Talk:Hyria (Boeotia)

Confusing

What is a paralía and why does it link to beech? Why do you call a town Drámesi when it is a link to Avlida? And the article on Avlida identifies itself with Aulis, not Hyria. Or do you mean to suggest these are the same town?J1812 (talk) 06:40, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

Latinization, Transliteration, Transcription

I would like to share some thoughts I had after going through this article's edit summearies and history.

i) I cite a comment by User:Dbachmann: *latinization* of Ὑ is "hy", *transliteration* is "hu", while *transcription* in Modern Greek is "i". I do understand the way he puts it, but I think that there are some complications in that (I am raising this issue as a relevant one to all articles containing transliterated grc and ell terms). For example, the transliteration of Ὑρία is indeed Huria, but unless one indicates that this is a translit., one might think that it is an alternative latinization. As for the Modern Greek transcription, it is correct that i is the right equivalent of υ but from what I've seen most ell words are usually transliterated and not transcribed in Wikipedia as well as in most other online and printed sources. Finally, regarding the inclusion of the Modern Greek equivalent of an archaeological site's name in its article, I agree that it is irrelevant from a philological point of view, but it could be useful from a practical point of view, such as for finding the place in an English travel catalogue in case the reader wants to visit the place (a relevant example in our case is this catalogue). Clarification: I have no strong feelings about the above (nor I want to turn Wikipedia into a travel booklet, of course); I am just a bit wary by the lack of a general policy in Wikipedia regarding the decoupling of "translits" from "transcripts", and the indication of an ancient place's modern name and vice versa.

ii) This article gave me even more reasons for continuing to add the original Greek or Sanskrit forms of many latinized or transcribed buzzwords and names I come across in Wikipedia. First: in each case, there is usually no indication regarding whether it is a latinization or a transcription. Second: there might be ambiguities in the system of rendering the original script. Third: in case one wants to verify the existence of a word in the original text or that the word really exists in the source-language, they are unable to do so unless they know the form of this word in the writting system of the source-language. Fourth: when one does not know the original form of the word, it is very easy for a "Chinese whispers effect" to emerge; thus, Hyria can become Hyrai (and stay this way for years without anyone noticing the mistake) and Hyrieus can easily become Hyreius, Hyreus, Hyrius, etc. --Omnipaedista (talk) 08:08, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

you are entering a larger discussion of transliteration issues that is probably ouf of place on an obscure talkpage such as this one. The way I see it, the grc-Latn transliterations are there as a courtesy to editors who are unable to read the Greek script. When we say "Ionic: Ὑρίη Huriē", without any punctuation between Ὑρίη and Huriē, the idea is that the two terms are exactly the same thing, just rendered in two different alphabets. That is, if we are going to present it this way, the transliteration should be a close one. "Hyria" otoh is how the name would appear in a Latin (and hence also learnéd English) context and does not need to be italicized or tagged with {{lang}}.

For all I care, we could also drop the Huriē entirely and stick with "Ionic: Ὑρίη", trusting that any reader unfamiliar with the Greek alphabet will not care about the gory details of spelling variants between Ionic/Homeric and later Koine.

The proper page to discuss this would seem to be Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Greek), a page I had not been aware of since it isn't linked from WP:MOS. --dab (𒁳) 08:55, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

OK then; thanks for the feedback. I know that it is a very general topic and I was unaware of the existence of this Greek naming conventions page; I just wanted to raise somewhere these general issues. I'll probably repost there what I wrote here when I get the time. --Omnipaedista (talk) 11:02, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

I wasn't aware of the page myself, and as you can see I have already taken to editing it. It is linked from WP:NAME, but "naming conventions" is misleading here because we aren't discussing article titles but treatment of Greek in article text. I have linked it from {{style}} now, which should make it easier to find. --dab (𒁳) 11:17, 16 June 2009 (UTC)