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.
- 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
Daniel Mayer wrote in part:
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.
I don't think that this is analogous. "mammal" is an English common noun (as is "angstrom"), while "Munich" is an Anglicisation of a German proper name (as "München" is the German proper name in question). I would treat these different situations differently. But it's not like there's no analogy whatsoever, so let's look at your observations:
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.
That's interesting. So do you think that people would write for a German-speaking audience if we titled an article [[München]]? That doesn't seem likely to me -- the predominant English text would keep people using that language.
There have also been more edits (many people were probably put-off by the foreign titles).
This datum would carry over better to the present discussion. If [[Munich]] attracts more editors than [[München]], then that's important. Were there jumps in editing frequency when you moved each article, or is the increase matched by a general increase in editing all of Wikipedia?
pedantic adj : marked by a narrow focus on or display of learning especially its trivial aspects
I don't see how this applies. It's not like everybody agrees that "München" is correct, but some people want to be lax and use the more common "Munich" while others are pedantic and insist on "München". The disagreement is more basic; you're claiming that "München" is *not* correct but "Munich" is. So both sides are striving for correctness.
-- Toby
On Wednesday 20 November 2002 07:29 pm, you wrote:
Daniel Mayer wrote in part:
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.
I don't think that this is analogous. "mammal" is an English common noun (as is "angstrom"), while "Munich" is an Anglicisation of a German proper name (as "München" is the German proper name in question). I would treat these different situations differently. But it's not like there's no analogy whatsoever,
But Munich /is/ also a common English noun since usage, not a centralized committee, decides just what is and is not an English noun. The origin or a word is just that, the origin. Anglicization just happens to be a common way new words enter the English language. The reason why words are Anglicized is due to the fact that over time foreign words mutate to be easier for English speakers to pronounce and spell and also to make them look similar to other English words. This is part of the evolution of the English language. Now instead of inserting our POV that this is wrong, how about we report widest usage by using what most English speakers use? Under the proposed plan we would have to delve into linguistic usage wars. How is this useful at all?
BTW, mammal comes from the Latin mammalis (which in turn probably comes from other languages). Back in the Middle Ages this was mutated via an early form of Anglicization to mammal. Therefore it is only logical to use mammalis under the proposed plan. Or is there some cut-off date past which Anglicization of a term is bad and should not be accepted? You still haven't addressed my point that the proposed plan in needlessly complicated since it absolutely requires redirects.
so let's look at your observations:
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.
That's interesting. So do you think that people would write for a German-speaking audience if we titled an article [[München]]? That doesn't seem likely to me -- the predominant English text would keep people using that language.
Perhaps 'technical writing' part of the organism analogy wasn't the greatest but is was my understanding that this convention would also effect those pages (and probably would since many people may not get your distinction). Wait a minute, this does touch on an important point: What if an animal has an English name but exists in a non-English country? Should we use the Swahili for Thompson's Gazelle? And if so, which transliteration? How is this useful to the reader and the person trying to link to the article? Oh that's right, the person would also need to make a redirect for the poor lame minded people expecting to find the article at the English title. There is also article rankings by Google to take into consideration: Articles that have the searched-for name in the title are ranked higher. Why should we purposely reduce article rankings and therefore reduce the reach of our content? Why is it necessary to make things more difficult than they already are?
There have also been more edits (many people were probably put-off by the foreign titles).
This datum would carry over better to the present discussion. If [[Munich]] attracts more editors than [[München]], then that's important. Were there jumps in editing frequency when you moved each article, or is the increase matched by a general increase in editing all of Wikipedia?
See Google argument above. Yes if the article is at [[Munich]] it will get more hits than if it is at the German.
pedantic adj : marked by a narrow focus on or display of learning especially its trivial aspects
I don't see how this applies. It's not like everybody agrees that "München" is correct, but some people want to be lax and use the more common "Munich" while others are pedantic and insist on "München". The disagreement is more basic; you're claiming that "München" is *not* correct but "Munich" is. So both sides are striving for correctness.
-- Toby
No, I am claiming that in /English/ we use Munich and this the /most/ correct. Therefore this is what we should use. Choosing to use München shows a POV bias for using German in an English encyclopedia. Whereas going with the most common usage is what is most useful to English speakers and inherently NPOV.
