Talk:Caeso (praenomen)

Be bold/revert

P Aculeius moved page Kaeso (praenomen) to Caeso (praenomen) over redirect: No justification for arbitrary respelling. Form with "C" is no less familiar and was more common in Classical Latin; "K." abbreviation persisted for the same reason as...)

Spellings with KA were more common in Latin than modern schematizing might lead you to believe, and I'm not talking just about KAESO but also VOLKANVS, KALENDAE and other items. I'm a little surprised to find myself swiftly reverted over this, since in fact both variants are fine. What I was trying to do was come up with a more rational distribution of the material we had; I'm sure P Aculeius will agree with me that having our two pages at Kaeso (praenomen) and Kaeso (disambiguation), respectively, makes more sense than Caeso (praenomen) and Kaeso.

What I am prepared to go to the wall over, however, is reversion to the faux anglicization /ˈkaɪsoʊ/. This kind of studied hypercorrection does no good to English students of the classics, because it's simultaneously not classical Latin (which has no /oʊ/ diphthong) and not conventional anglicization.

We can talk about whether to include the list of historical individuals. Here's my thing: If students comes across the name Kaeso/Caeso and want to know what the deal is, it's probably going to have been a reference to K. Fabius or K. Quinctius; I really don't think it does any harm to mention them here. Obviously we cannot do the same for every historically noteworthy Gaius, Marcus or Lucius, but it makes some sense for the less common praenomina, particularly when historians refer to particular historical figures by that praenomen alone.

Finally, P Aculeius is wrong to revert my correction of the section heading "Origin and Meaning of the Name" to "Origin and meaning of the name"; the latter corresponds to the conventions used all over Wikipedia. Q·L·1968 ☿ 05:16, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

The use of K was vanishing throughout the classical period, except as an abbreviation, in which it enjoyed almost exclusive reign, just as "C" and "CN" never gave way to "G" or "GN". Many modern historical writers and English translators of Latin histories have shown a clear preference for Caeso. The translations of Livy that I relied on when compiling early lists always used this form. Roman names are my area of expertise, which is how I came to work on this article in the first place. In fact, I wrote nearly all of the articles in this series from scratch, including a complete rewrite of the frame page on praenomina over the course of several days. They were written with the intention of presenting a unified whole, and if I'd known there was a "Kaeso (disambiguation)" in place of "Caeso (disambiguation)" (the necessity of which I wasn't aware of), I would have redirected it a long time ago.

There's no need to go "over the wall" about so-called "faux anglicizations." I did my best to render the name as pronounced for an English-reading audience in the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is confusing enough for anyone, and which I'd rather have avoided had I realized at the time that alternate methods were permissible. This was never an attempt to pawn off false pronunciations on anyone, and I'd appreciate a little more faith in my intentions. Seeing how many other editors have their own ideas how to pronounce Latin names, I've concluded that in most cases it's better not even to attempt to suggest pronunciations... in this case I felt it essential to make clear that the C was a hard C and not soft or medial. The rest of the spelling was based on IPA for English, not IPA for Latin, since the article's readers would be English speakers, not Latin speakers. If you think it should be something else, then go ahead and improve it.

The only articles in this series that mention specific individuals are those requiring examples because there aren't any well-known historical examples. Several articles mention gentes that were known to use particular praenomina, but only the rarest of the rare mention individuals, and that's usually because inscriptions or obscure passages provide the only examples; for example Sertor Resius or Septimus Modius; individuals entirely unknown to history, who are unlikely to appear in any other articles, as examples for names unlikely to be found in more than two or three examples. The original article linked directly to several gentes that used the name Caeso, where readers could have found dozens of examples more clearly differentiated than the proposed additional paragraph here would have done. As the whole article is five short paragraphs long, they're hardly difficult to find.

I'm perfectly happy to revert the subheading. Since I found the entire article substantially revised without discussion, I simply reverted to an earlier form. I can't object to perfectly reasonable changes, but in future I'd appreciate more deliberation before wholesale revisions are undertaken to an article that was carefully planned as part of an organized whole. P Aculeius (talk) 06:15, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

Well, good work on this series, then. I've read nearly all of it, and found it highly informative.

I hadn't looked into the page histories. My experience has been that WP:BOLD works well in the field of ancient history, because if you wait to find somebody else to run your ideas by, you might be waiting a long time. Is there a central talk page for the series on praenomina, by the way?

Without disputing your expertise or diminishing the time you have devoted to these articles, I would like to draw your attention to the WP:OWN policy. No individual owns Wikipedia articles, so what is or is not included must be worked out collaboratively (as exasperating as that can be).

I certainly did not intend to accuse you of deliberate falsification of pronunciation, or anything like that; however, Latin pronunciation and English pronunciation are not the same. As I'm sure you can appreciate, simply taking an English pronunciation and substituting /k/ for /s/ doesn't make for either an accurate rendering of either; both as an English speaker and as a sometime Latin learner, I cringe at pronunciations like [ˈkɪkəɹoʊ] for Cicero.

I know IPA extremely well, and am more than a little knowledgeable on historical phonology. If you would ever like assistance on IPA, please shoot me a line.

I've prepared a template, {{Praenomina}}, which should make it easier to navigate around this series of articles. I hope you find it agreeable and useful; obviously, the layout, format, and so on are open to modification. Q·L·1968 ☿ 06:41, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

Kaeso (disambiguation) doesn't appear to fit, as Kaeso isn't a disambiguation page (and also resulted in a WP:MALPLACED disambiguation page). I've tagged it with {{given name}} to indicate it includes a list of people with the same given name. -- JHunterJ (talk) 14:18, 14 January 2013 (UTC)