Talk:Punjabi grammar

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I noticed that the transliteration scheme for this article and for the long and short "e" vowels includes using:

• plain "e" for the long-"e" sound (IPA: /e/) and

• the digraph "ai" for the short-"e" sound (IPA: /ɛ/).

Since this article uses macrons extensively, for the other vowels "a," "i," and "u," I think we should make it more regular for those sounds as well:

• macron "ē" for the long-"e" sound and

• plain "e" for the short-"e" sound.

In addition to "standardizing" it, the digraph "ai" could be mistaken for the diphthong /ai/.

If no one has a problem with this, I will make that change. I'd propose the same thing for the "o"s as well, though there is less need for that distinction as there are no short "o" sounds to distinguish from the long ones on this page currently. Though I'll do that too if no one objects. 3swordz (talk) 00:55, 28 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Why is the transliteration scheme discussed in the grammar article? Mcswell (talk) 23:35, 30 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It was already there, I just tweaked it. But I think it has a place here, so that non-Punjabi speakers can see the grammatical changes for themselves in fully accurate Latin alphabetical representation, instead of seeing solely Gurmukhi and making it inaccessible to users of the Latin alphabet, defeating the purpose of having an English wiki article on it. (personally I find it frustrating when foreign scripts are not transliterated in a way that is accessible to people not proficient in the given script, like non-Cyrillic readers can make any sort of sense out of much of the conjugation on the English Russian grammar page at the present time, for example.)

The transliteration scheme is also seemingly unique to this article, not a widespread thing, and was conceived solely to let English readers see Punjabi conjugations, and the use of tones and macrons warranted an explanation, I think. For a while I considered doing away with the Roman transliteration scheme altogether and just using IPA in its place, but not every Wiki reader has working knowledge of IPA so I didn't. Accessibility to laymen was the main consideration for me in contributing to this article. Hope this makes sense. 3swordz (talk) 19:26, 14 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This article should explain the transcription convention for tones. I'll try to work on it. Bʌsʌwʌʟʌ ^{Speak up!} 22:48, 2 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The article says "Like the nominal system, the Punjabi verb involves successive layers of (inflectional) elements to the right of the lexical base." That sounds like it's describing an agglutinating language (as opposed to a fusional morphology). That may be correct, but it is not apparent from the examples. Nouns appear to only take a single inflectional suffix at a time, and afaict verbs do also. There are in the table some things written to the right of the verbs, but judging by the space between the inflected verb and the "thing" to its right, that is an auxiliary verb (or at least that's how it's being analyzed). So either the text should be revised to eliminate the reference to "successive layers of (inflectional) elements", or examples of agglutinating morphology need to be added to both the noun and verb sections. If the former is done, I would suggest a more linguistically standard re-wording, maybe "...the Punjabi verb takes a single inflectional suffix." Mcswell (talk) 23:40, 30 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Punjabi is not agglutinative, it uses inflectional verb conjugation and yes, auxiliary verbs, much like some other Indo-European languages like Romance languages and English to some extent. It is indeed a single inflectional suffix used. Perhaps the person who wrote that also was referring to Punjabi's postpositions, which are often contracted in common speech, or the fact that auxiliary verbs come after the main verb in Punjabi, or branching, or something along those lines. It is indeed ambiguous and I will fix it, thanks for pointing that out. 3swordz (talk) 20:34, 14 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

What's the difference between the left and the right table under the heading "Declinable adjective caṅgā "good" in attributive use"?

So a previous user around 13 years ago changed the transliteration so that e represents "short e" /ɛ/ and ē represents "long e" /e/ (therefore also that o represents /ɔ/ and ō represents /o/). I believe that these should be swapped, so that e = /e/, ē = /ɛ/, o = /o/ and ō = /ɔ/.

Reason being, /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ are historically the long versions of /e/ and /o/, and still function as such phonotactically in Punjabi. This change would just make it easier to distinguish messes of a-i vowels which Punjabi contains a lot of.

This transliteration is also in line with some Sanskrit transliteration forms and Ancient Greek.

Edit: Since nobody has objected, I will go ahead with this. OblivionKhorasan (talk) 18:24, 9 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]