[WikiEN-l] Re: Re: transliteration is stupider

[Daniel Mayer]

On Wednesday 20 November 2002 04:27 am, Danny wrote:
> Going over last night's work, I notice that Angstrom has been redone to
> include all the various diacretics. Is that common usage in English?

Not to my knowledge. Taking out the diacritic flare it is still recognizable 
as Angstrom so I don't think it is /that/ bad. Opps! Looks like Ed fixed it.

> Oh, and Lir, I also noticed on your page that you refer to Jesus Christ as
> Yehoshua of Nazareth. A very cute attempt to go back to the Hebrew/Aramaic,
> but there are so many mistakes in that transliteration, it really makes it
> useless.
>
> 1. There is no "ho" in the name. Yehoshua is Joshua, Yeshua is Jesus. In
> fact, in Deuteronomy, Joshua's name was changed from Jesus--you are just
> changing it back.
> 2. You're forgetting the gutteral ayin after the final a in Yeshua (though
> in Hebrew/Aramaic writing it appears as if it would be before, the proper
> pronunciation places it after).
> 3. Nazareth is just so far off the mark, it's not even worth explaining.
> 4. "Of" would "me" in Hebrew or "de" in Aramaic, without distinguishing
> between the different vowels (tzeireh and shewa).
>
> In other words, here your "attempt at accuracy" is just confused gibberish,
> i.e., it is wrong. Stick to languages you know something about.
>
> Danny

Well said. We needn't go down that road; it is far more complicated than our 
current system (since it absolutely requires redirects). Newbies simply don't 
know about or use redirects so using transliteration or native forms is not 
an answer. 

Above all else we should strive to be useful to the reader and user by using 
the most widely used title in English. Redirects are supposed to catch 
non-common forms and the most common form should be the article itself.

Also in many cases, several different scholars throughout history have come up 
with several different transliteration for any given term. Which one should 
we use? In addition Lir has expressed an interest in having article titles in 
their original non-Lain text which would be completely unreadable by the mass 
majority of the English world.   

A Wikipedia that uses the some pedantic, more scholarly "correct" system of 
naming articles gives me the creeps. This is one of the reasons why I have 
moved so many organism articles from the Latin to common English forms. Under 
the Latin people have tended to write to a more technical audience but now 
under the common English forms people tend to write in more inclusive 
language. There have also been more edits (many people were probably put-off 
by the foreign titles).

I for one wouldn't want to be a part of a Pedanticpedia but anyone wanting to 
do so is more than welcome to start your own encyclopedia someplace else. And 
don't be surprised if it is a very lonely place.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

pedantic
     adj : marked by a narrow focus on or display of learning
           especially its trivial aspects