Talk:Đàn tính

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the proposal was move.Cúchullain ^t/c 16:32, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

---

Dan Tinh → Đàn tính – i. WP:CAPS, ii. ambiguity of "dan tinh" without tones, iii. per redlink on Traditional Vietnamese musical instruments, iv. per "the best such sources" ("đàn tính" pdf in article) v. encyclopedic quality (the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music uses Vietnamese alphabet for đàn instruments throughout), vi. per Category:Vietnamese musical instruments: đàn đá lithophone, đàn đáy long-necked lute, đàn gáo, đàn môi mouth harp, đàn nguyệt moon lute, đàn nhị erhu, đàn sến, đàn tam thập lục 36-string zither, đàn tranh Vietnamese zheng, đàn tỳ bà Vietnamese pipa, đàn hồ Central-Asian lute, sáo Vietnamese flute. In ictu oculi (talk) 01:14, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose. This title should be moved to dan tinh. I get 25 (21 deghosted) post-1970 Google Book hits for "dan tinh", one for "đàn tính". We should use the spelling that is most commonly given in English language reliable sources, per WP:DIACRITICS. A title should tell readers what English-language usage actually is, not mislead with regard to diacritics. The native language name is properly given in the opening of the article, not the title. Britanica and Columbia, which use diacritics for many languages, do not use them for Vietnamese. The style guide for National Geographic says to "retain the original diacritical marks" for a long list of languages, but explicitly makes an exception for Vietnamese. Vietnamese diacritics are the most intense of any Latin-alphabet language. Multiple diacritics can appear on a single letter, as in the infamous Đặng Hữu Phúc example. The Vietnamese English-language press generally drops off diacritics -- see, for example, Viet New News or Thanh Nien News. The Wiki titles of Vietnamese bios, provinces, towns etc are all currently given without diacritics. See WP:Naming conventions (Vietnamese). Kauffner (talk) 05:34, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
• Support đàn tính per nom. The term is not English and we typically don't "translate" such names. Nor is Wikipedia bound by style manual or technical restrictions that would prevent using the correct spelling. —  AjaxSmack  01:32, 26 June 2012 (UTC)
• Support. I had some misgivings about whether Vietnamese diacritics might have display issues, however the city Huế seems to have been at that title since 2005 and its talk page shows no discussion of display problems since that date. The National Geographic style guide guideline mentioned by Kauffner (below in the Discussion section) may make perfect sense for such a publication: a person who does not speak, say, Czech or Romanian or Turkish can still add correct diacritics for those languages from a tool like Microsoft Windows "Character Map", or proofread them by visual inspection; however, to do so for Vietnamese really requires actual knowledge of the Vietnamese language and good familiarity with its keyboard input methods, and a commercial publication cannot reasonably commit itself to perpetually maintain Vietnamese-speaking staff merely for this purpose; however, crowdsourced publications like Wikipedia suffer from no such limitation, as those who are knowledgeable about such diacritics will be the ones who truly care enough to add them. Some Vietnamese terms have very common and familiar anglicized forms, like "Hanoi" (or "Vietnam" itself), but that is not the case here. — P.T. Aufrette (talk) 03:54, 6 July 2012 (UTC)
  • Comment. We already have a WP:Naming conventions (Vietnamese) which is generally followed within the project. Unless an RM about an obscure musical instrument is being treated as a way to overturn the convention, this title should conform. Vietnamese fonts have been part of the standard font package since Windows 95 came out, so there certainly shouldn't be any display issues at this point. There are nearly a dozen English-language news sources published in Vietnam, including VOV Online and Viet Nam News, as well as Thanh Nien, which I linked to above. As these are produced by Vietnamese writers, the reason they do not use diacritics does not relate to any lack of language skill. Vietnamese diacritics are more intense then those of French or Spanish, and are distracting to an English-speaking reader. A title is not the place to teach readers a foreign language. Instead, it should give the usual spelling of the name in English, per WP:UE ("The choice between anglicized and local spellings should follow English-language usage"). No major publisher has a styleguide that is more diacritic-friendly than National Geographic`s. So it is misleading for a title to imply that these diacritics are used to any significant extent in English. Kauffner (talk) 15:06, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

