This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 |
I've written the draft of a new proposal. I feel it's much clearer than the previous guideline. I also feel it takes some of the comments we've been hearing into account and tries to compromise and please as many people as possible. Please comment and modify as needed. Maybe Salleman could add his new ideas for the representation of alternative anglicizations. I'd like to see that.
If you're completely opposed to the proposal it's probably best that you don't modify it but write up your own counterproposal instead. - Haukur Þorgeirsson 21:25, 8 October 2005 (UTC)
It seems to me that some of the things talked about on this page are in danger of breaking the WP:NOR. Perhaps a constructive way forward is to list some of the options which have been used by various people who have translated and published a lot of texts for the general public to read (not specialist to specialist) and comment on how they have translated the names etc. It there is one person, or School of people, which has a substantial body of work that covers a wide area, and it is a close fit to the Wikipedia:Naming convention then perhaps that could be used as a standard.
Even if nothing else comes of such a survey it it would at least produce enough information to help make a more informed choice on how Wikipedia editors could progress the issue and probably produce enough information for a page on the history of translations. Philip Baird Shearer 17:28, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
Please can you explian what this means in English?
We do not use name in English from the 13th century without updating them so why should an English encyclopaedia be using an C13th Icelandic name? If people working on these articles have taken the spelling used in works like Ursula Dronke's translation of the Poetic Edda (the best English translation there is, no competition) and Richard North's recent book on Haustlöng (an excellent and very accessible work) and made some minor adaptations. The why not say that instead of the above? Philip Baird Shearer 19:57, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
I have no position on the Old Norse question, but I wanted to comment on Philip's statement that we update earlier English names. Wikipedia follows the current scholarly norm for Medieval and Renaissance English names, even if they are names of texts involving words whose spellings have changed. See The Shepheardes Calendar and The Faerie Queene. See also the much earlier Hroðgar for a clear case of older orthography preferred to modern for scholarly reasons. There is some confusion here, however, as the pagenames for characters in Beowulf do not follow the same conventions used on the Beowulf page. Chick Bowen 20:40, 8 October 2005 (UTC)
My opinion is that the standard should be to use modern Icelandic spelling rules since Old West Norse/Old Icelandic did not have standardised spelling rules that were uniformly adhered to until recent centuries, so there *is* no uniform set of spelling rules for Old West Norse/Old Icelandic that has any authority superseding that of using modern Icelandic, which logically more people will be familiar with anyway, and also retains a degree of accuracy in the spellings used- English spelling of proper Old West Norse nouns is far from uniform, so modern Icelandic is the best source on which to draw for making a standard here. I also say that liberal use of redirect pages should be employed.
- P.MacUidhir 22:51, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
Why move the page to a more narrow name? Why shouldn't these guidelines just as well apply for historic persons in the same time and space? Fornadan (t) 21:41, 8 October 2005 (UTC)
I recommend it for background information relevant to this debate.
Found here: (link in centre of page)
P.MacUidhir (t) (c) 00:32, 10 October 2005 (UTC)
From the current text:
I have no problem with Veðrfölnir I do have a problem thought with "The name can be Anglicized a number of ways". "Vethrfölnir, Vedrfölnir" If it is Anglicized it should not have "ö" as that is not an Anglicisation! Can we discuss this further. (That I only have a quibble about this shows how far I think the text has come, or it is perhapse my POV being changed by a reasonable argument!)
One other point. In the Höðr article all the Anglicisations are placed into a footnote. I would like a note added to this guide that if one or two Anglicisation is more prominant in Wikipedia than the others, they should appear in the first paragraph of the article. The redirect pages can be used for this so in the case of the Höðr article, "Hodur" and "Hod" seem to be the most popular Philip Baird Shearer 11:58, 22 October 2005 (UTC)
With the exception of the most common anglicized forms as mentioned above, I like the footnote solution as it is done on the Höðr article as it stops the first paragraph becomming cluttered and "represented or Anglicized" I think is a better (more pedantically correct :-) ) wording. Philip Baird Shearer 22:17, 22 October 2005 (UTC)
Okay, I agree with Philip's point that it's nice to know something about which forms are most frequently used in English texts - rather than to have a long list thrown into your face.
I've done some research on Höðr. This is not very methodical or very accurate but it may give some idea of the problem.
