Talk:Kithara

message: The article should state how many strings it has. Badagnani (talk) 05:38, 10 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Number of strings 

message: So wikipedia decides to go against the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, and all other major art museums in its spelling of Kithara?  Of course, we eventually get to this article - but I'm guessing the typical user types Kithara first.  There are no phonetic rules for Wikipedia spelling, that I know of - it's true that "Cynic" starts with the same Greek letter - but it was pronounced hard K.  Kinokos.  Kithara.  Maybe the page would get more citations if it were easier to find.Levalley (talk) 00:50, 7 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: References and spelling

message: This article makes reference to a two-stringed lyre. This is not mentioned in the Lyre article.
Kortoso (talk) 22:40, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Two-Stringed Lyre?

message: *This article started out as  kithara (25 January 2005)
*It was moved by The Man in Question on 8 November 2008 with the edit history comment of 
*It was moved back with a cut and past move by Spettro9 on 11 September 2011
*This cut and past move was not noticed by an administrator until today. I have now fixed the cut and past move (which are depreciated because they destroy edit history which is needed for copyright reasons) by merging the two articles under the article title Cithara. If any more moves are to be made they should only be made using the WP:RM process as there is clearly not a consensus on what name to use. I personally have no opinion on this issue, and have only placed it under its current title to revert the cut and past move. -- PBS (talk) 00:25, 12 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Move dispute 

message: Why is this in the category "Ancient Hebrew Musical Instruments"?  The article talks entirely about Greece and Greek uses, and doesn't even mention the word "Hebrew", much less indicate any Hebraic use.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Ancient_Hebrew_musical_instruments [unsigned]
It's possible that the Hebrews had as similarly named stringed instrument. eg: the Indians had the sitar116.90.140.41 (talk) 22:36, 27 March 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hebrew? 

message: The picture "Muse tuning two kitharai" is of a phorminx, not a kithara.  Note the rounded bottom, body-arm joint, and other details.  See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phorminx .  -- David R. Watson  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2602:306:C4CE:AC29:6CE8:C193:7509:CC54 (talk) 03:45, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: David, that appears to be a kithara. There isn't enough detail to see the bottom, but it's probably not a phorminx. Did you not notice that it has seven strings? While a phorminx can technically have seven strings, this would lend itself toward an identification with the former. The original description of the photograph labels them lyres, which seems incorrect as well, though that's ultimately irrelevant. There are variations in the design of kitharai, as can be seen in the other pictures, including those with rounded upper bodies. I'd err on the side of what's labeled, as opposed to indulging in original research. If you can find some supporting evidence that those aren't kitharai, then it can certainly be removed.  Symmachus Auxiliarus (talk) 03:53, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Not a Kithara 

message: The title of the article and the text within the article are not consistent. Either the article should be moved to "Kithara" or the use of "kithara" in the article should be replaced with "cithara". Does anybody with more understanding of this topic have an opinion? Desertambition (talk) 17:47, 12 April 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is it called a cithara or kithara? 

message: What latinization should be primarily used for the ancient Greek seven-stringed professional version of the lyre:
*A: cithara 
*B: kithara
There is no real argument that I can see but the article appears to switch between the two at random and I have no idea what should be used but we should choose one for consistency. The last post about this difference was made over nine years ago by . Posting the relevant text below:
 Desertambition (talk) 18:13, 12 April 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Taking a look at the Google N-gram, I would say that modern usage is pretty even in this. Per WP:TITLECHANGES the status quo article name should stay. , Desertambition for getting page histories merged. VanIsaac, MPLL contWpWS 20:53, 12 April 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: You should thank PBS for that lol. Also, we should determine what version to use throughout the article, not just in the title. The usage in the article is pretty random. Unless you believe we should just use the article title throughout the article, which makes sense. Pretty sure it really doesn't matter. Thanks for looking into the usage. Desertambition (talk) 22:19, 12 April 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Request for comment about "cithara" vs. "kithara" 

message: :The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion. 
The result of the move request was: moved per consensus below.  Extraordinary Writ (talk) 17:34, 21 December 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Cithara →  – This move is necessary because the vast majority of scholarly sources all use the Greek spelling of this instrument. I further note that there are many factual errors in this article, as the word kithara had different meanings across time as the round-based western lyre extant during the time of Homer (who was the first to use the words kithara and kitharis in surviving literature) was later replaced by a different construct of instrument with a flat base in the Hellenistic period that was also referred to as a Kithara. Scholars today divide the kithara into separate groups, the round-based "cylinder kithara" and the flat-based "concert kithara". In some cases the word kithara was also used to encompass both the kithara and the phorminx; and there has been some inter-changeability of the terms in literature and antiquity depending on the period of the writer. There is a highly detailed article which sorts through all the various uses of the term across history/scholarship in  There is also further content, placing the kithara in relation the history of the lyre family in  Other scholarly works using kithara include , , . I am willing to completely re-write the article with these sources providing we move the article to the correct title. I also note, that while the 1911 version of Encyclopedia Britannica used cithara, the current version of the encyclopedia uses kithara; which demonstrates a move in the scholarly literature away from the Romanized spelling. 4meter4 (talk) 20:33, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: @ I linked Grove above which titles their entry by Martha Maas "Kithara". So does the Oxford Dictionary of Music. 4meter4 (talk) 22:26, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: As I say, I have no strong views, but with a Wikipedian hat on I just note that we adopt some eccentric spellings such as Rachmaninoff rather than the usual Rachmaninov, in other works of reference. Personally, I'd stick to the OED's spelling of Cithara, but I'm not going to complain if we don't. Tim riley talk 23:33, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

