Wikipedia:Peer review/Philippine Spanish/archive1

Philippine Spanish

Hi, folks. The Wikipedia article on the Philippine dialect of Spanish has had quite a history. This article originally redirected to Spanish language in the Philippines, then someone earlier in the last decade made an article that was, and this me being generous here, lacking in heft. It was then merged back to the other article until I split it again and put a lot of work on it in the last month, including making several visits to the National Library of Spain to consult some hard-to-get sources.

The article has just passed DYK review (waiting for it to close) and I'm aiming for this to get to GA or FA within the year alongside its Spanish-language counterpart which is still in progress. It has been a very long time since I last took part in a PR (my last PR was over 10 years ago, if memory serves) and I'd like to request for some feedback on how close this article is to reaching GA or FA. I'm also not a linguist, so if there are any linguists here who want to review the article to make sure I'm explaining a concept properly, I'm all ears. Thank you and ¡muchas gracias a todos! --Sky Harbor ^(talk) 20:07, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

Comments from TechnoSquirrel69

Hey Sky Harbor, nice work on this article! Hopefully you're still open to some comments after a few silent months...

• The first sentence currently reads "Philippine Spanish is a Spanish dialect and a variant of standard Spanish native to the Philippines, spoken mostly by Spanish Filipinos.", which seems a little awkward and redundant to me. I'd suggest "Philippine Spanish is a dialect of Spanish native to the Philippines, spoken primarily by Filipinos of Iberian descent." or something similar.
• Technical (?) Spanish terms such as vosotros and yeísmo need to be explained the first time they're used. In general, make sure the treatment of linguistic terminology follows the spirit of WP:MTAU.
• Do a pass of the article with an eye out for run-on sentences, as there are a few of those.
• I think non-Spanish speaking should be non-Spanish-speaking.
• Single quotation marks are usually reserved for glosses and not orthography, see MOS:SINGLE. Many of the current uses of single quotes should probably be italics instead.
• I think [ɾ–l] shift should be [ɾ]–[l] shift.
• I'd recommend changing the SFN citations that are like Lipski December 1986 to Lipski 1986b.

Let me know if you have any questions, and good luck if you decide to bring this to GAN! —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 03:31, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Hi, TechnoSquirrel69! Thank you for taking the time for reviewing the article, and yes, I'm still open to comments, though you may notice that I'm a bit slow in responding as I've landed a new job and haven't been able to dedicate as much time to Wikipedia as I used to. That said I'm hoping to bring this to FAC, actually, but if GAN is a better route let's see what may come out from that.

Now, moving on to addressing the points you raised as you reviewed the article:

• The English version of the article is the original, but there are certain stylistic practices from the Spanish version that I can bring here, including the use of shorter sentences. I can see how they can be edited to make them less run-on and I intend to do a more thorough copy-edit as time allows.
• The first sentence of the lead paragraph is something that was maintained from the original version of the article. That said, it bears noting here that some have confused Philippine Spanish (the dialect of standard Spanish spoken in the Philippines) with Chavacano (a Spanish creole) though the two are different languages. While this fact is pointed later on in the article, I argue that it would make sense for the lead to subtly, not overtly, point this fact out. To that end I revised this sentence to "Philippine Spanish is a dialect of standard Spanish native to the Philippines, spoken primarily by Spanish Filipinos" which hews closer to your proposed edit.
• I'd actually argue that there needs to be a balance between readability and precision. I agree that terms like vosotros, seseo and yeísmo should be explained, but explaining them in the lead would be unwieldy as these are not terms with direct one- or two-word translations into English. I'll clarify for vosotros that it's the second-person plural pronoun since that's relatively easy to put in, but I am inclined to keep seseo and yeísmo as they are unless you have a better way of explaining them that's not a full-on sentence which would repeat the section explaining this phenomenon.
• The phrase "non-Spanish speaking" has been corrected to "non-Spanish-speaking" as suggested.
• [ɾ–l] shift has been changed to [ɾ]–[l] shift as suggested.
• The citation pointer for the one Lipski reference has been changed to the one suggested.

Open to any more relevant edits that should be made as I hope to get this article promoted and in tip-top shape. --Sky Harbor ^(talk) 23:19, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for making those changes, Sky Harbor! I wanted to follow up on your reply regarding the use of technical terms in the lead. Remember that the lead is supposed to be a high-level summary of the article's main topics, and should avoid going into too much technical detail. If you think that "explaining them in the lead would be unwieldy", then those terms should probably not be mentioned. Think of it this way: would an average reader, after going through only the lead, be able to understand the main points that the article covers without getting lost in the weeds? —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 06:36, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

Okay, what I did here was summarize the first two sentences into this: Spanish as spoken in the Philippines contains a number of features that distinguish it from other varieties of Spanish, combining features from both Peninsular and Latin American varieties of the language.. Is this a better revision? --Sky Harbor ^(talk) 01:25, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

This sounds good to me, and I think your average reader will now have an easier time deciphering what the lead is saying. Thanks! —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 05:37, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

@Sky Harbor: Coming back to this review after a couple weeks, there are a few of my comments that I don't think you responded to. There's still the issue of the usage of single quotes, and the SFN citations are still a little janky. Citation 26 reads Lipski January 1986, and Lipski 1986 needs to be Lipski 1986a for disambiguation purposes. —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 20:18, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

Hi, TechnoSquirrel69. To address this I did the following:

• The Lipski references are fixed.
• Glosses now uniformly use the {{gloss}} template. Translations (found further down the article) now uniformly use the {{literal translation}} template.
• The section on yeísmo was rewritten to remove the use of the slash, which doesn't look great with italicized text. The letters are italicized accordingly.

Looking forward to your inputs. --Sky Harbor ^(talk) 02:53, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

@Sky Harbor: I'm just doing a final scan of the article now and noticed that while in some places you have gone ahead with my suggestions (or a modification of one of those changes, as discussed on this page), there is inconsistency in your application. For example, there are still some single quotes being used to mark orthography instead of italics, and not all of the Lipski references are fixed as you said above. I hope you understand that I'm saying this out of a desire to help you bring this article up to its best possible state, but I think you need to slow down a bit and reconsider all of my comments. Do another pass of the article and make sure the style-related issues are remedied across the board. —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 04:03, 4 October 2023 (UTC)