Talk:Manlia gens

Potential edit war about pronunciation

The last several edits to this article indicate a decided difference of opinion over whether the name needs to be accompanied by a pronunciation guide. The edit summaries on both sides suggest little willingness to compromise, suggesting that this will become an edit war. In an effort to head that off, I'm starting this conversation so that we can discuss the pros and cons.

Just to be candid, I happen to agree with Avilich that the article doesn't need a pronunciation guide; occasionally Latin pronunciation differs from English, but in English most Latin names are pronounced as though they were English, and the names "Manlius" and "Manlia" appear to be perfectly transparent; there is no ambiguity about how any of the letters should be pronounced, except perhaps the 'a', and that really is a matter of personal preference with no absolute right or wrong. In fact I think that's a good reason for not telling people how to pronounce it—it suggests a degree of certainty inappropriate to a matter that in English is left up to the speaker.

Most articles about Roman gentes—and most articles about individual Romans—don't have or need pronunciation guides; it's usually fine to pronounce the names as though they were English, leaving it up to individuals if they want to say "Julius" or "Yulius", "Valerius" or "Walerius", "Tybeerius" or "Teaberrius". Some people will be sticklers for Classical Latin pronunciation, others for traditional English, and some may opt for a more idiosyncratic selection (and it's worth pointing out that besides regional variations and obvious changes in pronunciation throughout Roman history, there are several systems of Latin pronunciation in use today)—but in my opinion it's neither necessary or desirable either to prescribe one pronunciation and proscribe others, or to list a whole litany of "acceptable" pronunciations for names that most readers aren't even going to think about how to pronounce. In fact most readers who are sticklers for "authenticity" in pronunciation will either know how they want to pronounce the names, or will simply visit our articles about Latin for guidance.

But to return to the present case—most of the variations between different systems of Latin or English pronunciation would agree on a name like "Manlius", which isn't likely to confuse anybody. I don't think it's "vandalism" to add a pronunciation guide, but I can see it as potentially patronizing and essentially unconstructive, although I'm willing to assume good faith on the part of the editors who seem to think it needs it, and I can only ask them to consider whether there aren't articles, or subjects, that would benefit much more from this kind of guidance than this article or, for that matter, most other articles about Romans. Roman names really aren't that confusing for English speakers to pronounce, and when there's a significant amount of variation in pronunciation, most if not all of the possible pronunciations are technically valid, rendering pronunciation guides unhelpful, unnecessary, and superfluous. P Aculeius (talk) 03:52, 9 September 2021 (UTC)

My reverts back in March were the first to be labeled 'quasi-vandalism', just so we're clear. Both Libhye and his friend whom he canvassed used that term before I did. I agree that a pronunciation guide with IPA symbols matching exactly the alphabet is more or less useless, especially for a straightforward pronunciation like Latin. The wiki also has a dictionary entry with the pronunciation, so again, pointless to include it here. Avilich (talk) 12:10, 9 September 2021 (UTC)

Sorry, didn't mean to imply that any one particular party was at fault for the term—merely that it's not really appropriate to describe either adding or removing a guide when the editors involved are merely disagreeing over whether one should be included. I might add that I find IPA largely indecipherable without visiting the IPA pages—and I cannot quite figure out whether an article about pronouncing a Roman name or Latin phrase in English should be using IPA for Latin (in which case I think it would be valid to ask whether it needs to be a specific version of Latin) or IPA for English—and on the whole due to the wide variety of possible pronunciations, none of which is absolutely right or wrong, I think we generally don't benefit from having these guides in Roman articles.

