User talk:Neil Copeland

Welcome!

Welcome to the Citizendium! We hope you will contribute boldly and well. Here are pointers for a quick start. You'll probably want to know how to get started as an author. Just look at CZ:Getting Started for other helpful "startup" links, and CZ:Home for the top menu of community pages. Be sure to stay abreast of events via the Citizendium-L (broadcast) mailing list (do join!) and the blog. Please also join the workgroup mailing list(s) that concern your particular interests. You can test out editing in the sandbox if you'd like. If you need help to get going, the forums is one option. That's also where we discuss policy and proposals. You can ask any constable for help, too. Me, for instance! Just put a note on their "talk" page. Again, welcome and have fun! Hayford Peirce 06:07, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

Iaorana!

Hi, Neil,

I lived in Tahiti for 25 and picked up a tiny bit of Tahitian, which I have now mostly forgotten.... :( Glad to see you here! (I think I have a step-grand-daughter going to school in NZ at the moment....) Hayford Peirce 02:32, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

Hi, join the club! About the first thing I did when I joined CZ in May of '07 was send Larry a *long* email about why it was such a lousy name. (Bashfulness is not a trait of mine.) Right now there is a long discussion going on in the Forums about the name, but, I know very well, it will never be changed. Let's see, here's the Forum site. http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,3008.0.html To join in our discussions there, you should re-register with the Forums, it's very easy.

Re: languages -- my understanding, from various step-children, and also talking with anthropologists over the years, is that there's a certain communality, mostly based on distance and the time of dispersal. For instance, a Marquesan, midway between Hawaii and Tahiti can't really speak *either* language, but can understand both of them up to a point. But a Tahitian can't understand Hawaiian, and vice versa. I recently had a Samoan girlfriend for several years and none of my kids could understand a word she said. Plus, although Samoan is obviously a Polynesian language, it doesn't *sound* like one, at least not to my ears nor to my kids'. On the other hand, my Samoan GF spoke half a dozen languages from the island groups near her home.... Hayford Peirce 04:06, 30 January 2010 (UTC)