[WikiEN-l] Re: "Proper" Foreign Names

[Daniel Mayer]

Stevertigo wrote:
>I read all of Mavs points, and as usual he ignores any 
>strong argument against his position. 

And where were you hiding your "strong" arguments? I didn't see any. 

>It did clear up some particular points, but these 
>were mixed in so much triteness -- "your minority opinion", 
>"Think of who gets harmed most" -- its hard to gauge the
>merits of his reasoning -- if it comes from a grocery shelf 
>or not.

It is hard to measure the merits of /your/ reasoning. Why make it more 
difficult for English speakers to use what is supposed to be an English 
language encyclopedia? Sorry if I'm a bit "trite" when somebody trys to make 
the English Wikipedia less useful to its primary audience. 

>Once again he assumes the context of English as being 
>limited to a majority interest - rather than deal with the possibility 
>that conventions can change, if reasonable. 

If and *when* the majority rules of English grammar and usage change then we 
should follow that. In isolated cases words have changed from a previous 
Anglicization to something more that more closely resembles the way the 
foreign word looks and sounds.  Beijing has replaced Peking, for example BUT 
the Mandarin characters have not yet entered our language so we use a 
well-accepted transliteration instead. 

Our job is to follow majority naming conventions that are already 
well-established in the English speaking world as much as possible. Our job 
/is not/ to push some minority linguistic agenda that would render our 
article titles unrecognizable by a majority of our readers (especially the 
native speaking ones). 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)