I realize that readers of British English are much more likely to be familiar with IPA, but I wonder just how familiar the British public really is with IPA. Kwamikagami is an experienced user of IPA whom I encountered a number of years ago, after attempting to provide IPA pronunciations for a few names—his understanding of IPA was so different from the instructions that I had read that it produced what I felt were irreconcilable results and a basic disagreement over how to pronounce Latin—which I did study in college and had a very good idea how to pronounce. As a result I began to suspect that IPA was somewhat less useful for readers and editors than I had at first thought, and on reflection I concluded that it was unnecessary in the great majority of Roman articles for the reasons that I outlined above. Obviously not everyone agrees! P Aculeius (talk) 12:55, 9 September 2021 (UTC)

If you were to consistently give the full Latin spelling, agreed, that would be sufficient for those who know Latin. But, (a) you don't do that, so even if you know Latin phonology you can't tell how this name is pronounced, and (b) not everyone reading this article is going to know Latin phonology. WP is for the general public. As for whether readers understand the IPA, we can add even more pronunciation info if that's what you prefer, though IMO the IPA (and linked key) is sufficient. But, regardless, readers need access to some way of determining the pronunciation. It took me a while to find it, and there will be readers even more ignorant than I am who won't know where to look. And why should they spend the time looking it up at some site like Perseus, when we can provide it so easily?

If the IPA pronunciation is wrong, that's another matter. If our treatment of Latin phonology is inaccurate, that should be taken up on the talk page of the Latin IPA key, because it affects more than just this article. But I doubt that's an issue, since the ppl there seem to know what they're talking about. As for the variety of Latin, they settled on the Classical (more or less, best we can tell, Ciceronian pronunciation), and if you know that, you can predict Church Latin or whatever. But you need to start somewhere. — kwami (talk) 12:06, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Interesting that you're replying to me, instead of addressing the person who you've used edit summaries to call a "quasi-vandal", an "idiot", and an "ignorant edit-warrior", after having ignored this discussion for months. But both sides can be a bit uncivil, so let's discuss the underlying issue. This is English Wikipedia, so if there's any room for doubt, what we're after is what English speakers should say when pronouncing this name in English; not English speakers speaking Latin, not Romans speaking Latin. But there isn't any room for doubt; by English rules of pronunciation, there have to be three syllables, because we don't have a sound /nl/ in English, nor a diphthong /ia/. The first syllable is stressed, and has to consist of 'Man-'. The first 'a' has to be short because the 'l' is followed by an 'i', the 'i' has to be long (European) because that's the only way it's ever pronounced in this position (and would be difficult to pronounce otherwise), and the terminal 'a' has to be short. There are no alternatives in English pronunciation.

"MAN-lee-uh" is a possible pronunciation. "MĀN-lee-uh" is not a natural pronunciation due to the position of the vowels, and would not be suspected by either English speakers nor Latin students. There's a remote possibility that in the 18th or early 19th century an English-speaking Latin scholar might have said "man-LĪ-uh", but that wouldn't occur to anybody today. It's not possible to say "MAN-lih-uh". Best of all, it doesn't matter much if we pretend we're Romans speaking Latin, because the stress on a name such as this would still be on the antepenultimate syllable, and that pretty much determines how the vowels are pronounced. So there don't seem to be any other likely pronunciations—nor would you expect there to be. You don't need a "Ph.D. in Latin Linguistics" to pronounce something the way it would naturally be pronounced in English—or Latin. Although the other person who so far has engaged solely in argument through edit summaries, and who went to your talk page to alert you that someone was fiddling with your work and needed to be stopped, suggested that even a "Ph.D. in Latin Linguistics" wouldn't be enough to figure out such a complicated name as this one!

As a rule, Roman names are fairly transparent in pronunciation. You can pronounce them as if they were English, or if you studied Latin you can pronounce them according to any of several versions of Latin pronunciation. The occasional uncertainty as to how to pronounce 'c', 'g', 'j' or 'v' is an artifact of multiple forms of Latin and English pronunciation—but for this there is no easy solution using IPA or any other method of indicating pronunciation. And it does not come into play with this name.

