[Wikipedia-l] Biography as a discipline

Mon Nov 26 12:29:19 UTC 2001

Lars Aronsson <lars at 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
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.ng
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 232 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/attachments/20011126/8400387a/attachment.pgp 