Talk:Qatraneh

Pls coordinate new articles about Jordan - districts, towns, historical sites

Here we have Qatraneh district, Qatraneh town, Qatraneh hajj fort, Qatraneh power plant. Each one was apparently created w/o knowing of the others, each spelled in a different way, which is very misleading and unprofessional (Al-Qaṭrāneh [district], Qatraneh [town], Qasr al-Qatraneh [khan], Qatrana Power Plant).

There should be rules observed.

• Look up long-established English name versions and transliterations: There isn't just no need to reinvent the wheel, but it's counterproductive. English transliteration of Arabic has been practiced and perfected for centuries, for the better use of English native-speakers. Also, many places have long-established English names and fighting them can be counterproductive, and sometimes ridiculous. Brits didn't try to colonise Bavaria when they called München, Munich; they just adapted it to their pronunciation. So in English Damascus is not Dimashq, and it's Petra, not Batra.

• Arabic article, yes or no: In English the Arabic article al- is usually dropped, especially when sites are already known from English-language literature, from archaeology books to guidebooks and magazines. So Fort Qatrana[h] rather than Qasr al-Qatraneh, as qasr doesn't mean anything to somebody who doesn't speak Arabic. Maybe not the right example, but think of Petra: nobody in the West calls it al-Batra. Cities like Zarqa, Mafraq, Tafilah should be left alone, without the article (as they are now). These are large cities, but articles on smaller towns tend not to follow this rule on Wiki (see Al-Muwaqqar).

• Article: NOT always with an L. In English the standard transliteration is phonetical. So an-Nasara, ash-Shawbak, adh-Dharih and so on, and NOT uniformly el-...
• Article capitalisation: If the article is used, it's written upper-case only if at the beginning of a sentence: Al-Qatrana, but Qasr al-Qatrana.

• Article followed by hyphen: The article should ALWAYS be followed by a hyphen. The El or Al are not names, they are articles of the following noun or adjective. So el-something. El Cid is El Cid, he made it into literature this way, but that is an exception, not the rule, and it's a name used in Spanish, not a rigurous transliteration of an Arabic name, as we should have here.

• Transliteration (vowels, endings): The classical English transliteration of the ending is -eh, sometimes -ah, but -a is used more often now. The Department of Antiquities has issued guidelines, which aren't necessarily great, but exist. They tend to move away from the British-era system, which works well in English phonetically, and adopt others, which might not. Example: the article was usually rendered as el- and the DA pushes al-. Whatever. We're trying to make the items as recognisable for the search function as possible, so we should use the most common English spelling, unless it's totally wrong, should have preference. Misconstruing this as a matter of "decolonisation" is nonsense, good philo-Arab researchers have always done their best to open Arab culture to their English-speaking audiences. and they acted as English native-speakers. Disregard them at your own peril.

This said, it all applies well to items of interest for science and tourism. With administrative units, if local authorities (the central ones are more accustomed & at ease with English) are stubbornly insisting on forms like Al Mafraq (that is: with the article, with capitalised Al, no hyphen), we might need to consider what's best for the Wiki user in terms of searchability. All smart guidebooks have "town of Mafraq", but maybe the PC fashion is changing that. To me personally it smacks of provincialism and lack of knowledge of the well-thought-out, long-established rules, i.e. of non-native speakers trying to literally transfer something to a language largely foreign to them that works differently, and with no knowledge of what already exists and is well-established in that language.

