Lars Aronsson <lars(a)aronsson.se> writes:
Yes, of course. But transliteration follows simple
rules on a phoneme
basis. (BTW, he is called Usama bin Ladin in Swedish. :-)
Only problem being that different languages have different
letter-phoneme mappings (Swedish "Ladin" vs. English "Laden"), and
that the "correct" pronounciation may be somewhere between two letters
("Ossama" vs. "Ussama"). Complicating matters is that living
languages
all have dialects -- which pronounciation of this man's name is
"correct", the North-Saudi-Arabian, the Persian, the Pashtun(sp?)?
[...]
No, on the contrary I think it is fine that he is Hans
Christian in
English, and I would like to document this opinion so that nobody else
makes this redirect by a thoughtless mistake.
There is a current trend in the English speaking world to be overly
politically correct in the spelling of foreign names. Not only
Beijing and Kampuchea, but also Göteborg, Hannover, Köln, and Wien
start to appear in English texts. This is a pity, because Gothenburg,
Hanover, Cologne, and Vienna are well-established words of the English
language since centuries.
True. I'd draw the line between cities and persons; i.e. use anglicised
versions for places, "most native" versions for people. But that's
just me of course.
The good thing is that in Wikipedia we can somewhat reconcile both
opinions by having one redirect to the other (as long as there's no
conflict with another entry). So Vienna and Hanover should be
articles, and Wien and Hannover could be redirects. IMO H. C. Andersen
should be the article and Hans Christian Andersen a redirect to it,
but the other way around is fine too.
To prevent people from reversing your decision in the future is
impossible. But you may perhaps convince future editors with a
succinct log message.
--
Robbe