Wiktionary talk:About Yoruba

Tones

I just wanted to know what the rationale was behind only marking tones in the headword line? In formal and standard Yoruba, tones are supposed to be marked and distinguish between words similar to other languages like Vietnamese where words with differing tones/diacritics have different pages. What makes Yoruba different in this case? Thank you. AG202 (talk) 00:18, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

@AG202: Welcome to Wiktionary, and thanks for asking. It was a decision to which I gave a good deal of thought, and I decided on this route because we aim to allow people to look up a word they may come across in the wild, and even official texts may lack at least some tone marks. Ọladiipọ et al say: "A well written Yorùbá textual document is expected to indicate the phonemic diacritics at all times and the tone diacritics sufficiently enough to minimize ambiguity for readers. This definition of a well written text has however scarcely been adhered to except in educational textbooks. The tone diacritics are the most violated, being either totally ignored, randomly used or wrongly used in many written texts. The absence of tone marking may be a minimal problem for human readers of the text who rely on context and diverse domains knowledge to disambiguate in real-time." Their scholarly assessment informed our current practice. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 06:24, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

@Metaknowledge: Thank you! That makes perfect sense, and I'll use that guideline moving forward. AG202 (talk) 06:29, 13 December 2020 (UTC)