We encourage all readers to comment on the papers published in PiHPh, and to use articles' comments sections (rather than, say, your own blog or social media) to do this, as the comments section makes it easier to record and refer to these comments in the future. If any discussion of a PiHPh paper occurs elsewhere, then we would encourage you to post a link to that discussion in the paper's comments section on this site.

The system for commenting changed in November 2017 as PiHPh was transferred to a new version of the journal hosting software. The new version uses the commenting system Disqus for comments (all comments made before the change were transferred to the new system). This means that anyone who would like to comment on a PiHPh article now needs to log in with a social media account, or to sign up with Disqus. If you have a Google, Twitter or Facebook account, you can sign in with that. If not (or if you want to keep things separate), you can sign up with Disqus very easily, as explained below. Anonymous commenting is not possible

In order to comment on a specific article:

* go the the article's homepage

* you may find that you are already logged in with a social media account, in which case you can 'Join the discussion...'

* if you are not already logged in, either log in with an already exisiting account or sign up with Disqus

* in order to sign up with Disqus, you need to: (i) click in the box that says 'Name' and type in your name (as you'd like it to appear next to your comments), (ii) enter your email address, (iii) choose a password and type it into the password box, (iv) click on the arrow button; this will register you with Disqus, but before you can comment, you will need to verify your email address — a link should appear which will allow you to send a verification email, and once you click on that (and then reply to the email that it sends), you will be able to submit your comment

* to enter a comment, click in the 'Join the discussion...' box on the article's homepage and away you go... (you may want to draft your comment in a word-processor or some other text editor and then paste it in once you are happy with it)

* please enter the month and year that you post the comment as the last line of the comment, and don't forget to click on the 'Post as ...' button, to post the comment
comments will be moderated on submission, so may take a short while to appear

* we will endeavour to let commenters know if someone replies to a comment

Comments policy

The comments following a paper in PiHPh form part of the permanent record of materials surrounding a paper (assuming that they are approved during moderation) so we encourage you to think carefully about the comments that you post — once published, PiHPh would not expect to withdraw a comment without good reason.

Comments are citable, so they must include your name, and you should be sure to add in the year of publication for your comment — that is, the month and year in which you post it — at the end of your comment.

However, there is no need to write long comments — short queries or refutations of claims are welcome. Longer comments are also welcome, but if a comment becomes very long, we would encourage you to think about submitting it as a standalone paper to PiHPh: we welcome this kind of discussion.

However, readers are welcome to submit multiple comments on any paper — we hope that on occasion conversations may occur between author and commenters.

Ad hominem comments are not allowed, and PiHPh will impose civility in comments (there is no place in comments for words like 'stupid' or 'absurd').

PiHPh encourages friendliness is commenting, but this does not by any means imply you should not say if you can provide evidence that a claim is wrong (but you should give that evidence, or provide a clear reference to it).

Comments can include references — in the normal way, following the Universal Style Sheet for Linguistics Journals.

All comments will be moderated on publication. We will remove comments which, for example, are simply unpleasant or which dismiss frameworks or certain questions as uninteresting. Comments (or whole articles) discussing fundamental frameworks and issues are welcome, however (indeed encouraged), but should be evidence-based.

Do not submit notification of typos as a comment. Please contact PiHPh directly about them (and please do this if you notice any — as all editing is done by volunteers, some will doubtless creep in). Send reports of typos to pihph@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk.

How to cite a comment

It may be on occasion that you would like to refer elsewhere to a comment published here in response to a PiHPh paper. We would encourage this, and we recommend using the normal (author, date) system when doing so, and using the following formatting for the list of references:

[Surname-of-commenter], [Forename]. [Year-of-comment]. [Title of comment, if any]. Comment on [Title of article] by [Name of Article's Author] (Papers in Historical Phonology, vol. [volume number]). [Web address of article].