I somewhat arbitrarily selected the top seven on this list into one group and the rest into a "less common" group. See Höðr. - Haukur Þorgeirsson 17:05, 29 October 2005 (UTC)
As I said before perhapse instead of looking outside Wikipedia one can look inside, for the usage and links as a guide to the other names to use.
Also what about Woden, Odin issue? English texts often define Odin as the Viking god and Woden as the Anglo-Saxon god so it depends on context as to which name is used. There were two distinct articles which were merged and the current article Odin implies that the use of Woden is archaic (Old Saxon) Wōden, yet to explain Wednesday, Woden is often still used in schools [1], and it is also used in popular histories like Monarchy with David Starkey and the book which complements the series The Monarchy of England Volume 1: The Beginnings published by Chatto and Windus. BTW, As a side issue it was the use of the code word Wodan used by the Germans for their Y-Gerät system that gave R.V. Jones, the clue that it was a single beam system ( So the spelling of the name is sometimes of great importance :-) ). -- Philip Baird Shearer 20:46, 29 October 2005 (UTC)
Idly searching for "ValhǪll" on the Internet I came upon this: [2] This is a stunningly good article. I'm just not used to seeing that kind of accuracy and the bibliography is just right. And there are others, here's one on Snorri Sturluson [3] with almost no errors. Especially interesting in our context is how the article uses the Old Norse form "Óðinn" throughout but gives "Odin" within parentheses at the name's first occurrence. Their Freyja article [4] is great (and ours is currently terrible but it's on my to-do list).
Could you check that site and see how you like it and if you think we can learn anything from the way they handle the spelling of names? - Haukur Þorgeirsson 14:00, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
It's now been more than a month since we started this and the discussion seems to have largely come to a halt. Meanwhile I've been operating under a self-imposed moratorium on page moves within the Norse mythology field.
Those who have commented seem to think that the proposal I've written up isn't too bad and no counterproposals have been made. Is anyone working on another proposal? Are there any changes we could make to the current proposal which would make any of you lot happier? I was thinking maybe we could put up a list of people endorsing the proposal, so if any of you have reservations about it that prevent you from endorsing it and you think it's something which we can fix then please come forth :) - Haukur Þorgeirsson 10:41, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
Wiglaf perhapse you need reminding that Archive 1 WAS the old guideline comments and all! The new one is many many times better.
So far I have restrained myself from making changes to the proposal but have instead raised them on this talk page. However I think I will make a few tweeks and we will see were we go from there. -- Philip Baird Shearer 13:56, 10 November 2005 (UTC)
Everyone here is aware of the limitations of Google tests for determining common use but they have the advantage of being easily available and when their results are overwhelming they give us a good clue. If anyone is interested in a quantitative guideline I suggest the following procedure which can be completed in two minutes for a given name.
I'm willing to concede the existence of a common English name for subject X from Norse mythology if all of the following conditions are met:
This will easily yield not only Thor, Odin and Loki but also Valhalla, valkyrie and even Asgard.
I think that's probably as much Norse mythology as the average English-speaking person knows.
Does anyone think this would be helpful? - Haukur Þorgeirsson 15:59, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
Philip made two changes to the proposed convention. One was to remove forms with 'ö' from examples of anglicized forms of the name of the hawk that sits on top of the eagle that sits on top of the World Tree. Philip's position is that a word with 'ö' in it doesn't qualify as anglicized. I can accept that as a valid point of view but then I'm at a loss as to what to call forms like 'Höd' (found in e.g. Britannica and Lindow's Handbook). It's clearly not the Old Norse form and it's clearly a form that's specially designed for English speakers, hence an anglicized form - from my point of view. But I won't press the matter and I won't revert or rewrite this change.
The other change is more substantial. Philip inserted the following:
There are good intentions behind this but it has a lot of problems, in my opinion. To begin with I think that a count of links from other Wikipedia pages is not a useful indicator of what is most common. Secondly one of the points of having a convention in the first place is to relieve us from the often quite difficult task of figuring out what the most common form is and to prevent inconsistent anglicization procedures within the encyclopedia. As an example the form Hodur (based on the Modern Icelandic form of the name) is almost certainly not the form most frequently found in English texts and to privilege it in the first paragraph is not warranted.
