Talk:Imperial Royal Austrian State Railways

Timeline

The timeline was taken as-is from German Wiki article on the company. They do not list source but the table looks valid so I copied it. Pavel Vozenilek 14:22, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

Requested move 13 May 2020

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. 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.

No consensus for any specific move. It is unclear whether the evidence provided supports a page move at all, since the last word seems to be that "Imperial and Royal Austrian State Railways" is incorrect, and that the current title is slightly more in use than the hyphenated title. It seems unlikely that extending the period of the move request for yet another week will solve this "classic conundrum", as one editor calls it. Participants can continue researching and discussing outside of this process and file a new move request if the picture becomes clearer. BD2412 T 04:04, 24 June 2020 (UTC)

Imperial Royal Austrian State Railways → Imperial-Royal State Railways – correct name, see intro text Gryffindor (talk) 17:12, 13 May 2020 (UTC) —Relisting. buidhe 04:00, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

Comment. I certainly agree the hyphenated form, but the name incorporating "Austrian" seems to have been one of two official usages and my sense is that it is more likely to be understood by an English-speaking readership, so that would be my preferred title unless the sources show the short version to be overwhelmingly the more common. I've added the reference used at German Wikipedia for the long version. Bermicourt (talk) 21:16, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

• Oppose – it's not clear what the hyphenated construct means, or whether it should be a dash. There's not even a single reference to go by. Moving an unsourced article is a bit beyond bold, I think. OK, I see that Imperial-Royal means "k und k"; definitely a symmetric relationship of the sort for which the en dash is preferred (like in this book). But we still need sources to decide on this article title. Dicklyon (talk) 04:00, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

  and I Support alternative proposed below by Necrothesp, with "and" instead of dash. Dicklyon (talk) 22:09, 9 June 2020 (UTC)

• Move to Imperial and Royal Austrian State Railways. "k.k." is usually thus translated; with a conjunction, not a hyphen. -- Necrothesp (talk) 15:40, 27 May 2020 (UTC)
• Pause for more research to confirm the best title and then re-convene the discussion.

First it's important to realise that the Austro-Hungarian Empire made a clear distinction between Imperial-Royal/Imperial Royal (kaiserlich-königlich, usually abbreviated to k. k.) – a title used widely until 1867 but then restricted in use to Cisleithania – and Imperial and Royal (kaiserlich und königlich, abbreviated as k. u. k., k. und k., k. & k.) which was applied to common Austro-Hungarian institutions after 1867.

Nevertheless, when it came to the state railways formed around 1880, they appear to have used "Imperial-Royal", for reasons that I haven't yet been able to fathom out. If we wanted to be faithful to their naming, we should use Imperial-Royal or Imperial Royal, both valid translations used in English sources, although Ngram Viewer suggest the hyphenated version was and is the least used in English (see below).

That being said, all three English names appear to be used, whether through ignorance or not, I don't know. Eliminating duplicated sources, Google books came up with 4 books using Imperial-Royal Austrian State Railways, 6 using Imperial Royal Austrian State Railways and ten books using Imperial and Royal Austrian State Railways! So regardless of the eventual title, it's worth mention all 3 naming variants in the article somewhere. Unfortunately, Ngram Viewer doesn't have results for the full titles; only for the three generic titles - see here. However, there's no way of confirming whether they are referring to k.k. or k. und k. institutions.

By the way, this is a classic conundrum when you have relatively few English sources - there is no clearly accepted name. I come across this frequently. Sometimes there is no English source to go on. Cheers. Bermicourt (talk) 08:16, 10 June 2020 (UTC)

The kkStB was k. k. and not k.u.k! It was Cisleithania only. The Hungarians had their MÁV – The double monarchy had two federal railway companies. -- Herby from Vienna (talk) 15:50, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

That is helpful, thank you. That suggests, for clarity, that we should not use "and" in the title. Bermicourt (talk) 09:02, 16 June 2020 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. 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.