text: That's absolutely ridiculous. I am not Greek by ethnicity or national origin and have a long standing editing history on wikipedia across many articles. My objection is purely based on the spelling used almost universally in published encyclopedias and other major reference works like Grove. I just find it incredibly annoying that our encyclopedia uses a strange spelling not used in most RS; particularly when much of scholarship in Grove deals with differences in Greek and its attachment to different iterations of the instrument (ie. Kithara v.s. Kitharis v.s. psilokitharistikē) which would be difficult to write on with a Romanized spelling (I'm not sure how I would even do that without SYNTH coming into play as there are no Romanized spellings of these versions of the instrument in the RS).4meter4 (talk) 17:00, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Most Ancient Greek words used in English come to us through Latin, in part because we inherited some of them from Roman sources, and in part because the Greek alphabet is not directly equivalent to the Roman alphabet that we use in English.  The trend in recent decades has been to treat this as if it were some form of colonialism that needs to be corrected by retranscribing Greek words more literally, as though none of the standard conventions for rendering Greek words in English existed.  This ngram indicates that "cithara" is the form that has historically been used in most published English works, and despite increasing use of "kithara", it remains so.  You cannot describe the use of "kithara" as "almost universal" without excluding the majority of recent publications, as well as the overwhelming majority of English-language works published before 1976.  If variations of the word do not appear using standard English conventions for rendering Ancient Greek, then feel free to use whatever forms you can find for them—there is nothing in English-language scholarship that requires all variations of a subject to be spelled consistently according to their etymology—but in the case of this article's topic there is a well-established English form.  P Aculeius (talk) 16:10, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: What recent publications? All of the recent encyclopedias, both general and specialized, all use the greek spelling Kithara in the title. I've linked some of them above. We can certainly go with title practices that were abandoned nearly 50 years ago, but that seems a rather antiquated approach not based in current scholarship. I would assume that wikipedia would want to emulate the titling practices used by other standard reference works in the English language like Encyclopædia Britannica or widely recognized music encyclopedias like The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. 4meter4 (talk) 17:31, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: So in order to claim "almost universal" use, you have to restrict your sources to certain encyclopedias, disregarding all other—and all older—materials.  The ngram shows that "cithara" remains as common or more commonly used in English today—looking back through time only tells us that the majority of sources likely to be found in English use over the last two centuries used "cithara" to an even greater extent.  Your argument is essentially one of recentism, not of correctness; certain sources prefer a different orthography than the traditional one, but this tells us nothing about the reasons, and they could just as easily turn around and do it the other way tomorrow, because one is not more "correct" than the other.  Per Wikipedia article titling policy, we generally prefer the common names of things; articles are not moved merely because another name has some claim of "officialness" or is trending within a particular academic discipline.  That's why we have "Turkey" instead of "Türkiye" and "Clytemnestra" rather than "Klytaimnestra".  P Aculeius (talk) 18:40, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Those are WP:OTHERSTUFF rationales. I'm not claiming any sort of need for a uniform change that would impact other articles. I'm only looking at the way current reference in English are titling their articles on this individual topic. Per WP:TITLE "Generally, article titles are based on what the subject is called in reliable sources." While granted cithara is used in some English language sources (particularly older ones), it is not the spelling used in the majority of the best English language publications on this topic as pointed out by Aza24 below and myself above. I prefer to model article titling after the best sources in the English language per our policies.4meter4 (talk) 21:06, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: So, not the common name, but the name that occurs in the most recent sources that I personally consider authoritative, and disregarding all other usage, especially when it disagrees with me.  Sorry, but there are many, many "reliable" sources—and there is nothing fundamentally "unreliable" about older scholarship about Ancient Greek music.  This is nothing more than a question of personal preference in any source—and a popularity contest between traditional English orthography and hypercorrectness—an artificial and inauthentic respelling intended to redress an imaginary injury.  P Aculeius (talk) 00:08, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: At this point, I am done interacting with you. Your tone is uncivil, and I am not seeing any way of productively engaging with you here.4meter4 (talk) 04:41, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Requested move 29 November 2022