Wikipedia:Peer review/Bengali language/archive2

Bengali language

There has been a lot of improvement since the last peer review. A language spoken as a native tongue by 230 million or more people is significant. I hope this peer review will allow critical evaluation of the article, and enable us to upgrade this to Featured status. --Ragib 19:58, 11 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Last peer review: Wikipedia:Peer review/Bengali language/archive1

From the article's intro: "Bengali is the English word for the name of the language and for its speakers.... From this point forward, Bangla will be used to refer to the language." Wha? The article should use the English word throughout. --NormanEinstein 13:22, 12 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Please don't relist an article for peer review when there are plenty of issues pointed out in the article talkpage that haven't been addressed. / Peter ^Isotalo 08:37, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Very good overal, so I'll just focus on what it needs to improve of course, and I figure I owe you. :). Basically I would agree with what is mentioned in the to do list on the talk page, except I'm not sure what "complete tabulation of word lists" means.

Needs more citations. The top 15-20 most important facts should be cited directly to the most reliable source available. The number of speakers is particularly important because of the number of variables involved there. Mention what the different sources claim and why they vary. Other places that could use it are the diglossia discussion, dialects, phonology (what dialect is the given information based on?), the facts in the vocabulary section,
Taxman's demands and views on verifiability are problematic, if not bad per se. The idea that footnotes should fulfill an arbtirary quota is not constructive. They should be inserted where needed, not because someone has decided that there simply aren't enough of them. The final figure could be anything from a handful to the high 30s, depending on the individual article. I also don't agree in the least with the heavy focus on turning most of the article into an academic treatise by discussing sources in prose. The responsibility of which sources to include (mainly in the reference section) lies primarily on the editors, not on the reader, or we'll just reduce ourselves to glorified copyeditors. Citations can be nice additions, but they should be used sparingly. We're still an encyclopedia intended for everyone, not an academic caveat for the academia and their ilk, i.e. the (upper) middle class. Accesibility and readability to a large audience should as much as possible outweigh the needs of a tiny minority of highly source-critical and demanding readers. / Peter ^Isotalo 16:06, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
There should be a discussion of the language history, not just modern history. It's only mentioned in the lead. An explanation of where the Apabramshas fit in and when Bengali became a distinct language would be good. 1000-1200 AD is what many sources say for Hindi, and I think it's the same as Hindi in that respect, but I don't know. A mention of the important sound shifts and other language changes should be covered. The Modern history section focuses on the publication of descritptions of the language and movements, some of which is good, but covering the history of the actual language is more important I think. Were any other scripts ever used for Bangla?
I'm not sure either that there's enough backing for using the term Bangla for the language throughout the article. "Bengali" is so much more common in English that you'd need a really strong reason to not use that name throughout especially given what the article title is.
Some short paragraphs in various places cause poor flow and should be merged, expanded, or removed.
The beginning of the grammar section seems to imply that morphology is inflection of adjectives.

- Taxman ^Talk 13:59, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for thorough feedback. I addressed some the address (really, the only ones I could). I took out the implication that morphology is only the changing of vowels and addeded what I think are the linguistically correct terms, but please feel free to correct me.

Tabluation refered to taking the long word lists that plagued the article and making them into graphics. User:SameerKhan placed that wonderful pie chart in the vocabulary section that took out basically the entire reason we had that task. There's still another big list o' words in the lexical variations of dialect section, but I think we'll be able to take care of that soon.

And we're figuring out the Bangla/Bengali thing ever so slowly.

--Ttownfeen 21:51, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]