I can sympathize with the idea that the reader might want to immediately see, without having to click to a footnote, a version of the name that uses only the 26-letter-English-alphabet-without-diacritics. But I would prefer those forms to be based on some consistent transliteration practice rather than the difficult and ill-defined task of determining a most common or useful form.
How about we adopt a simple transliteration scheme for determining this privileged anglicized form?
This would deliver "Hodr" as the privileged anglicized form of "Höðr". Could you live with this, Philip? - Haukur Þorgeirsson 19:03, 10 November 2005 (UTC)
Looking at other Wikipedia:Naming conventions it seems to me that they're typically adapted after a discussion like we've had here. I don't see any voting or other formal procedures going on. So, if anyone has something to add to the discussion then please come forward. And if we don't hear anything new soon can we consider the convention adapted tentatively? And if no-one objects before the end of this month does anyone mind if I slap a guideline-template on this? - Haukur Þorgeirsson 12:48, 14 November 2005 (UTC)
I fully respect that CDThieme and No Account are entitled to their opinions and I'd like to point out the following. We've been discussing this proposal for more than a month now. Each step of the way I've been asking for input. You have offered nothing. When I propose that we consider the convention adapted you emerge and register your disapproval without offering any alternative or any material input. But if you absolutely insist that we vote on this then let's do that. - Haukur Þorgeirsson 18:55, 17 November 2005 (UTC)
Okay, five votes so far. Let's bring this to a wider audience. I'm going to start by contacting everyone who has commented on this page and tell tham that a proposal is up for a vote. I'm also going to post notices on some high-profile Norse mythology articles and on the village pump. If I get to it I might also try some other notice boards and even people who've participated in some previous move votes. I'm going to try to make a neutral "ad" so to speak and also contact people who have disagreed with me in the past. But I obviously have a stake in this so if someone wants to help draw attention to this and ensure that I'm not conjuring up some secret army of people who vote in lockstep with me then that's great :) I'm especially talking to those of you who disagree with me - feel free to bring this to the attention of anyone you think might be interested. - Haukur Þorgeirsson 23:29, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 |
I've written the draft of a new proposal. I feel it's much clearer than the previous guideline. I also feel it takes some of the comments we've been hearing into account and tries to compromise and please as many people as possible. Please comment and modify as needed. Maybe Salleman could add his new ideas for the representation of alternative anglicizations. I'd like to see that.
If you're completely opposed to the proposal it's probably best that you don't modify it but write up your own counterproposal instead. - Haukur Þorgeirsson 21:25, 8 October 2005 (UTC)
It seems to me that some of the things talked about on this page are in danger of breaking the WP:NOR. Perhaps a constructive way forward is to list some of the options which have been used by various people who have translated and published a lot of texts for the general public to read (not specialist to specialist) and comment on how they have translated the names etc. It there is one person, or School of people, which has a substantial body of work that covers a wide area, and it is a close fit to the Wikipedia:Naming convention then perhaps that could be used as a standard.
Even if nothing else comes of such a survey it it would at least produce enough information to help make a more informed choice on how Wikipedia editors could progress the issue and probably produce enough information for a page on the history of translations. Philip Baird Shearer 17:28, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
Please can you explian what this means in English?
We do not use name in English from the 13th century without updating them so why should an English encyclopaedia be using an C13th Icelandic name? If people working on these articles have taken the spelling used in works like Ursula Dronke's translation of the Poetic Edda (the best English translation there is, no competition) and Richard North's recent book on Haustlöng (an excellent and very accessible work) and made some minor adaptations. The why not say that instead of the above? Philip Baird Shearer 19:57, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
I have no position on the Old Norse question, but I wanted to comment on Philip's statement that we update earlier English names. Wikipedia follows the current scholarly norm for Medieval and Renaissance English names, even if they are names of texts involving words whose spellings have changed. See The Shepheardes Calendar and The Faerie Queene. See also the much earlier Hroðgar for a clear case of older orthography preferred to modern for scholarly reasons. There is some confusion here, however, as the pagenames for characters in Beowulf do not follow the same conventions used on the Beowulf page. Chick Bowen 20:40, 8 October 2005 (UTC)
My opinion is that the standard should be to use modern Icelandic spelling rules since Old West Norse/Old Icelandic did not have standardised spelling rules that were uniformly adhered to until recent centuries, so there *is* no uniform set of spelling rules for Old West Norse/Old Icelandic that has any authority superseding that of using modern Icelandic, which logically more people will be familiar with anyway, and also retains a degree of accuracy in the spellings used- English spelling of proper Old West Norse nouns is far from uniform, so modern Icelandic is the best source on which to draw for making a standard here. I also say that liberal use of redirect pages should be employed.