Bringing this to the discussion page was an attempt to head off an edit war, but the three of you seem determined to go on warring until the stars fall from the skies—shoot first, maybe post something implausible or irrelevant on the talk page after the victim is dead. It's clear that nothing I say is going to persuade you, and I doubt very much the person you've been warring with is going to listen to anything you have to say either. Maybe it's time to move on. P Aculeius (talk) 15:29, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

You say it must be pronounced this way because it must be pronounced this way -- that's hardly a convincing argument. Why must it be pronounced this way? Okay, forget a PhD in Latin -- what of just some high-school Latin? What of just high-school English? How is the reader to know that it's Manlia and not Manlīa? You say it may have been Manlīa in the 18th century. Did Cicero speak differently in the 18th century than he does today? Lewis & Short specify that it's Manlĭus, so at least they don't think the pronunciation is so obvious it doesn't need to be indicated. I don't know how *Mānlius got in there. But the solution to incorrect information is to correct it, not to delete it. If someone attempting to indicate the pronunciation gets it wrong, then it obviously wasn't obvious to them, and by extension it isn't going to be obvious to others.

I originally added the pronunciation because I couldn't predict it, and it's not a trivial thing to look up. And although I hardly have any Latin, I probably have more than the average WP reader. So the argument that the pronunciation must be obvious to everyone because it's obvious to you doesn't carry any weight with me. — kwami (talk) 21:22, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

BTW, Wiktionary doesn't have an entry for Manlia. It does have one for Manlius, but that won't come up if a reader does a search for Manlia. Also, the Wikt. entry has it as Mānlius. Since you say that's wrong (and Lewis & Short concur), if the reader did manage to find the Wikt entry they'd still be lead astray. That's presumably where we got the long ā from.

If the pronunciation is not obvious to the Latin editors of Wiktionary, again, how is it supposed to be obvious to the average reader of WP? BTW, the long ā was added w the edit-summary "updated macrons in la-proper noun per Bennett (with corrections by Allen and Michelson)". If that's an error, we should contact the Latin project so that it can be corrected. Who knows how many similar errors might've been introduced.

The reason Julius, Valerius and Tiberius don't need pronunciations is that they're accessible in readily available sources. Manlia is not.

If there's a phonotactic rule that there can be no sequence -īV(s) at the end of a native Latin word, is that clear from our articles on Latin? — kwami (talk) 21:36, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Ah, it is ⟨MÁNLIA⟩ per chapter 3 of Bennett (1907) The Latin Language – a historical outline of its sounds, inflections, and syntax. So it looks like the transcription was right after all. And certainly not predictable. — kwami (talk) 23:24, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Difficult to make a coherent reply to a stream-of-consciousness reply—but you're still missing the point that I was talking about English and not Latin. There's only one possible pronunciation in English—and since you seem baffled by my mention of 18th/19th century English pronunciation of Latin, maybe you should familiarize yourself with the history of how Latin was taught and pronounced in English. On second thought, don't. It was a digression, and I thought that was clear, but apparently I shouldn't have mentioned it since now I have to explain and defend it in endless detail. I point out, however, that macrons aren't used in Latin—they're found in dictionaries aimed at Latin students, but are not found in written Latin. I am not speaking of apices, which are at best used intermittently and inconsistently, rather than a standard part of Latin orthography. The accent mark in Bennett is presumably an indication of stress—not vowel length.

Speaking of which, you'll find a general pattern in the names I mentioned, and which you recited above. In Julius, Valerius, and Tiberius, the stress in each case is on the antepenultimate syllable—never on the 'i'. Manlius follows the same pattern—virtually all Roman nomina do. -ius and -ia are two-syllable terminal nominative endings, and while I don't propose that there couldn't be any names in which the 'i' is stressed, I can't think of any. Because the stress on Latin names is generally predictable, and the vowels are usually predictable—there is little if any variation in the endings—these names are extremely transparent, and not in need of pronunciation guides.

