On 7/29/06, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
On 29/07/06, John Lyden rasputinaxp@gmail.com wrote:
I'm still roughly confused as to why some people are pilloried for applying [[Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)]] to hockey players.
Although many letters with diacritics *look* like English letters, they are not the same. "Antonín Dvořák" can't simply be changed into "Antonin Dvorak" because this would be changing the letters of the word, so changing the spelling of the word. In this name, changing "ř" would be particularly problematic as the letter is quite distinct from "r" in several ways (most importantly, pronounciation).
I fully understand that. The most common way you see Dvořák's name printed in English is "Dvořák," fully and diacritically correct.
That said, if the full policy is that the most commonly recognized English name for the person or thing addressed in the article is where the article should reside, then [[Jaromir Jagr]] is right where it belongs.
There are people who are quite unhappy about it right now, and I really don't understand why, not because I don't understand the concept of diacritics, pronunciation differences et al, but because as a common courtesy, we as English speakers don't go barging over to cs-wiki demanding that they change http://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolfov%C3%A1 to [[Virginia Woolfe]] because they have the capability to display E's.
We're not saying "change Dvořák," we're saying "respect policy."
-Ras