Talk:Swienca family

Notability

I removed the notability tag, because the Swenzones meet the following criteria of WP:Notability:

• "Basic criteria: A person is presumed to be notable if he or she has been the subject of published[3] secondary source material which is reliable, intellectually independent,[4] and independent of the subject.[5]"

-->this is met, e.g. Jan M Piskorski, Pommern im Wandel der Zeit, 1999, ISBN 839061848; Werner Buchholz, Pommern, Siedler, 1999, p.154, ISBN 3886802728; and of course the sources given in the article

• "Additional criteria:Any biography: The person has made a widely recognized contribution that is part of the enduring historical record in his or her specific field.[7]"

--> The towns they founded and administered are still there.

• "Additional criteria:Politicians:People who have held international, national or first-level sub-national political office, including members of a legislature and judges.[8]; Major local political figures who have received significant press coverage.[7] Generally speaking, mayors are likely to meet this criterion, as are members of the main citywide government or council of a major metropolitan city."

-->I guess a dynasty ruling for more than a century in place of a mostly absent margrave or as the palatine of the Pomerelian dukes qualifies for "first-level sub-national political office". Skäpperöd (talk) 16:20, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Prose

I don't think the ancestry would be more comprehensive if written in prose style. Most of the article however is, so I removed that tag, too. Skäpperöd (talk) 16:20, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

name

I can't find a single source for this german "swenzones" being used in English.VolunteerMarek 08:25, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

The only sources which use "Swenzones" are Wikipedia reprints. Hence the name "Swenzones" is a Wikipedia invention [1].VolunteerMarek 08:27, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

Again, the page was moved because "Swenzones" is a Wikipedia invention with no independent sources on gbooks in English.VolunteerMarek 09:59, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

• Swenzones is ok as a descriptonary title since there is a lack of an English equivalent to Swenzonen or Święcowie. You can't just move the article to some unhistorical Polish designation. We can't call this article "Swenzo, his brother and their immediate descendants, who are likely the ancestors of the Puttkamer family." If you have a better title, you can argue here. Skäpperöd (talk) 10:18, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

Swenzones is ok as a descriptonary title since there is a lack of an English equivalent to Swenzonen or Święcowie - in other words there doesn't exist a single English source which uses "Swenzones". So, no, it's not "ok". Article needs to be moved back to Święcowie, which IS the better title.

From the edit summary: Swenzones is not a German term, Święcowie is used only in Polish literature. It's not a German term??? It sure isn't English as, let me repeat this, there isn't a single English source which uses the term. So either it IS German or you simply pulled it out of thin air. Wikipedia is not in business of inventing new words.

There is nothing "ahistorical" about the name "Święcowie", or the name "Święca". Pretending that this wasn't their name simply because in documents they appear under latin designations is ridiculous.VolunteerMarek 10:34, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

How can medieval Pomeranians have Polish names in modern Polish spellings? Skäpperöd (talk) 10:56, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

I thought you were already schooled on this, and not even by me [2]. To paraphrase that very smart person, whoever that was:

"As explained above, from linguistic point of view it makes no sense to differenciate between Polish and Pomeranian that early, what we have there is western Slavic dialect continuum. Also, as explained above, "Swenzo" is not an original form of any kind, but a clumsy mediaeval latin rendering of a spoken word which must have sounded somehow along "S'wieca". So what above mentioned authors are doing is rendering early Slavic in modern Polish, not "Polonizing a foreign name". You could as well use Czech or Kashubian spelling, or some form of Slavic linguistic transcription for this purpose and it is still going to look more like "Swieca" than "Swenzone"."VolunteerMarek 11:04, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

I don't share the assumption that just because medieval Pomoranian and medieval Polish were both part of the broad West Slavic dialect continuum it means that you can take a modern Polish equivalent and claim that this is the "real" name which those who wrote the medieval documents would have used if the modern Polish alphabet had been used back then. Skäpperöd (talk) 13:03, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

And the link to the Puttkamer is dubious, essentially an example of 19th century people making up "noble" ancestry for themselves in the interest of social advancement. Hey, I'm related too the Hohenzollerns you know.VolunteerMarek 10:35, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

Not at all, we are talking about late-20th century sources. Skäpperöd (talk) 10:56, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

