[WikiEN-l] "Proper" foreign names

[Daniel Mayer]

Stevertigo said in part:
>Once again - referring to how confused people are.  
>Well, Lir was right. The only people who disagree with 
>that were people stuck in convention. 

Oh was he? Cristóbal Colón is SPANISH but Columbus was born in 
Italian-speaking Genoa under the name Cristoforo Colombo. This underscores my 
point; Different languages have different words for the same thing. And 
pardon me if I'm stuck in the conventions of the English language. 

>But you do have some strong points to address - however, 
>Im calling for a change of convention - Im not making claim 
>that its *not conventional to simply follow convention. I'm 
>calling to question the *merits of that convention - and 
>whether its a convention from another era - say, 1672.  
>(Before telephones, I might add.)

This convention is from this era. Here and now and used throughout the 
English-speaking world -- especially by native speakers. You are trying to 
subvert that by inputing your minority POV that names should be exactly like 
they are in the places from where the names originate. Sorry but that isn't 
going to happen since /most languages/ are written in non-Latin scripts that 
are completely unrecognizable by the great majority of English speakers. 

The merits of the convention we use is that it follows already established 
conventions used throughout the English-speaking world. Different languages 
have different rules on pronunciation and rules of stress so when you present 
an English-speaking person not familiar with the language a given foreign 
word is in (even if it is in Latin-based script) what you are going to get 
from the mouth of that person is utter garbage that will vary from person to 
person. /That/ is exactly why many foreign words are Anglicized.  

>Well your toughest argument by far is based on a limitation 
>of the En wikipedia to en "native English speakers" - again.  

I did not limit en.wiki to native speakers. I merely said that whatever 
conventions we do use should have an emphasis on the needs of native 
speakers. This is only fair (see below). 

>As a said before -- being the lingua franca has advantages 
>and disadvantages.  Among the disadvantages is that English 
>is no longer owned bu the English ("England for the English")

Think of who gets harmed most; A German speaker who knows English as a second 
language and who already has access to a German encyclopedia that follows 
proper German rules and conventions.  Or an English speaker with an English 
language encyclopedia that follows a weird convention that replaces the place 
and person names they know with foreign words. Now the German speaker gets to 
have an encyclopedia in his native tongue that follows the rules of his 
language but the English speaker does not get to have such an encyclopedia. 
How is that fair?

>I disagree, again, that the only reason for redirects 
>is a "hack". As for "reflecting a bias" -- Im not sure this 
>is NPOV.  IS the area of language forever to be an issue 
>where the prime directive of  NPOV is undermined? 

What? How is it at all neutral to replace terms known by the majority of 
English speakers with terms that are only known by a few? I would venture to 
guess that there is no English speaker alive who knows all 3,000 or so 
languages in the world. Sure, they would be perfectly at home with your 
"convention" but the rest of us won't.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)