But you're also forgetting something important: I'm not the one you're warring with. Talk to the person whose edits you keep reverting. I left your edits alone since it was clear from past experience that you'd just keep reverting me. You're fighting someone else—that's what this discussion was created to deal with—and you're not addressing him at all. You should have done that before reverting him with name-calling. There's still time to thresh out these issues, but it takes a willingness to engage with one another—not just reverting back and forth. P Aculeius (talk) 00:25, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

If readers are to be misled by wiktionary, you may want to use your inexhaustible energy to fix that instead. As has been said above, there's no evidence that Manlius/Manlia doesn't follow the same pattern of other Latin names, with the stress belonging to the antepenultimate syllable. Readers who even care about precise pronunciations probably won't be looking at Wikipedia in the first place, and putting a pronunciation guide whose characters match exactly those of the word itself, especially in a language whose letters mostly stand for one single sound each, doesn't tell anybody much to begin with. Avilich (talk) 02:25, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

Ante penultimate in an i-stem noun (as most nomina are). The 'i' is a separate syllable, but I'm not aware of any instances where it's stressed. P Aculeius (talk) 02:59, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

My bad, thanks, fixed. Avilich (talk) 03:05, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

The apices marked length, not stress, which was predictable if you knew what the vowels were. This was never about proper English pronunciation, but about Latin pronunciation, and the idea that we shouldn't provide Latin pronunciation for unpredictable Latin words is just stupid. If the IPA ends up being identical to the Latin orthography, that confirms that the orthography isn't defective, which is valuable information. Without knowing that, you're left wondering how the word is pronounced. Honestly, I don't understand why anyone would intentionally obscure the pronunciation of a word and then argue about it. Articles are written for people who don't know the subject, not those who already do.

As for macrons, they're the universal modern convention, so that point is also irrelevant. If you really believe we shouldn't use macrons because they're not authentic, then we shouldn't use lower-case letters either. Sorry, but this whole argument is just stupid. — kwami (talk) 20:35, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

There's a bit of a readability problem here, though — the reader sees The gens Manlia (Mānlia), and has to guess whether the macron over the a is meant to be interpreted in Latin (giving IPA /maːnlia/) or English (/meɪnliə/). I wasn't sure which was intended until I clicked the edit button and saw that it was a Latin {{lang}} instantiation. Granted the English interpretation would be odd, but there are lots of odd renderings of Latin in English, so it's hard to exclude. I'm not against the macron but I think if you use it you have to call out its meaning in visible text (not just a hyperlink; people might not follow hyperlinks). --Trovatore (talk) 21:25, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

Since when is the macron used in English words? At most they appear in American dictionaries for pronunciation respelling. Outside America, who uses them? And judging from Pronunciation respelling for English#Traditional respelling systems, it's not like there's a consensus between US dictionaries on what symbols to use either. Though sure, writing (Latin: Mānlia) wouldn't hurt. Double sharp (talk) 09:12, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Whether they're unpredictable or not is anybody's guess. You yourself said some names are straightforward enough that they don't require pronunciation guides, and we have no reason to believe Manlius/Manlia works any differently than those. MOS:PRON doesn't recommend the use of pronunciations when they're of limited relevance to the subject matter, or when the term itself isn't the main topic. Just because someone doesn't know something doesn't mean that they want to know it or that Wikipedia should tell them what it is. Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information, clutter in the text can be a problem, and Wiktionary exists. Avilich (talk) 00:19, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

This is the first I'm reading that non-obvious information on pronouncing the name of the article is "indiscriminate". And it's also weird to see you say there's "no reason to believe" this name works any differently, when the reason why has literally been discussed above: how do we know it's not Manlīa? Double sharp (talk) 09:21, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

And as if thumbing his nose at us, Kwami's now added "Latin" templates to 15 or 16 articles about Roman gentes, which do nothing more than say—and provide a citation for—the fact that Roman nomina are from identical Latin nomina—with the slight modification of adding macrons, which are inauthentic and potentially confusing, and italicizing them. These additions are absolutely useless—"The gens Manlia (Mānlia)^[1] was a..." does absolutely nothing helpful for readers. It just disrupts the flow of the lead for no benefit. P Aculeius (talk) 00:56, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

Being one word in round brackets, it disrupts the flow of the lede as much as providing the birth and death dates of the subject of a biography in the first sentence does. That is to say, not at all. Double sharp (talk) 09:13, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Not confusing for anyone who knows anything about Latin, and those who don't aren't going to bother with it. Sorry, but if the Latin pronunciation of a Latin name -- one which several of you were apparently unable to predict despite thinking it was "obvious" -- isn't worth a note, then by implication Latin isn't worth bothering with. Hell, you couldn't even copy it right: I had to correct it for you. If Latin is such a waste of time, I wonder why we bother with articles for the gentes at all. If someone hits 'random article', these useless articles will disrupt the flow of their browsing through important topics like football players and Pokemon characters. — kwami (talk) 10:57, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

We have something similar now also at Marcia gens (back-and-forthing over the macron), so let's just keep it all here.