1. Garland has a styleguide for world music that is more diacritic-friendly than National Geographic.

2. Looking at the editing history WP:Naming conventions (Vietnamese) seems to be primarily your own essay? Does it have the backing of the editors who created the Vietnam articles, such as at Talk:Cần Thơ/Archive 1? In ictu oculi (talk) 16:58, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

"The editors who created the Vietnam articles." There's an opening for a boring story if there ever was one. Let me see. YellowMonkey/Blnguyen could be the top writer of Vietnam-related material, at least for the featured articles. He was opposed to diacritics, if I recall correctly. DHN, the only admin with an interest in Vietnam, is also opposed, as you can see here. Of course, the people doing the military articles like RM Gillespie were never into diacritics. Then there was Amore Mio....I'm sure none of this means anything to you. None of the titles had diacritics before 2006, which means all the major articles were created with ASCII titles. Kauffner (talk) 19:03, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

• Kauffner, dare I point out that we already have a WP:HOCKEY guideline page which is generally followed within that project, yet in Talk:Stephane_Charbonneau#Requested_move you took a position in opposition to those longstanding guidelines. So it is inconsistent for you to cite a guideline page as the final word. I don't agree that diacritics should be considered distracting to monolingual English-speaking readers, it is very easy to see through the diacritics to the underlying letters. And in this case in particular, the diacritics used are very simple, identical in appearance to those used in Western European languages and in Croatian, so the higher level of complexity of Vietnamese diacritics in general is not even an issue here. In the name of consistency, we need not make a special case for Vietnamese; rather, why not bring Vietnamese in line with other languages that use the Latin alphabet with diacritics? There is a reason why commercial publications like National Geographic might special-case Vietnamese, but no real reason for Wikipedia to do so, as explained in my earlier comment above. — P.T. Aufrette (talk) 14:32, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

• I cited WP:DIACRITICS in hockey RMs, and the first thing I did here was the was to cite it again. This guideline was confirmed in a very large RfC last year. It was a close vote, but the editors who wanted to rewrite this guideline cited primarily Britannica and National Geographic. Neither of these use Vietnamese diacritics. I interpreted this as overwhelming opposition to the use of these marks and rewrote the Vietnamese naming conventions accordingly. So there is no guideline that supports this proposal. If it is successful, the title will be Đàn tính, and the d-with-a-stroke character is notoriously off-putting. As for commercial reasons, I don't see how that applies to the Vietnam News Agency, The Word, Britannica, or Columbia. It shouldn't matter why they do not use these marks. They are not used in the English-language sources and that should be the end of the story. Putting them in the title implies otherwise, and therefore misleads the reader. Kauffner (talk) 03:09, 8 July 2012 (UTC)

• "Notoriously off-putting"? That is odd wording, it sounds like the expression of a pet peeve actually. Can you clarify? — P.T. Aufrette (talk) 08:20, 8 July 2012 (UTC)

• The character seems to have inspired Jimbo's rant on diacritics: "We have somehow, wrongly in my view, gotten to the point that Đặng Hữu Phúc is remotely plausible."[1] Kauffner (talk) 08:39, 8 July 2012 (UTC)

Discussion

• Comment: I don't really think it matters either way as both will come up in a search which does not use the diacritics. However, I am curious what Wikipedia's style guidelines are for Vietnamese. Could anyone provide a link clarifying this? It seems to be a mix at the moment, with some with (Đàn đáy, Đàn nguyệt, Đàn tỳ bà, Đàn gáo) and some without (Dan bau, Dan Tinh, K'ni) diacritics. Emma dusepo (talk) 10:26, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
  • Reply. Everything Vietnamese is at an ASCII title except for this small folk music category. See Category:Vietnamese_people, Category:Cities_in_Vietnam, or feature articles like Thich Quang Duc, Nguyen Chanh Thi, and arrest and assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem. The guideline is at WP:Naming conventions (Vietnamese). Kauffner (talk) 12:04, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
    • Thanks for clarifying. So the debate really, it seems, is about what the 'common usage' names would be in English. I can't imagine any of these names being in common usage outside of their specific specialist field, so difficult to say. Emma dusepo (talk) 15:07, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
      • I did that analysis above: 21 English-language GBooks give this term without a diacritic, one with. That book isn't really in English either. It's bilingual and the diacritics are given in the Vietnamese part of the book. Kauffner (talk) 16:43, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
        • I also found that book[2]. It looks like diacritics are usually removed from Vietnamese when translating to English? --Enric Naval (talk) 15:27, 2 July 2012 (UTC)
          • Even in travel books, where they would certainly be helpful, Vietnamese diacritics are not given.[3][4] Lonely Planet gives native script names for Chinese and Thai cities, but not for Vietnamese. Vietnamese Traditional Dan Bau Music (not "đàn bầu music") is the No. 2 selling Vietnamese folk music CD on Amazon. See also National Geographic. Kauffner (talk) 01:05, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

