alaskan. But people probably aren't so finicky in practice, or maybe figure that since the language is "Yup'ik", it should have the apostrophe even with the dab. Or maybe that's just a distinction that Jacobson makes and not everyone follows it.

I can't imagine that anyone would not have fonts to support these rather basic Unicode characters. Times New Roman has them, and that's a default font for most computers. Many other fonts do as well.

In the end, I think I'd prefer a title without any apostrophe over one with the incorrect Unicode character, even ASCII <'>. I expect we'll want to follow ISO (and Unicode) practice here, just as we already do with the click letters. — kwami (talk) 00:01, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

Oh, one other point. In the names of Semitic languages, <'> can either be hamza (glottal stop) or ayin (pharyngeal). That's an important distinction that any decent source will make, so it would be a bit weird to conflate the two in article titles. And if we use the appropriate characters for Semitic languages, then why not for other languages? — kwami (talk) 00:41, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean by Times New Roman being a default font for most computers. I'm using an out-of-the-box edition of Windows 10, and not a single character on my screen is in Times New Roman. But as I think we agree, how a rendering engine makes sense of a glyph is entirely outside of our control - as you suggest, we should use the appropriate character because of its semantics, if there is one. (One might imagine how a text-to-speech browser should handle this.) Presumably we should prefer a combining diacritical mark, but they are prohibited in article titles.

If Central Alaskan Yup'ik (targeting Yup'ik, which is proposed to be moved to Yup'ik people) is a tautology, it should be marked as {{R from unnecessary disambiguation}} - and possibly the source of some of my confusion. We should also probably move Central Alaskan Yup'ik language over Yup'ik language (Yup’ik language is red). I think this is in line with the proposal at Talk:Yup'ik#Requested move 24 January 2019, although that was not made explicit.

On my European keyboards, "’" is not an easily-accessible symbol. 94.21.204.175 (talk) 15:53, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

Yes, you have an ASCII keyboard. That has nothing to do with the formatting of article titles. WP is intended as a resource for the reader, not for the editor. The modifier letters can be added to the Latin letter set below your edit window. — kwami (talk) 22:53, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

I don't have an ASCII keyboard. Nevertheless, readers type things in search boxes, which is why WP:TSC recommends providing redirects to or from "versions of the title that use only standard keyboard characters". 94.21.238.64 (talk) 00:38, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

• Support per nom. We should use the straight apostrophe, not a curly one.  — Amakuru (talk) 17:02, 1 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Curly vs. straight is one of the dimensions; the more important one is ASCII apostrophe vs. modifier apostrophe. – Uanfala (talk) 21:18, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

Yes. And double-click behavior has nothing to do with it. That just depends on how the software categorizes "words", for example OpenOffice Writer and even Windows Notepad will select the whole word in "Uanfala's" with a plain old apostrophe. 94.21.238.64 (talk) 01:01, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Do people use Notepad and OpenOffice Writer to access wikipedia? The double-click behaviour is only a test to see if the character is the right one. I don't think we should be using a "wrong" character just because on some pieces of software this wouldn't make a difference. – Uanfala (talk) 01:43, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Double-click is perhaps part of such a test but on its own is unreliable. Same anon, new IP. 188.143.76.152 (talk) 05:41, 11 February 2019 (UTC)