@P Aculeius: I am somewhat at a loss as to how to solve this. Clearly, a significant number of people here are not finding the pronunciation obvious. Okay, you've given a reasonable argument for not simply IPA-ing a particular version, say Classical Latin or traditional English, because some will be sticklers for each. (Could still be solved maybe by putting them all, but that's long. Maybe a footnote?) But each set of sticklers will have a right one in mind, and we can't reconstruct what either would find right without knowing which vowels are long. So, we can simply put the Latin spelling with vowel-length marks, and either set of sticklers will be able to predict what the pronunciation they'd want would be. That's what Kwamikagami then tried. Except that now you edit out the macron and write in the edit summaries: The Latin template isn't a pronunciation guide, and shouldn't be used as one. So, how are we supposed to indicate pronunciation then? Double sharp (talk) 13:30, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

• Comment, I really don't see the point of adding Latin spelling when it is the same as English. The only difference is the macron, but it is neither standard, nor useful. Most people will be confused by it and it clutters the lede. T8612 (talk) 14:07, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

The point is pronunciation. The pronunciation of the name is not obvious, but there are multiple systems in use to pronounce Latin words in an English context, so giving one pronunciation will probably annoy sticklers of the system we don't pick. Knowing the Latin will at least let you use them to figure out what the pronunciation you want is in your preferred system, but only if the Latin has long vowels marked. Double sharp (talk) 14:16, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

I edited two of them because I quickly realized that I was just going to get reverted—it simply took a couple of days before someone started reverting them. I left more than a dozen others because the impasse became obvious. There are literally hundreds of articles about Roman gentes, and none of them included pronunciation guides until people decided that this article needed one—all of the others got done by one of the participants here, solely because this discussion was taking place. But there is no single standard pronunciation guide for Roman names in English—most names are fairly intuitive, but there can be variations depending on which conventions someone chooses to apply. There doesn't seem to be much need to prescribe any one of them in any of these cases; these articles are written in English, so if pronunciation were to be indicated, the question would be how to do it in English, and there's no easy answer because of multiple conventions, but if you simply pronounce them as if they were English words or names, you'll generally be understood.

That is to say, we don't care whether you pronounce "Caecilius" /Sessillius/ or /Kaisillius/ or /Kaikillius/, because all are acceptable in English—but nobody is stressing over whether it shouldn't be /Kaikeeleeoose/ or any of the other possible variations—and it's not really that important to spend all the time or space that such a digression would require. These articles are largely biographical, not discussions of Latin grammar, except to the extent that the etymology of some names is known or can be guessed. This is one of those cases where arguing over pronunciation is far more trouble than it's worth, since English speakers should almost invariably pronounce "Manlius" /manly-uss/, without any prompting—and that's pretty much what would be expected; the only real difference in Latin would be the substitution of continental vowel sounds (in this case for the 'a'), and you don't even need to have studied Latin to know that.

Most Latin names are just as transparent, which is why you don't usually see pronunciation guides with Roman biographical articles, in or out of Wikipedia. You'll find them in dictionaries and grammars, but only rarely anywhere else. The use of macrons in a Latin dictionary is unambiguous, just as it is in an English dictionary, but they produce completely different sounds in three out of five vowels, and here have the potential to leave readers confused about which sound they indicate. Pronunciation guides are not particularly helpful with Latin names, since English speakers are free to make the distinctions they choose between pronunciations of 'c', 'g', 'j', and 'v', or different vowels and diphthongs, and all of the other letters are pronounced roughly the same way in both languages. But if an article doesn't have a pronunciation guide, then telling people that a Roman name is spelled the same way in Latin (of course it is) and citing a source is simply redundant. There are cases where it makes sense to include a Latin original—people need to know that "Mark Antony" is really "Marcus Antonius". But nobody needs to be told that the Latin for "Titus Manlius Torquatus" is "Titus Manlius Torquatus", nor does there need to be a source citation for that fact. It just clutters up the lead unnecessarily. P Aculeius (talk) 14:24, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

