[Wikipedia-l] This whole Lir and Americanization thing

Sun Nov 24 17:36:00 UTC 2002

Oliver Pereira wrote:
> We're after facts. And the fact of the matter is that anglicisations of
> names are simply distortions (or replacements) of foreign names. Calling
> Jo~ao "John" is just an *approximation* to the truth in the same way that
> calling a Jean Claude van Damme "French" is. It's sort of *nearly* right,
> but not quite. The job of an encyclopaedia should be to correct these
> sorts of approximations!

"Jo~ao" contains characters that do not exist in English.  This is not
materially different from words like "Tokyo" or "Osaka".  They can not
be written in English in the same way that they are written in their
native language, because they use characters that do not exist in
English.

> I would argue that it makes most sense to call it whatever the people who
> live there do. It is, in a sense, *theirs*, after all. If there are
> several official versions of the placename locally, one could simply use
> the one that the largest number of locals use. We should aim to be most
> familiar with whatever is on the signposts, so that we don't get lost when
> we get there. ;)

Until people are willing to give concrete examples, it's very
difficult to imagine what is being advocated.  Japanese people do not
call Japan "Japan".  It's either "Nihon" or "Nippon".  They don't call
Mount Fuji "Mount Fuji", they call it "Fuji-san".

There are perhaps cases in which we should prefer something closer to
the original than what is most common.  In English, the name of
Beijing is now "Beijing" where it was "Peking".  Good.

-------

None of this really gets at the problem with Lir's behavior.  It isn't
so much that Lir was wrong about anglicization, although that's true
too.  It's that Lir was obnoxious about it, calling people who
disagreed "racist".  (And, by the way, Lir/Bridget/Adam continues to
strongly assert that her opponents are racist in our conversations
about possible reinstatement, which grows less likely each day, I'm
afraid.)

It's quite possible for people to disagree on these matters in a
collegial and intellectual way, respecting that other people have
reasons for their opinions, and to work together to formulate a more
sophisticated policy that appeals to all parties.

--Jimbo