Wikipedia:Peer review/Swedish language/archive1

Swedish language

I've been working on this one on and off for over two months now, though I have mostly concentrated on the aspects of Swedish phonology and Standard Swedish. There's been som good groundwork for the article, though it's been lacking in academic material somewhat. I intend to correct this as best I can, and I have good reference literature at my disposal and quite a passion for linguistics. I'm setting my sights very high; I want to top or at least equal the Holy Grail of language articles, Portuguese language in quality, and I intend to keep up my editing until that goal is reached! I know the article still has a lot that needs to be done, but it would really help if others could assist in defining the objectives more specifically.

While I don't expect that many expert comments on specific Swedish issues, I know there are many quite competent linguists here at English Wikipedia, and I hope to hear from as many of them as possible.

Peter Isotalo 13:21, May 10, 2005 (UTC)

Nice article, and quite complete. My overall impression is most favorable, although I'm missing a few things and have to point out a few others things that could be clarified. Here you go...

• Lead section. Try to summarize the article here. Things that are found here raise the reader's expectation that he will read more about it further down. At present, most of the lead section talks about the classification, which is not discussed later on. Along similar lines, the pluricentric thing is handled most extensively in the lead, and is only alluded to in the rest of the article.
  • There has been some (quite heated) discussions of the pluricentricity, and I somewhat question the validity of the claim, since almost almost all Swedes speak varieties that have evolved from the Central Swedish dialects in during the last century-and-a-half. This is supported by all linguistic literature and Nationalencyklopedin. / Peter Isotalo 10:02, May 11, 2005 (UTC)
• Geographic distribution. A map would be cool, especially since the Old Westrogothic Law is the only picture in the article at present. Additionally, I was a little confused by the fact that Swedish is so important in Finland, and I couldn't find the historical background of it being taught in schools along with Finnish. Similarly, the fact that schools in Finland seem to try to avoid Finlandization puzzled me. Upon re-reading, I saw that this is briefly explained in the section on 'Official status' — I'm not sure if that's the best place for it.
  • No I agree. The Finland-Swedish issue seems to have been described a bit too thoroughly. I will try to summarize it. Peter Isotalo 10:02, May 11, 2005 (UTC)
• Official status. How come it's not an official language in Sweden?
  • Eep! You got me there. To some extent it can be generalized as being consistent with the Swedish national character, I suppose. Consensus-making instead of legislation and all. But largely I think it's simply because there has been no need for legislation, since Sweden has been fairly homogenious (and the various minority languages have been so small and and hence successfully supressed). But I don't really have a simple, supportable answer to that one yet. / Peter Isotalo 10:02, May 11, 2005 (UTC)
• Dialects. Again, a map would be illuminating (maybe it could be combined with the other map).
  • A first draft of the dialect map is now up, courtesy of IceKarma. / Peter Isotalo 21:29, May 17, 2005 (UTC)
• Sounds. A little more detail in the main article would be nice. The 17 different vowels seem like an alarming amount until one clicks through to Swedish phonology to learn that vowel length is contrastive. I note furthermore that consonants aren't dealt with at all (except in some talk about variation). Additionally, I have often come across Swedish as an example of a tonal language; I would expect to find a short discussion of that as well. I guess that's related to the discussion of lexical stress in the Prosody section; I would at least note that some linguists, on the grounds of those minimal pairs, consider Swedish a tonal language.
  • Vowels Well, one could argue that the realization of the short vowels is actually different, you're right. I'm not that used to describing phonologies.
  • Tones The Swedish linguist Olle Engstrand writes that the tonal element is quite insignificant. It is contrastive to some extent, but the tones are predictable through morphology and not even remotly like that of Chinese or Thai. One can live an entire life in Sweden and speaking perfectly acceptable Swedish without ever mastering the acute and grave accents. There is a somewhat confusing terminology used on Wikipedia right now, as seen at melodic accent, which to me seems to be a very general layman's term for (Scandinavian) prosody in general. I would appreciate your input on that one (at the article talkpage).
• Morphology. I'm missing a treatment of syllable structure and word structure here. Do words tend to be disyllabic or monosyllabic? Preference for open or closed syllables? And how about some phonotactics ;)?
  • Oh, shush! I was gonna do that. Really... Peter Isotalo 10:02, May 11, 2005 (UTC)
• Grammar.
  • What does it mean that "[t]he standard language's grammar is uniform"?
  • Do nouns occur without the "suffix which varies according to gender"? If they don't, what does it mean that definiteness is expressed by use of this suffix? If they do, how should I relate this to the fact that "[a]ll Swedish nouns belong to one of two genders"? A few examples of nouns of different genders, definite nouns, nouns plus declensed adjectives etc. would help clarify this.
  • What does it mean that "participles are used either in perfect or present tense"? Also, I note that participle is a problematic notion cross-linguistically. I've seen it being used for substantivized verbs (i.e. verbal nouns) by some linguists, for verbs in relative clauses by others, and finally for adjectives derived from verbs as stated in our own (not too helpful) article 'participle'. In which sense is it used here? Here, too, some example sentences would be cool.
    • Plenty more text added as well as a table and some examples. It's somewhat difficult for me to tell if it's comprehensible to others since I'm a native speaker. Have a look and see what you think. / Peter Isotalo 22:49, May 13, 2005 (UTC)
• Vocabulary. "A significant number of French words were imported into Sweden around the 18th century" — what's the historical background for this?
  • Like, duh... French political and cultural hegemony in Europe, of course. :-) I should definetly state the obivous, though. Good call. / Peter Isotalo 10:02, May 11, 2005 (UTC)
• History. Some more words on the 1526 Bible translation would be cool — who initiated the project, who was the main translator, was it the very first translation, if not, why was it more influential than earlier ones?
  • I've added information on the translators as well as some of the impacts the new bible had on the language. / Peter Isotalo 22:49, May 13, 2005 (UTC)

• General. Try to avoid one-sentence paragraphs, they make the article look messy (several can be fixed by joining them to adjacent ones; for others, consider expanding them).

That's all for now. — mark ✎ 21:47, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

The objections I have not commented I consider to be just as valid, but not really needing any further explanation. I'll let you know when I've taken care of it.

Peter Isotalo 10:02, May 11, 2005 (UTC)

Looking good. But I do like the organization of Portuguese language better. Most odd is that the history section in this article is near the bottom. IMO, it really needs to be at the top or at least near the top. Several of the 'main article' links are misleading since the section covering that material in this article is longer than the main article. Consider either making these links inline or better yet move the more detail text to the main articles and leave a more compact summary here. Oh and main article links are usually reserved for second level sections, not sub sections. -- mav 00:47, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

• Thanks for commenting, mav! The History section being last is because it's been placed last in the language template, and because I'm actually kinda favorable to that. Do you think that History should go before all the linguistic features-sections?
• The seperate article section links is somewhat of an artifact because I created those articles before I really started working on the article. Do you think the History subsections are too long right now, or should they be even more thorough?
• I was also wondering about the examples. To me it seems like a slight violation of Wikipedia not being an idiom guide. Do you think it's necessary to have common phrases or not? / Peter Isotalo 07:50, May 18, 2005 (UTC)