Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Arabic)

revert

There are a number of points of contention, and I get the feeling that you're suggesting conventions which are unacceptable. For example:

The ` sign should however be avoided in article titles.

This is nonsense, I don't even know where this came from, but all the guidelines say to use standard versions of transliteration, not make-up-your-own.

I wrote it, it is no nonsense, page names are better not by *transliteration*, but by transcription/translation. --Francis Schonken 06:36, 28 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Compare also Okina, including this page move: [1] (edit summary: "moved ʻOkina to Okina: It is never a good idea to use special symbols in a title in English Wikipedia" - my bolding). Further the Okina page discusses several symbols that can be used to represent the Okina character, including:

apostrophe character (')
ASCII U+0060 grave accent (`)
Unicode U+02BB MODIFIER LETTER TURNED COMMA ( ʻ )
superscript half ring with the opening to the right ( ʿ )
a superscript c ( ^c )
Unicode punctuation character U+2018 LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK (‘) = HTML entity ‘.

NONE OF WHICH are used in Wikipedia page names for Hawaiʻian names (except for redirect pages). --Francis Schonken 11:04, 16 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

secondary transliteration

This should be standard transliteration, you made this word up.

No I didn't. But if it's no longer in the MoS, then it has to be changed. --Francis Schonken 06:36, 28 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The issues of transliteration vs translation need to be better defined. There are articles on people and places which are Arabic and do not have translations. Rather than say every article should use a translation if possible, it should say something like: "If the article is about a concept" or something.

I'll quote you: "nonsense". Further there's still something else beside "transliteration" and "translation": it's called transcripting. About time this would be properly handled. --Francis Schonken 06:36, 28 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Avoid points, lines, or other signs under letters

The correct terminology is "Avoid diacritics, underdots, and underscores in the page names", and besides this, all this is already covered by saying that the strict transliteration should not be used in article titles.

No, that's not the correct terminology. Diacritics can as well be above letters. See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (standard letters with diacritics). --Francis Schonken 06:36, 28 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

And in general, you need a lot of examples. All this could easily just be redirected to the Arabic MOS as it was before. Cuñado - Talk 06:11, 28 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, examples are needed, and you are free to provide them. I'm indifferent whether this is again encorporated in Wikipedia:Manual of Style (Arabic). But please see [2] - if this goes back to the MoS, then the MoS should be "proposal" again: this is not near to a workable solution for a Naming Convention. --Francis Schonken 06:36, 28 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I can't help but say something about this. There was a long discussion about whether to use Arabic or Turkish standards of transliteration. The sultan was Turkish, but used the Arabic script. I would rather use Arabic, and others insisted on using Turkish. If they actually make additions to the MOS I would support using Turkish for Ottoman Turkish names, but nobody has done that so far. Abdülaziz is the Turkish form of the Arabic word (عبد العزي), which in Arabic has two standard ways of writing it: ‘Abd al-‘Azīz or ‘Abdu’l-‘Azīz. I strongly prefer the phonetically correct version, and if I put aside a few hours I can arrange a vote to standardize the MOS so that there is only one form. I made the MOS in such a way that the "`" could also be used because it's on the keyboard. It was an attempt to get more popular support for standardizing, but nobody seems to care but me, so I will also try to get rid of that difference.

Since you ignored the points I brought up, I reverted again. Cuñado

- Talk 00:50, 29 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Re. "Since you ignored the points I brought up, I reverted again": Pardon? I replied all, you only reply to a single point, and a very indirect one (the Ottoman Arabic). --Francis Schonken 06:20, 29 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti

Sorry, if this is not the appropriate place for my inquiry. I couldn't find a better one. The Arabic version of his name is getting modified time and time again. Since at least one modification came from a vandal, I suspect, that these might have been insults. Could someone with command of Arabic verify the spelling? Latest edit replaced "برزان إبراهيم التكريتي" by "طرزان إبراهيم التكريتي"

Thanks. --Johannes Rohr 13:10, 15 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I don't have command of Arabic, but from Googling, it seems that BBC, Al Jazeera, and the Arabic wikipedia all have برزان for this man's name, and طرزان appears to mean "Tarzan". I'll edit to برزان --Cam 16:44, 15 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

more reverts

The issue of whether or not to use translation/transliteration, including the use of the grave accent, are dealt with in the Arabic MOS. The grave accent is printable and supposed to be used. I already brought up the issue on WP:Naming Conventions, but either way the Arabic MOS overrides the suggestion to avoid it. When a standard form of Arabic transliteration is required, there are clear guidelines on how to write it. There are also already clear guidelines on when a word has become a translation, and therefore doesn't need a standard transliteration. Cuñado - Talk 20:14, 16 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The Arabic MoS is a Manual of Style page. Manual of Style pages are about what happens in the body of articles. The Arabic naming conventions (NC) page is a Naming conventions page: NC pages are about what happens in article names.

