#hyolmo

Hyolmo (ཡོལ་མོ་) man playing Tungna

This new article gives a basic overview of the grammar of the Yolmo language. I’m excited to share it, because it’s the first time I’ve systematically drawn together resources on the different dialects of the language, including those worked on by other people (Hari’s work on the Melamchi variety) and my own work on the Lamjung and Ilam varieties as well as the closely related Syuba language. I’m also excited because it’s one of the first articles in the new WikiJournal of the Humanities.

I’ve been slowly improving the Yolmo Language Wikipedia page for years, because Wikipedia is still one of the most read websites on the internet, and the place most people are likely to learn about a language. This meant that I already had the basis of a good encyclopedic article, the kind of thing you might find in The Sino-Tibetan Languages handbook or something similar (without the $420 price tag).

WikiJournals are set up as part of the larger WikiMedia family, which includes Wikipedia. There are a number of benefits to publishing an article in a WikiJournal:

It motivated me to to one final push to round out some sections of the article I’d been putting off

It creates a ‘version of record’, which can still be updated but is easier to cite because the content is stable

Because it’s a journal article, not an encyclopedia, there is more scope for speculation, and a bit of original research

It’s a peer-reviewed journal article, and so I get some academic credit for my time spent improving Wikipedia

I decided to essentially draft the document on the Wikipedia page. Once I was happy with it, I created a Wikiversity account for myself, and copied the content across to submit as a pre-print. There were a few changes to make, such as writing an abstract, and adding some more speculative thoughts about the relationship between the dialects for which there aren’t any good citable sources (yet... I’m working on it). Some lessons learnt in this process: set up your account 24-28 hours before editing, otherwise they tend to think you’re a bot. I had some trouble editing the template myself, but I’ve been told they’ve fixed that. Also, the visual editor that makes editing Wikipedia such a breeze is not turned on automatically - you have to go into your settings and in the ‘beta’ section choose the visual editor as an option.

Overall, I found the peer review experience very positive, as I was fortunate enough to have reviewers who understood the grammar overview genre, and were familiar with Wikipedia style. The whole peer review process is run on the Wikipedia model, where everything is documented publically. You can see the reviewer comments and my responses by going to the Discuss tab on the article.

Abstract

Yolmo is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Nepal. Also known as Helambu Sherpa, it is a Tibetic language. This article gives an overview of the language, including information about the dialects spoken, history of documentation, and a grammatical overview. The grammatical overview brings together work on different dialects, providing an outline of the sound system, noun phrase, verb phrase and clause structure.