- P.MacUidhir 22:51, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
Why move the page to a more narrow name? Why shouldn't these guidelines just as well apply for historic persons in the same time and space? Fornadan (t) 21:41, 8 October 2005 (UTC)
I recommend it for background information relevant to this debate.
Found here: (link in centre of page)
P.MacUidhir (t) (c) 00:32, 10 October 2005 (UTC)
From the current text:
I have no problem with Veðrfölnir I do have a problem thought with "The name can be Anglicized a number of ways". "Vethrfölnir, Vedrfölnir" If it is Anglicized it should not have "ö" as that is not an Anglicisation! Can we discuss this further. (That I only have a quibble about this shows how far I think the text has come, or it is perhapse my POV being changed by a reasonable argument!)
One other point. In the Höðr article all the Anglicisations are placed into a footnote. I would like a note added to this guide that if one or two Anglicisation is more prominant in Wikipedia than the others, they should appear in the first paragraph of the article. The redirect pages can be used for this so in the case of the Höðr article, "Hodur" and "Hod" seem to be the most popular Philip Baird Shearer 11:58, 22 October 2005 (UTC)
With the exception of the most common anglicized forms as mentioned above, I like the footnote solution as it is done on the Höðr article as it stops the first paragraph becomming cluttered and "represented or Anglicized" I think is a better (more pedantically correct :-) ) wording. Philip Baird Shearer 22:17, 22 October 2005 (UTC)
Okay, I agree with Philip's point that it's nice to know something about which forms are most frequently used in English texts - rather than to have a long list thrown into your face.
I've done some research on Höðr. This is not very methodical or very accurate but it may give some idea of the problem.
I somewhat arbitrarily selected the top seven on this list into one group and the rest into a "less common" group. See Höðr. - Haukur Þorgeirsson 17:05, 29 October 2005 (UTC)
As I said before perhapse instead of looking outside Wikipedia one can look inside, for the usage and links as a guide to the other names to use.
Also what about Woden, Odin issue? English texts often define Odin as the Viking god and Woden as the Anglo-Saxon god so it depends on context as to which name is used. There were two distinct articles which were merged and the current article Odin implies that the use of Woden is archaic (Old Saxon) Wōden, yet to explain Wednesday, Woden is often still used in schools [1], and it is also used in popular histories like Monarchy with David Starkey and the book which complements the series The Monarchy of England Volume 1: The Beginnings published by Chatto and Windus. BTW, As a side issue it was the use of the code word Wodan used by the Germans for their Y-Gerät system that gave R.V. Jones, the clue that it was a single beam system ( So the spelling of the name is sometimes of great importance :-) ). -- Philip Baird Shearer 20:46, 29 October 2005 (UTC)
Idly searching for "ValhǪll" on the Internet I came upon this: [2] This is a stunningly good article. I'm just not used to seeing that kind of accuracy and the bibliography is just right. And there are others, here's one on Snorri Sturluson [3] with almost no errors. Especially interesting in our context is how the article uses the Old Norse form "Óðinn" throughout but gives "Odin" within parentheses at the name's first occurrence. Their Freyja article [4] is great (and ours is currently terrible but it's on my to-do list).
Could you check that site and see how you like it and if you think we can learn anything from the way they handle the spelling of names? - Haukur Þorgeirsson 14:00, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
It's now been more than a month since we started this and the discussion seems to have largely come to a halt. Meanwhile I've been operating under a self-imposed moratorium on page moves within the Norse mythology field.
Those who have commented seem to think that the proposal I've written up isn't too bad and no counterproposals have been made. Is anyone working on another proposal? Are there any changes we could make to the current proposal which would make any of you lot happier? I was thinking maybe we could put up a list of people endorsing the proposal, so if any of you have reservations about it that prevent you from endorsing it and you think it's something which we can fix then please come forth :) - Haukur Þorgeirsson 10:41, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
Wiglaf perhapse you need reminding that Archive 1 WAS the old guideline comments and all! The new one is many many times better.
