Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (use English-language sources): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 09:58, 1 April 2021

Revision as of 11:00, 1 April 2021

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:::I see there are many opinions about the representation of names written in the cyrillic alphabet. And it looks that many talk of [[Transliteration]] and mean [[Transcription (linguistics)]]. Transliteration is an international way to converse names written in cyrillic into latin regardless of the pronouncation in a certain language (I think mainly based on the Czech alphabet). So '''Ч''' is written ''ch'' in Englisch and ''tsch'' in German, ''cs'' in Hungarian and ''Č'' in Czech (see town [[Chop, Ukraine]]. But if you use the transliteration it is ''Č'' in all languages that use the Latin alphabet. This remark is just to make clear what is talked about (or not).--[[User:Wanfried-Dublin|Wanfried-Dublin]] ([[User talk:Wanfried-Dublin|talk]]) 09:58, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

:::: If I understand what [[User:Wanfried-Dublin|Wanfried-Dublin]] wrote above, when talking about the composer whose native name was Пётр Ильич Чайковский, and limiting ourselves to his family name, ''Ćajkovskij'' (with a capital c-caron initial) would be a transliteration, ''Chaykovski'' would be a transcription, and ''Tchaikovsky'' would be — what? A translation, maybe. So let's rephrase what I said earlier: IMHO, when there is an accepted translation (e.g. ''Moscow'' and not ''Moskva'' for Москва, ''Khrushchev'' and not ''Khrusshoff'' for Хрущёв, etc.), we should use it; if there is no accepted translation, I believe that for Wikpedia a consistent transcription would be appropriate, while in some other documents (maybe a linguists' technical review) a transliteration using some agreed-in-advance lossless convention would be better. For Чайковский (the composer) there is an accepted transltion, ''viz.'' "Tchaikovsky", so let's use that; for Чайковский (the town in the Perm region) there is no accepted translation into English, so we fall back on transcription. I'm not sure exactly how Wikipedia transcribes Russian names from Cyrillic, but I suppose that "Chaykovski, Perm rayon" would not be too far of the mark. The fact that we write differently a person's name and the name of a town which was intentionally given (in Russian) the name of that particular person, is just a quirk of the English language. The Japanese customs about how to pronounce Chinese proper names (and common nouns) based on their hanzi orthography is even more quirky. — [[User:Tonymec|Tonymec]] ([[User talk:Tonymec|talk]]) 11:00, 1 April 2021 (UTC)