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.
1. 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