You mean the ones which debunk the Puttkamer-Swiecie connection? I seriously doubt that this "we're the Swenzones!" (or whatever) is a recent thing.VolunteerMarek 11:05, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

There was no "debunk"ing, rather an argument whether historical records are sufficient to draw the connection or not. Skäpperöd (talk) 13:03, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

The only reference to these guys I can quickly find in a decent English-language source uses neither of the two options currently move-warred between, but "Swienca family" (Halecki, History of Poland, [3]). Would that be an acceptable solution? Fut.Perf. ☼ 11:27, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

P.S. There are also a couple for "Swieca family" or "Swieca clan". I'd personally prefer such a compound to either attempt of using a single-word name, either just borrowing the Polish -owie morphology (which is quite opaque to English readers) or calquing the German -onen to --ones. Fut.Perf. ☼ 11:36, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

Since that's the first English language source that's been brought up, yes, I'm fine with "Swienca family".VolunteerMarek 11:34, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

PS - "en" is an alternative way of spelling "ę", particularly with regard to older names.

Looking around it seems like "Swieca family" is the most widely used designation [4]. So can we move it to "Swieca family"?VolunteerMarek 04:59, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

The book search link posted by VM above (search string=Swieca family) is flawed - the results are almost exclusively dealing with people named Swieca who have nothing to do with "our" Swenzo and his descendants.

The search string="Swieca family" and search string="Swieca clan" (+ quotation marks) return a combined 7 results, of which one (Lewin) is about a Swieca family unrelated to this article, and another one is a Revenue... journal entry which I atm can not evaluate.

Of the remaining five books, four were written by Polish authors and, though in an English version also, were published in Poland (Tymieniecki, Poznan 1929/30; Wankowicz, Warsaw 1974 repr.; Cierlińska, Warsaw 1982/3; Gieysztor [transl. Krystyna Cekalska], Warsaw 1968) - thus, these books have no relevancy for establishing English usage. None of them are written about the subject of this article either, but mention the family in passing w/o going into detail about them.

The only source actually written by an English speaker and published in the English-speaking world is Tighe, Carl: Gdańsk: national identity in the Polish-German borderlands, London 1990. While Tighe may be regarded an expert on modern Polish history, he is badly uninformed regarding the subject of this article. On p. 16, Tighe's "Swieca family" instigates an anti-Polish uprising which leads to Danish forces taking control of Danzig, who in turn are defeated on 13 Nov 1308 by the Teutonic Order who after taking over kills 16 members of the family. In fact, the Danes (better: their vassals from Rügen) had been repelled by the Order already in 1301/2, and it was the Brandenburgers who took Danzig and were defeated by a TO relief force on 13 Nov 1308. Furthermore, the 16 persons reportedly killed and buried at Oliva were not the members of said family - afaik the family did not even have that many members by then - but various Pomerelian knights. Thus, because Tighe unfortunately is completely unreliable in his only reference to the subject of this article, this reference should not be considered.

The best we got here is actually Halecki's reference introduced by FPaS. Though Halecki is a Polish author, he spent his late years (after 1940) in the US, where until 1942 Monica Gardner and Mary Corbridge-Patkaniowska had translated his "History of Poland", which was "a revised and enlarged edition of the author's La Pologne de 963 a 1914, published in 1933" [5]. This book has since been reprinted several times, so probably there are several English readers who wonder about who that "Swienca family" is Halecki mentions in passing. But I am not sure whether that qualifies as "English usage." Furthermore, though it is less ambiguous than "Swieca" (common surname) and though the "-n-" spelling is an improvcement, English readers will think of it as "Sweenka" which is not even close to either German or Polish pronounciation (which are more close to each other than the different spellings might suggest). Is that really any better than the current article title?

Skäpperöd (talk) 13:03, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

Personally, I'd say, yes it is. In the absence of any other models of English usage than these few ones? Saying that the sources were published in a Polish context is hardly a good argument as long as we haven't got any others that were published elsewhere. I'm also not convinced that the argument about Tighe being wrong about some of the facts disqualifies that source as evidence for the naming. We're not using it as a source for what these Sw.* guys did, but for what they are called today. Fut.Perf. ☼ 13:15, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

7>0.VolunteerMarek 18:24, 13 February 2012 (UTC)