To give an example,

Wikipedia:Manual of Style (biographies) (a MoS page) says to write "David Drew Pinsky" and "Dr. Drew" in the opening sentence and "Pinsky" for all subsequent uses for a person's name in his article;
Wikipedia:Naming conventions (people) (a NC page), leads to the article name on that person being Drew Pinsky (not "David Drew Pinsky", nor "Dr. Drew", nor "Pinsky", but pages with such name can of course be redirect or disambiguation pages, depending on case).

MoS pages *can* have NC sections, but then they should be clearly marked as such, and usually they should better be split off in a NC guideline, in order to avoid confusion.

Since the Arabic MoS page has no NC content, the Arabic MoS page is of no relevance here, apart from the relevance we want to give it, anyway there's not "automatic", nor "imposed" relevance. If you'd like to see the NC content re-integrated in the Arabic MoS page, then that guideline steps back to proposal, until there's consensus on page naming issues regarding Arabic articles.

Please also look at the comment I added earlier today above in #revert, under the The ` sign should however be avoided in article titles subtitle.

--Francis Schonken 21:12, 16 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The naming conventions for Arabic have always been based on the MOS. This page was branched off of the MOS in order to have a naming convention page on its own, but the naming conventions were already in the MOS. It's stupid to have an article title that is different from the spelling used in the text, so why would you try to impose your own version of transliteration on the NC page? The MOS is based off of actual standards, and it was adjusted so that all the characters in article titles are printable, but still accurate. You have no argument here. Cuñado

- Talk 17:32, 17 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not trying to impose anything. I only say, that for the best I know, ` should be avoided in page names, except for redirects, and I'm quite confident that reflects the general feeling in the Wikipedia community. (as confirmed by the "Shia Islam" move request. Oops, I just see I can't even type Shi`a Islam on my keyboard (I can only copy-paste it), because when I try to type it, what appears is Shià Islam (because an ` followed immediately by a letter a is automatically transformed to à when typing on Azerty).

I'm not so interested in MoS pages (in the sense of working on them), but I worked on quite a lot of Naming conventions pages, so you can say that I know what I'm talking about there.

Nonetheless, I can't help noticing that the use of the word "transliteration" on the Arabic MoS page is somewhat careless (at least stretched beyond the actual meaning of the word "transliteration" in English), e.g. there's no way "Cairo" could be called a transliteration of "القاهرة", while the article isn't transliterated - the French name for that city (Le Caire), could *maybe* be called a transliteration, but even there not without a stretch I suppose - so the term "primary transliteration" used in the Arabic MoS is in fact not correct, and should maybe rather be called romanisation, or still better, simply translation.

I don't think you're the best person to explain "why" this page was branched off from the MoS. As far as I can recall, I was the one who did it. And not for the reasons you give. I did the split primarily because the Arabic MoS was not OK with general Wikipedia naming conventions ideas (as laid down in policies and guidelines, and not less as I recall them from numerous WP:RM votes and naming conventions related discussions).

Re. "actual standards": a bit vaguish isn't it? I don't think there's something really behind that. At least not Wikipedia's actual naming conventions standards. --Francis Schonken 21:25, 17 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Look up transliteration, romanization, and translation. Translation is converting the meaning, transliteration is converting the script, and romanization is a transliteration into the roman alphabet. Riyadh is a transliteration and a romanization, and "meadow" is the translation. Cuñado

- Talk 22:30, 17 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Apart that a translation should not intend to convert any meaning (I know, traduttore traditore, but it is not the intention to convert any *meaning* when translating), what you write only confirms that "Cairo" is not a transliteration of "القاهرة", like I said, but a translation: it is the name of a city (same meaning) in another language, without bothering about script: Queen Margot is the English translation of the title of Dumas' novel La Reine Margot, proposing "The Queen Margot" as English translation for that title (also translating the definite article) would simply be wrong in this case. This has nothing to do with transliteration. --Francis Schonken 23:37, 17 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The term for the kind of "translation" under discussion here (at least for place names) is exonym. --Cam 00:11, 18 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]