[Wikipedia-l] What variant to use for Irish, Scottish and Welsh localities?

Sat Mar 11 15:43:58 UTC 2006

In message 
<648f108b0603100121k2d9e159fw19f370215b94b095 at mail.gmail.com>, 
"Wikipedia Romania (Ronline)" 
<rowikipedia-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> writes
>Hi,
>
>I'm planning to work on a number of articles related to Irish, Scottish and
>Welsh localities on the Romanian Wikipedia. I am currently in a dilemma as
>to what name to use - the Celtic variant or the English variant. I have
>realised that most non-English Wikipedias use the English variant - so that
>place names such as "Cork", "Dublin", "Edinburg" and "Cardiff" are used. For
>the exception of Dublin, perhaps, many of these place names, particularly
>smaller towns, do not have native variants in languages such as Romanian,
>German, French, etc.
>
>So, why should the English name be used in this situation? Wouldn't the
>Celtic name be more appropriate? Celtic languages are co-official in
>Scotland and Wales, while in Ireland, Irish is the first official and
>national language. Due to this, I would prefer to use placenames such as
>"Corcaigh", "*An Uaimh*" (for Navan), "*Chill Dara" *(for Kildare), etc.
>However, this sounds quite odd and are not frequently used, even though they
>are the first official name. What do others think? I am inclined to use them
>so that people are actually educated that there exists an Irish language as
>the first official language of Ireland. Too often, people in Romania say
>"the Irish speak (just) English" and stop it at that. They're surprised, for
>example, when I tell them about Irish names such as "Baile Atha Cliath" for
>Dublin, etc.

Writing from the point of view of the Welsh Wikipedia, I'd suggest using 
the English name for simplicity, with the Welsh equivalent listed in the 
introduction, so that your readers both know that there is a Welsh name 
and what it is. Have a redirect from the Welsh name to the English one, 
as I presume most Romanians are more likely to know the English name. If 
you're doing a thorough list of Welsh place names the problem is fairly 
limited, because most villages will only have a Welsh name, it's just 
the cities and towns which may have two. There are a few places where 
the Welsh name has now supplanted the traditional English name, even in 
English usage - "Caernarfon" rather than "Carnarvon", and "Conwy" rather 
than "Conway".

We had a similar problem in the Welsh Wikipedia - most countries in 
Europe and the Commonwealth, and a few other countries, have a 
traditional Welsh name, but we got into a dispute over how to name or 
spell more obscure places - apply a Welsh transliteration to the English 
name or not? Wsbecistan or Uzbekistan (using two letters which aren't 
even in the Welsh alphabet!!). Eventually we settled on using the 
country names used in the only Welsh-language atlas ever published - 
which generally uses English country names! I'm not totally happy with 
that decision, and some of our articles are consequently in a horrible 
mess - China is at "Tsieina" with a redirect from "Tseina" which is 
another popular spelling, but "Peoples Republic of China" is at 
"Gweriniaeth Pobl China".  Traditional city names are used where 
available - Paris, Llundain/London, Brwsel/Brussels, Rhufain/Rome, but 
we had to get creative with Moscow and finally settled on "Moscfa", as 
the local name transliterated. Russian names are "interesting" - Pyotr 
Ilyich Tchaikovsky - should that be Tsaicofsgi? Should we change Pyotr 
to Pedr? Should we change Ilyich to ap Ilia? Actually we decided to keep 
the usual English spelling, recognising that few music lovers are likely 
to bother trying anything else, though we did include a redirect for 
Pedr I.T.!
We're very aware that as we're putting a fair volume of text online in a 
language which doesn't have a very large web corpus that any wrong 
decisions we take may stick, and affect the direction the language 
develops in the future, so we tend to be a bit hesitant about taking 
these decisions...

-- 
Arwel Parry
http://www.cartref.demon.co.uk/