So far I have restrained myself from making changes to the proposal but have instead raised them on this talk page. However I think I will make a few tweeks and we will see were we go from there. -- Philip Baird Shearer 13:56, 10 November 2005 (UTC)
Everyone here is aware of the limitations of Google tests for determining common use but they have the advantage of being easily available and when their results are overwhelming they give us a good clue. If anyone is interested in a quantitative guideline I suggest the following procedure which can be completed in two minutes for a given name.
I'm willing to concede the existence of a common English name for subject X from Norse mythology if all of the following conditions are met:
This will easily yield not only Thor, Odin and Loki but also Valhalla, valkyrie and even Asgard.
I think that's probably as much Norse mythology as the average English-speaking person knows.
Does anyone think this would be helpful? - Haukur Þorgeirsson 15:59, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
Philip made two changes to the proposed convention. One was to remove forms with 'ö' from examples of anglicized forms of the name of the hawk that sits on top of the eagle that sits on top of the World Tree. Philip's position is that a word with 'ö' in it doesn't qualify as anglicized. I can accept that as a valid point of view but then I'm at a loss as to what to call forms like 'Höd' (found in e.g. Britannica and Lindow's Handbook). It's clearly not the Old Norse form and it's clearly a form that's specially designed for English speakers, hence an anglicized form - from my point of view. But I won't press the matter and I won't revert or rewrite this change.
The other change is more substantial. Philip inserted the following:
There are good intentions behind this but it has a lot of problems, in my opinion. To begin with I think that a count of links from other Wikipedia pages is not a useful indicator of what is most common. Secondly one of the points of having a convention in the first place is to relieve us from the often quite difficult task of figuring out what the most common form is and to prevent inconsistent anglicization procedures within the encyclopedia. As an example the form Hodur (based on the Modern Icelandic form of the name) is almost certainly not the form most frequently found in English texts and to privilege it in the first paragraph is not warranted.
I can sympathize with the idea that the reader might want to immediately see, without having to click to a footnote, a version of the name that uses only the 26-letter-English-alphabet-without-diacritics. But I would prefer those forms to be based on some consistent transliteration practice rather than the difficult and ill-defined task of determining a most common or useful form.
How about we adopt a simple transliteration scheme for determining this privileged anglicized form?
This would deliver "Hodr" as the privileged anglicized form of "Höðr". Could you live with this, Philip? - Haukur Þorgeirsson 19:03, 10 November 2005 (UTC)
Looking at other Wikipedia:Naming conventions it seems to me that they're typically adapted after a discussion like we've had here. I don't see any voting or other formal procedures going on. So, if anyone has something to add to the discussion then please come forward. And if we don't hear anything new soon can we consider the convention adapted tentatively? And if no-one objects before the end of this month does anyone mind if I slap a guideline-template on this? - Haukur Þorgeirsson 12:48, 14 November 2005 (UTC)
I fully respect that CDThieme and No Account are entitled to their opinions and I'd like to point out the following. We've been discussing this proposal for more than a month now. Each step of the way I've been asking for input. You have offered nothing. When I propose that we consider the convention adapted you emerge and register your disapproval without offering any alternative or any material input. But if you absolutely insist that we vote on this then let's do that. - Haukur Þorgeirsson 18:55, 17 November 2005 (UTC)
Okay, five votes so far. Let's bring this to a wider audience. I'm going to start by contacting everyone who has commented on this page and tell tham that a proposal is up for a vote. I'm also going to post notices on some high-profile Norse mythology articles and on the village pump. If I get to it I might also try some other notice boards and even people who've participated in some previous move votes. I'm going to try to make a neutral "ad" so to speak and also contact people who have disagreed with me in the past. But I obviously have a stake in this so if someone wants to help draw attention to this and ensure that I'm not conjuring up some secret army of people who vote in lockstep with me then that's great :) I'm especially talking to those of you who disagree with me - feel free to bring this to the attention of anyone you think might be interested. - Haukur Þorgeirsson 23:29, 18 November 2005 (UTC)