English speakers should almost invariably pronounce "Manlius" /manly-uss/, without any prompting – yes, that's what I'd do if I had to guess. But how do I know if it's right? I'd much prefer having something there that would help me confirm that yes, indeed, it is.

I can't see how you can possibly have any confusion if it read "Latin: Mānlius". Readers in the US interested in pronunciation would then presumably see the word "Latin" and realise that that macron is meant in the Latin sense. Readers not in the US don't use macrons for English pronunciation guides, so they'll correctly imagine that it's Latin anyway. And once we know that the original Latin had a long vowel there and not somewhere else, we are then free to make our pronunciation choices according to whatever system we prefer. Without that, we can't do that, at least without knowing more Latin than I guess you can reasonably expect for people who just encountered this name somewhere and want to know how to pronounce it "correctly" in whatever system they like best. All that for just one little diacritic mark that is completely unambiguous to everyone outside the US, and whose ambiguity is cleared up by the Latin-language template for everyone inside the US. And which can't be predicted unless you already know the Latin. What exactly is wrong with that? Double sharp (talk) 14:34, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

This article discusses a clan of people named Manlius, not the name Manlius: if readers find themselves here, chances are they don't care or want to know about it (if they even know how to interpret pronunciation guides correctly), and Wikipedia doesn't need to tell them. A pronunciation guide for an ordinary word is not directly relevant to the subject, and there's no reason to think that having one will aid the average reader's understanding of it; it also disrupts the flow of text. Also, Wiktionary exists. See MOS:PRON. Avilich (talk) 15:37, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Which helpfully informs us Normally, pronunciation is given only for the subject of the article in its lead section, which is exactly what I'm arguing for. Manlius is in the article's title, which I assume accurately reflects its subject, and I'd like to know how to pronounce it. And as I said, being one or two words, it disrupts the flow of text just as much as the parenthesis in something like "Carl Gauss (1777-1855) was a German mathematician and physicist" does. Which cannot be much since that is a standard practice. Double sharp (talk) 15:54, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

No, this is like having the lead read: "Carl Gauss (Ger. Carl Gauss^[1] 1777–1855) was a German mathematician and physicist", in which the added material serves no useful purpose. That's not actually how the article reads, for a variety of reasons—but I'm following from your example. In a case where the spelling actually changes significantly, it would be useful, as in my example of Mark Antony—an example of where, for primarily literary reasons, the name most widely known form of the name in English doesn't resemble the original Latin. P Aculeius (talk) 16:13, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

If the macron isn't there, then yes, it's pleonastic and not useful. But I was arguing for including the Latin with the macron, because my argument was that the macron provided non-pleonastic information that the reader interested in pronunciation could go and use. That seems pretty useful.

Now, I certainly don't object to leaving this, and pronunciation-related info more generally, to Wiktionary. Macrons are indeed mostly used in dictionaries, and this way the information is at least still somewhere, which to me is the important thing. But then shouldn't there be an easily found interwiki to it? Double sharp (talk) 16:28, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Finally you mention it: yes, interwiki links should be found on disambiguation pages, where the bare term itself is the main subject. Avilich (talk) 17:22, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Except, of course, that there is no disambiguation page in this case. Manlia redirects here. Double sharp (talk) 03:49, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

There's a dab page in the hatnote of this very article. There is no wiktionary entry or dab page for Manlia as of now, but nobody is preventing anyone from creating them. Avilich (talk) 15:29, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

That dab is for Manlius rather than Manlia. Presumably analogous, but why make the reader guess? Double sharp (talk) 08:03, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

Re "rubbing your noses into it", I didn't realize until this stupid insistence on ignorance that there could be a long vowel in a closed syllable. It was only a matter of where the stress lay; I maintain that we should provide that info so others won't have to spend the time to look it up like I did, assuming they'd even know where to look. But now that I've been corrected on that possibility, I added pronunciation guides to other gentes that have long vowels in closed syllables.

