If the English name is the most common name in Romanian, use that one
and vice versa. It's all about the least possible surprise for the
readers. They want to find an article where they except it to be. We
don't have the article about Germany under "Deutschland" on enwiki,
even less under "Bundesrepublik Deutschland", or "United Kingdom"
under "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" (rowiki:
"Regatul Unit"). Just use the common names and write the official ones
in the info box, just like with all the countries and cities with
local (Romanian) names.
I'm Swedish and would be extremely surprised and confused if the
enwiki article about Sweden would be under the official name
"Konungariket Sverige" (The Swedish Kingdom), and would in that case
very much suggest a move of the article.
/Andreas
On 3/11/06, Wikipedia Romania (Ronline) <rowikipedia(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 3/11/06, Cormac Lawler <cormaggio(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On 3/11/06, Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)gmail.com> wrote:
For purely practical considerations, I would
suggest using the English
name for a Romanian audience. Chances are, if they have happened to
hear of these places before, they would be more familiar with the
English name, and, in addition to that, English pronunciation is more
intuitive when reading Romanian than that of most Celtic languages --
imagine how horribly most Romanians would mangle Caerdydd, An Uaimh,
or Corcaigh.
Mark
To be honest, I agree - that's what I was thinking too.
Cormac
But the weird thing is that the Irish name will have to be listed first in
the infobox, since it's the first official verison. In that case, won't it
be a bit odd to use the English variant for the title, which is really the
"secondary" variant?
So far, most admins on the Romanian Wikipedia seem to favour English names.
I do see their point of view. I've had many personal experiences where I've
told Romanians about visiting "Caerdydd" and they correct me
"Cardiff", as
if I didn't know how to pronounce English! My point was that such ignorance
is really unfortunate, and should be reversed in such way. I'm not saying
that Wikipedia should become a hotbed of Gaelic revivalist rhetoric, but we
can at least try and teach people that there's more to these regions than
just English!
Another thing - could someone please do some recordings of Irish names.
Celtic languages are really hard to pronounce, but they are really beautiful
and unique languages. It would really help a lot if people could just go to
Wikipedia to find out how to pronounce key Irish (Welsh, Scottish) toponyms.
Hopefully we'll come back in 20 years and see a great deal more use of these
languages.
Go raibh maith agaibh!
Ronline
PS: Another can of worms is created by Basque toponyms. For example, should
one use San Sebastian, Donostia, or San Sebastian-Donostia for that
respective Basque city? How about Catalan toponyms? I think most Wikipedias
have just taken the easy way out and chosen Spanish names, but to me at
least, that sounds awfully superficial and ignorant.
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l