I see you didn't bother to answer several of my points that relate to what is most useful for readers and users. There is also the fact that the proposed change absolutely requires the use of a technological fix to work (namely redirects). Google's language tools can be used as an objective measure of widest usage whereas the proposed plan depends on subjective choices between different transliterations and language sets. So again, please explain how the proposed plan is better the current one? How is it less complicated when redirects are absolutely required? How is it more NPOV when it shuns widest English usage for a minority naming scheme? What about the audience: How is it more useful for them to use words they can't pronounce, spell or are familiar with? What about the writers: How is it more useful for them to have articles that they can't link to directly (or at all when redirects are not made)? Which transliterations should we use? How about native non-English fonts? How would the proposed system not cause a chilling effect by favoring titles that most English speakers don't know? Remember: "Otherwise somebody will come by later and move the article and probably chide the original author for their Anglo-centric based ignorance." Double burr
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Mav wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
I don't think that this is analogous. "mammal" is an English common noun (as is "angstrom"), while "Munich" is an Anglicisation of a German proper name (as "München" is the German proper name in question). I would treat these different situations differently. But it's not like there's no analogy whatsoever,
But Munich /is/ also a common English noun since usage, not a centralized committee, decides just what is and is not an English noun.
You misunderstand me, I said "English common noun", not "common English noun". Here I'm using "common noun" in its technical grammatical sense. (If that's not enough to jog your memory, then see [[Noun]]).
The origin or a word is just that, the origin. Anglicization just happens to be a common way new words enter the English language. The reason why words are Anglicized is due to the fact that over time foreign words mutate to be easier for English speakers to pronounce and spell and also to make them look similar to other English words. This is part of the evolution of the English language. Now instead of inserting our POV that this is wrong, how about we report widest usage by using what most English speakers use?
NPOV, of course, has nothing to do with this (despite what Lir says). As you know, NPOV doesn't mean the majority point of view. It means presenting every point of view in a manner fair to it. A truly NPOV title would be [[The city known to its residents as "München" but commonly called "Munich" in English, and which some people argue that we should talk about in an article entitled "München" becuase <blah blah blah> but which others argue that we should talk about in an article entitled "Munich" because <yada yada yada>]]. But we can't do this, so we pick one or the other. Either is an equally POV choice (since the majority POV is as much a POV as going to the original name is), which is why we use naming *conventions* instead.
Under the proposed plan we would have to delve into linguistic usage wars. How is this useful at all?
Under the current plan we also have to delve into linguistic usage (not *wars* that I can see, but I don't anticipate those in any case), to decide which usage is most common. That's an issue of linguistic usage.
BTW, mammal comes from the Latin mammalis (which in turn probably comes from other languages). Back in the Middle Ages this was mutated via an early form of Anglicization to mammal. Therefore it is only logical to use mammalis under the proposed plan.
I don't know about Lir, but I don't propose such a thing, because "mammal" is a common noun, not a proper noun. I certainly don't want to change all of our article titles back to Proto-Indo-European ^_^!
Or is there some cut-off date past which Anglicization of a term is bad and should not be accepted? You still haven't addressed my point that the proposed plan is needlessly complicated since it absolutely requires redirects.
That's because I hadn't read that point when I wrote this post. But I've addressed it now in another post.
Perhaps 'technical writing' part of the organism analogy wasn't the greatest but is was my understanding that this convention would also effect those pages (and probably would since many people may not get your distinction).
["those pages" meaning pages like [[Mammal]]/[[Mammalia]]] As you now see, I wouldn't want to change those, and we can include a link to [[Proper noun]] in the convention write up if you think that any confusion is likely.
Wait a minute, this does touch on an important point: What if an animal has an English name but exists in a non-English country? Should we use the Swahili for Thompson's Gazelle?
"Thomson's gazelle" (note the lowercase Ge) is a common noun. So, no. I'd even go so far as to Anglicise "Thomson" if it was exclusively Anglicised in the name of the gazelle. We're getting at the gazelle here, not at Thomson himself.
There is also article rankings by Google to take into consideration: Articles that have the searched-for name in the title are ranked higher. Why should we purposely reduce article rankings and therefore reduce the reach of our content?
This is definitely the best point that I've seen so far. You can tell, because I don't have any response to it ^_^! I'll have to think about that.
pedantic adj : marked by a narrow focus on or display of learning especially its trivial aspects
I don't see how this applies. It's not like everybody agrees that "München" is correct, but some people want to be lax and use the more common "Munich" while others are pedantic and insist on "München". The disagreement is more basic; you're claiming that "München" is *not* correct but "Munich" is. So both sides are striving for correctness.
No, I am claiming that in /English/ we use Munich and this the /most/ correct.
That's what I said, you're claiming that "Munich" is correct. My comments are all in the context of the English Wikipedia, of course. Or is the problem that I left out "most"? fine, stick that in. We're arguing about what is, in fact, most correct; we're not arguing about what degree of correctness to insist on. So it's not about pedantry; it's more fundamental than that.
I see you didn't bother to answer several of my points that relate to what is most useful for readers and users.
I've now responded to everything that you listed in this paragraph. Please rememeber that, like you, I read this list in digest mode, so my reply to any given post naturally won't address points that were made in later posts, even if the reply itself is written after those later posts.
-- Toby