• Question what practical advantage to the User interested in folklore and music is there in benchmarking to an unaccented newspaper report on a beauty contest (above) rather than benchmarking to the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music? For example, to know that this "dan" is đàn, instrument, not dân, people. And that this "tinh" is tính temper(?), not tình sentiment. People who work on contributing to ethnomusicology, culture and folklore pages are more likely to use the terms than articles on towns, sources are more likely, and readers are more likely to not be offended or panic at the sight of tones. In ictu oculi (talk) 21:52, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

• Reply. You have yet to present even one example of this subject given in published English-language material with the proposed diacritics. Unlike Garland, both newspaper stories I gave above actually mention this instrument. See also Minorities of the Sino-Vietnamese Borderland and Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit. Correct English-language spelling is useful to more readers than a spelling that is exclusively Vietnamese-language. No information is lost if diacritics are dropped from the title: The Vietnamese name would still appear both in the opening sentence and in large type on top of the infobox. Putting diacritics in the title would mislead the reader as to what English-language usage is. In addition, it looks unprofessional when titles in this category are inconsistent with those of other Vietnam-related articles. World Music and Britannica don't mention this instrument, but they do drop off the diacritics for the Vietnamese music terms they do use. Apparently, they are not of "encyclopedic quality". Kauffner (talk) 02:59, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

Hi Kauffner,

See article footnotes Asian Ethnology

If you are asking if the free-version website Britannica which doesn't mention the đàn tính and doesn't render Vietnamese accents is a more reliable source for spelling of đàn tính than the Asian Ethnology article on the đàn tính in the footnotes then I would have thought that question answers itself.

Re "No information is lost if diacritics are dropped from the title" - what is lost is (i) indication of Vietnameseness, (ii) consonant pronunciation (đ "d" and d "z" so "đan tinh" becomes "zan tinh"), (iii) vowel pronunciation, (iv) disambiguation, (v) tones, and (vi) indication of the Chinese character. What else could be lost that isn't being lost?

I don't have a big opinion on Vietnamese cities and people, but Huế is conspicuously at Huế, the RM at Talk:Cần Thơ/Archive 1 is evidently divided, but more is the issue that this is a Project World Music tagged article, people interested in Vietnames music are more likely to be interested in the pronunciation than, say, a Vietnam War article. In ictu oculi (talk) 08:06, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

I and others have explained multiple times that the purpose of a title is to give the name of the subject in English, not in the native language. For this purpose, of course a widely used reference beats an obscure journal article. That's quite a list of things you expect the title to do. Are you sure you don't want it to sing and play the instrument as well? As I said before, the Vietnamese name would still be given inside the article, so no information would be lost. As for Huế, it is given with a diacritic to disambiguate it from hue. Let me ask you this: Should the English-language name of a subject be given somewhere in the article? If the answer is yes, isn't the title the logical place for it? Kauffner (talk) 12:34, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

Kauffner, đàn tính doesn't have an English name.

As regards sources. Perhaps you could illustrate, could you please show 2x European-latin-alphabet-accented-in-original-language articles (1x modern place name, and 1x modern personal name excluding exonyms for places, monarchs and stage names for people and ß) that you agree with where these 1x place and 1x are currently at, and then we can have a discussion about Vietnamese place and person names. Cheers. In ictu oculi (talk) 14:00, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.