Hi all,
I’m working on an R&R and finding myself exceedingly frustrated by many of the comments to remove “inappropriate” and “superfluous” sentences that mention the effort and contributions by local speakers.
For example, this is the first-ever publication to mention the orthography of the language. And so I include a short paragraph detailing the efforts of the three speakers that crafted the orthography, resulting in a nearly one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and symbols. Recommended to put simply “The orthography has a nearly one-to-one…” without mention of how it was crafted. I worry readers will assume that I did this myself.
Another example, all my data came from 16 speakers who of various ages, genders, dialect backgrounds. I include a table that has their name, gender, age, hometown, and citation of the recording that includes the data used for the article. I have been asked to Thank them by name in the acknowledgments but not put cite their recordings or put information about their demographics.
Finally, I’ve been asked to reformat my citations that refer to the speaker and year of the recording (e.g., Geser 2015) and an accompanying line in the References that directs the reader to that item in the archive, with a code (e.g., WGG_20150820_001) that matches the corpus and removing the line in the references. This makes it both harder for the reader to access the original files in the corpus AND reduces the contributor of this information to a code instead of a name like all other Western contributors of information in the article.
I know that my topic and language area are quite niche and that very few people will be reading these articles (a select few linguists interested in the area or my analysis) but MOSTLY these will be read and shared with local speakers who are interested in learning more about their language! I want their contributions to be highlighted not hidden!
Thoughts? Is sticking with the status quo the professional move? Also I should add that this journal is electronic only, so I don’t think that the concern is space.
Kate