There are a few formats we could use to handle this:

1. Latin orthography indicating long vowels, which by modern convention is done with macrons
2. IPA linking to the Latin IPA key, perhaps with a {{sic}} template to show that the vowel length is not an error
3. A parenthetical "(punctuation)" linking to Wiktionary or to someplace else that indicates the pronunciation. Yes, that could be a dab page, but in this case plain "Manlia" rd's here.

I don't really care which, as long as the information is provided. It could also be a footnote, though in that case it should be a little longer to make it clear what we're indicating. If you really think readers aren't going to understand what a macron means in Latin, that would be the way to go: Macron or IPA, followed by a verbal explanation that the first vowel is long. — kwami (talk) 20:24, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Instead of taking advantage of this topic to thresh out the issues, you've simply continued warring until nobody can revert you without violating the three-revert rule, and ignoring what everyone opposed to you says about this being English, and you not being "censored" just because people think your edits are unhelpful. You've called people "vandals", "ignorant", "idiots", "stupid", and gotten your way through sheer stubbornness. Things are how you want them now, and nobody can revert you without achieving consensus, which obviously will never happen. I'm not going to waste my time carrying this ridiculous war across fifteen other pages just because you have to have the last word. I sincerely hope you're happy with the result, since a lot of other people aren't. P Aculeius (talk) 21:46, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

I really don't understand why you'd want to make an article purposefully obscure, or deny that Romans spoke Latin, so yeah, I'm going to be stubborn. — kwami (talk) 22:35, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

I think there's a completely standard way of giving foreign pronunciations, which is to use phonetic IPA. I'm not a huge fan of some aspects of this (the guardians of pronunciation keys for Italian insist on rendering, say, conversazione in a way that starts with [koɱv], which does represent a way that people sometimes pronounce it in practice but is extremely jarring if you're thinking phonemically). But even if the standard could be improved, it does seem to be the standard, and I don't know why we should invent something different for Latin gentes. Kwami, what would be wrong with doing that? --Trovatore (talk) 21:49, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, but that's really not the issue here. The main question is whether there needs to be a pronunciation guide at all, since English rules of pronunciation really only support one plausible pronunciation, and there doesn't seem to be any point in telling readers how they might pronounce it very slightly differently when speaking Latin. Added to which, the template currently used isn't even for pronunciation—it's for indicating the original spelling, which in this case is identical to the form used in English, with the addition of a macron—not used to spell the name in either Latin or English. P Aculeius (talk) 23:21, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

Macrons are a standard convention to mark vowel length in Latin, when that is the issue. By those standards, presumably we should give up lowercase letters when spelling Latin, since the Romans didn't use them either. And stop distinguishing between U and V, too.

The point of giving the Latin spelling is that it allows one to predict pronunciation from one's preferred system of pronouncing Latin words in English, without either being biased in favour of one system, or cluttering up the article with all of them. Double sharp (talk) 08:03, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

They're a convention of Latin grammars and dictionaries—not of written Latin in any period. That's why we write, e pluribus unum, not ē plūribus ūnum. By adding macrons wherever a dictionary supplies one, we would be prescribing one manner of pronunciation—but it would be for speaking Latin, not English, since that isn't the natural pronunciation in English, and a macron used in English pronunciation indicates a sound that would be incorrect for either English or Latin. If, as you state, we're not telling people what method of pronunciation to use in English—something I agree with—then we shouldn't be giving them a pronunciation that only applies when speaking Latin, any more than we would tell them how to say it in French or Italian, where yet different pronunciation rules apply. The article is aimed at English speakers speaking English, and Latin names don't usually require any explanation to be pronounced in English. P Aculeius (talk) 13:51, 15 December 2021 (UTC)