Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Old Norse/Old Icelandic/Old English)/Archive 1

message: Reduction of Norse names to the 26-letter alphabet with no diacritics is common in English. I will go along with that, if that is indeed what other people really want here.
Personally I don't prefer such lowest common denominator renderings.
The opposite idea, using the full Old Norse forms throughout is just not English practice. Rudolf Simek's A Dictionary of Norse Mythology (translated from German) is the most extreme example I am aware of in the direction of using Old Norse forms without change in a work on Norse mythology. That work uses the hooked-o, and ð throughout, still retains case endings on names, and always renders thorn as th where it occurs. But even this text still uses the English spellings Odin and Thor  . Only some scholarly articles in international journals are more or equally extreme. Jean Young's partial translation of Snorri's Edda also used ð, but dropped the case endings and used ö rather than hooked-o  . These works are the unsual exceptions. Normally, in translation after translation, commentary after commentary, you get ð rendered d or more rarely th or occasionally dh, diacritics more often dropped than included, and æ sometimes retained and sometimes rendered ae, and  various things done with œ when it is not retained as is. I could personally accept following Simek, except that I don't think that such usage fits the general Wikipedia principle of using the form of a name most common in English. Which forms are most common in English for names from Norse mythology is very debatable, but they are certainly, and perhaps unfortunately, not the Old Norse forms with case endings and all the "frills". And in general the policy of using the most common names serves Wikipedia well, even though I'd love to start using more correct forms like Mōšeh or Mōsheh instead of Moses and Akhilleus instead of Achilles. I tend to be a pedantic purist. But the current policy rightly keeps pedantic purists from being able to replace accustomed English forms with more correct forms, at least until other works start doing the same thing. Don't come here to change the standards, even if the change would be for the better. And it keeps those who want to use non-standard systems from fighting over which non-standard system. Unfortunately there is no standard system for Old Norse, but there are features of adapting the names that are more common than others.
I was using the forms used by Lindow and Orchard because they represent the most normal English letter spellings (j not i, d not th or dh for ð) and their rules mostly provide naturally the forms found normally in English, for example, Sigurd, not Sigurth or Sigurð. The diacritics are also found in many translations and are the kind of extra one expects in more scholarly works. Brodeur used the same forms, but kept the case endings. Hollander used the same forms except for rendering ð as th and ö as o; but he kept the other diacritics. Faulkes and Larrington use the same forms, but drop the diacritics and represent j by i. Lindow and Orchard represent a reasonable common denominator rendering which is yet not a lowest common denominator rendering. They keep æ rather than using ae and keep œ rather than rendering it as oe. They keep the diacritics, which readers can mentally filter off, if they wish, but can't filter on again if they aren't there. And they provide an external standard that can be followed without niggling over whether a name is well-known enough in an English form or unaccented form to appear that way. Óláf or Olaf? Just see what they do and copy it. And because they have written encyclopedic works, they have far more forms than those found in most individual translations. I could compile a list of the name which are exceptions to their normal rules for the Manual of Style. There aren't many: Odin, Thor, Halfdan, Olaf are the only ones that spring to mind. Orchard only identifies Odin and Thor and just mentions there are others where he has used forms "more familiar to the general reader". When discussing Old Norse words as technical terms, both Orchard and Lindow do use accurate Old Norse forms.
I don't like the suggestion of different forms as article headers and as standard forms within articles, except for technical reasons. If we adopt a standard form of a name for Norse mythology in Wikipedia, it should normally be the standard form in both the title and article. It seems to me there would be something philosphically wrong with a policy in which almost all links would be piped links. If the common Wikipedia spelling of the Norse king of the gods is decided to be Óðin, then the article should also be Óðin, with redirects from the forms Oðin, Óðinn, Odin, Ódinn, Othin, Óthinn, Odhin, and Ódhinn. If we can't justify Óðin as the proper title for an article, then it shouldn't be the normal form in the text either.
I do see reason for making a partial exception in the case of anglicized titles of Norse literary works. In an article they might more often be referred to by their Old Norse form, for some more than others. Voluspa doesn't look too bad. Fra daud Sinfjotli looks like carelessly rendered Old Norse. However Thrymskvida or Thrymskviða seems far better to me than Þrymskviða in a casual reference in English. Such differences is the impression such forms make is probably one reason there is no consistancy in Wikipedia. One could also make an exception that titles of works, but not other names, do not follow the Orchard/Lindow rules, but appear in Old Norse forms following Simek's rules, that is substitute th for thorn but otherwise follow the Old Norse spelling, even to the use of the hooked-o, though currently in article titles ö would have to be used as a substitution. I think it would be simpler just to stick to Orchard and Lindow's reasonable and consistant anglizations. Different forms tend to look strange, pedantic, or dumbed down to different readers.
I have already been doing a fair amount of standardization based on what I believed was consensus. If consensus has changed now, fair enough. I am willing to change what I've done. But consensus should not keep changing. One way is often as good as another and there are thousands of divergent forms now regardless of what standard is used. For search purposes I want to continue providing alternate forms at the bottom of articles, (see Halfdan the Old as example). Doing this partly depends on having standard forms within an article, whatever that standard is. A change of standard away from Lindow and Orchard now will require quite a bit of work on my part to fix up what I've already done. But I'd rather this happen now than six months from now after making many more such lists of variant forms, which is why I am bringing up the matter after producing a concrete example of what I have in mind. I want to get things started, if possible, and I want what I am doing to have support by those who are currently working in this area, otherwise it won't be done. And it should be a standard that others cannot lightly change in the future, if only because it has become, hopefully, so entrenched by it being followed that the work involved in changing it would be enough to put people off.
We're past the point where we can just change a standard lightly and start fresh with new rules every few months. And the mess of having no rules is becoming more and more annoying. We must decide. And we must start using whatever standard is decided on, or watch the anarchy increase, and face the possibility of silly edit wars over spelling. Generally, it is better to be using a standard for names that one does not particularly like than to be forced to fight again and again on article after article to get spellings accepted, which is why such standards exist. It enables one to fight instead about what is worth fighting over, the content. I far prefer Ægir to Aegir (and use of æ does appear in some translations which don't use diacritics.) But if I am outvoted, it is not worth fighting about compared to the time taken to actually improve an article about Ægir or Aegir. But if we don't decide, we are making more and more work for ourselves in the future.
Jallan 01:02, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Response to initial comments

message: 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)
thread_title: No original research