Mav wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
>I don't think that this is analogous.
>"mammal" is an English common noun (as is "angstrom"),
>while "Munich" is an Anglicisation of a German proper name
>(as "München" is the German proper name in question).
>I would treat these different situations differently.
>But it's not like there's no analogy whatsoever,
But Munich /is/ also a common English noun since usage,
not a centralized
committee, decides just what is and is not an English noun.
You misunderstand me, I said "English common noun", not "common English
noun".
Here I'm using "common noun" in its technical grammatical sense.
(If that's not enough to jog your memory, then see [[Noun]]).
The origin or a
word is just that, the origin. Anglicization just happens to be a common way
new words enter the English language. The reason why words are Anglicized is
due to the fact that over time foreign words mutate to be easier for English
speakers to pronounce and spell and also to make them look similar to other
English words. This is part of the evolution of the English language. Now
instead of inserting our POV that this is wrong, how about we report widest
usage by using what most English speakers use?
NPOV, of course, has nothing to do with this (despite what Lir says).
As you know, NPOV doesn't mean the majority point of view.
It means presenting every point of view in a manner fair to it.
A truly NPOV title would be [[The city known to its residents as
"München" but commonly called "Munich" in English,
and which some people argue that we should talk about
in an article entitled "München" becuase <blah blah blah>
but which others argue that we should talk about
in an article entitled "Munich" because <yada yada yada>]].
But we can't do this, so we pick one or the other.
Either is an equally POV choice (since the majority POV
is as much a POV as going to the original name is),
which is why we use naming *conventions* instead.
Under the proposed plan we
would have to delve into linguistic usage wars. How is this useful at all?
Under the current plan we also have to delve into linguistic usage
(not *wars* that I can see, but I don't anticipate those in any case),
to decide which usage is most common. That's an issue of linguistic usage.
BTW, mammal comes from the Latin mammalis (which in
turn probably comes from
other languages). Back in the Middle Ages this was mutated via an early form
of Anglicization to mammal. Therefore it is only logical to use mammalis
under the proposed plan.
I don't know about Lir, but I don't propose such a thing,
because "mammal" is a common noun, not a proper noun.
I certainly don't want to change all of our article titles
back to Proto-Indo-European ^_^!
Or is there some cut-off date past which
Anglicization of a term is bad and should not be accepted? You still haven't
addressed my point that the proposed plan is needlessly complicated since it
absolutely requires redirects.
That's because I hadn't read that point when I wrote this post.
But I've addressed it now in another post.
Perhaps 'technical writing' part of the
organism analogy wasn't the greatest
but is was my understanding that this convention would also effect those
pages (and probably would since many people may not get your distinction).
["those pages" meaning pages like [[Mammal]]/[[Mammalia]]]
As you now see, I wouldn't want to change those,
and we can include a link to [[Proper noun]] in the convention write up
if you think that any confusion is likely.
Wait a minute, this does touch on an important point:
What if an animal has
an English name but exists in a non-English country? Should we use the
Swahili for Thompson's Gazelle?
"Thomson's gazelle" (note the lowercase Ge) is a common noun.
So, no. I'd even go so far as to Anglicise "Thomson"
if it was exclusively Anglicised in the name of the gazelle.
We're getting at the gazelle here, not at Thomson himself.
There is also
article rankings by Google to take into consideration: Articles that have the
searched-for name in the title are ranked higher. Why should we purposely
reduce article rankings and therefore reduce the reach of our content?
This is definitely the best point that I've seen so far.
You can tell, because I don't have any response to it ^_^!
I'll have to think about that.
>>pedantic
>> adj : marked by a narrow focus on or display of learning
>> especially its trivial aspects
>I don't see how this applies.
>It's not like everybody agrees that "München" is correct,
>but some people want to be lax and use the more common "Munich"
>while others are pedantic and insist on "München".
>The disagreement is more basic; you're claiming that
>"München" is *not* correct but "Munich" is.
>So both sides are striving for correctness.
No, I am claiming that in /English/ we use Munich and
this the /most/ correct.
That's what I said, you're claiming that "Munich" is correct.
My comments are all in the context of the English Wikipedia, of course.
Or is the problem that I left out "most"? fine, stick that in.
We're arguing about what is, in fact, most correct;
we're not arguing about what degree of correctness to insist on.
So it's not about pedantry; it's more fundamental than that.
I see you didn't bother to answer several of my
points that relate to what is
most useful for readers and users.
I've now responded to everything that you listed in this paragraph.
Please rememeber that, like you, I read this list in digest mode,
so my reply to any given post naturally won't address points
that were made in later posts, even if the reply itself
is written after those later posts.
-- Toby