Jordan is a great country to visit, even from one's armchair, so let's make it as user-friendly as possible. Cheers, Arminden (talk) 22:35, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Armiden; to me this looks as if you are trying to force the Arab name into one, and one only English name. In general; linguists who are knowledgeable in Arabic do no such thing; we simply cannot translate into one name only. That point were clearly made to me, when I more than 20 years ago passed a public building in Damascus, where the name of Bashar al-Assad was spelled in 3(!) different ways in English on outside banners. (I now regret not taking pictures of that :()

The best way of making this searchable is to make as many redirs as possible, IMO. Also; names are not constants; say, I grew up calling a country Ceylon, a name which are not used today, Huldra (talk) 23:45, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

@Huldra: hi. Not at all. It's about recognisability. And look at the concrete example: the power plant chose its own name, that's branding and is of course allowed. But using diacritics in the title is counterproductive; it might make sense when dealing with strictly scientific items, such as cuneiform tablets, but not with modern administrative terms. Using the article for the district, but not for the town which gave the name to the district is nonsense. People add w/o checking that the name already exists, and the result is chaos - both in spelling, and in connecting the two (what you mentioned). It leads to insular, orphan articles.

Your al-Assad example is supposed to prove exactly what? All "developing" countries in terms of linguistic globalisation, including the Arab countries you & I know, the Israel I know, China,... you call it, get it wrong until they start standardising transliteration. If you feel a nostalgia for the "wild times", I understand and share it with you, but not on Wiki. E.T. Lawrence had the same attitude, but he was a romantic and adventurer who never wasted his time on writing encyclopedias.

It would of course be best to add as many redirects as one can rationally think of, but first enWiki needs to have a standardised transliteration system. If established forms exist, they have priority; where not, the standard applies. Why? The only reason we're here should be to make info as easily accessible for the Wiki user, who should be able to recognise a system in the madness. You can also put in all the variants under "Name" or "Etymology", creating even more search words, no problem, but not in the title: district with Al, district capital w/o, landmark with Al- (with hyphen), and maybe more articles w more variations. That's crazy–in an encyclopedia. On Tik Tok no, it's a great joke, like that Chinese supermarket with a supposed name banner over the entrance reading "Translation Error. Try again." Humour (of the unintended kind) is one thing, an encyclopedia another.

There are legitimate differences between countries. Syria was a French mandate, Jordan a British one, they can decide on their own transliteration standards based on that and on local dialects. I'm not talking of that, and that must be respected. I'm just talking of spelling standards within a country. If a name changes, we change "Ceylon" to "Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon", like we always do - what is the relevance to this discussion here? Encyclopedias use standards. The rest is travel literature, or "Seven Pillars of Wisdom", where Lawrence mocked what I'm suggesting here - his right, in a book of what's called today docudrama. Different genre. Cheers, Arminden (talk) 10:55, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

"All "developing" countries"? Excuse me for saying so, User:Arminden, but you sound pretty ethnocentric here; look at it from the Arab side: could it be that the Western languages are simply not rich enough to accommodate Arabic? Also, Lawrence (unlike you(?) or me) actually knew Arabic. So he lived a zillion years ago, but do you have any present Arabic scholars who support your view? Names, please? Huldra (talk) 21:10, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Huldra, if you misread what I'm writing, it makes no sense in discussing anything. I wrote "All "developing" countries in terms of linguistic globalisation". And included explicitely Arab countries, Israel, and China.

Ethnocentric supposes that I'm placing one ethnos at the centre. Which would be...?

Take any Oxford dictionary you can find. It's about the work of all of the best Arabists, both Arabs and non-Arabs, who have worked and developed a number of transliteration systems to the Latin alphabet, resulting in a mainstream trend or standard, over many years, especially the last 200. And transliteration has absolutely nothing to do with how "rich" Western languages are or not, because "rich" refers to the lexical and semantic capacity of languages, and I'm talking about phonetics. Apples and oranges. Phonetically you can assign signs to an infinity of sounds based on the Latin alphabet by modifying letters and adding diacritics where needed. In the popular version of the resulting system, which is what's employed in the press and on Wiki, most if not all diacritics and modified letters are dropped, or else you have 99% of the readers ignore something they perceive as typos or gibbrish.

It's time and again the same story: I'm bringing up what I consider to be technical points which I believe to be useful in objective communication, in avoiding mix-ups and chaos; and the pushback comes in terms of Newspeak and political comments from the "P.C." camp. Where the C in "P.C." has nothing to do with correctness in the sense of factual objectivity, and everything with subjective perceptions and points of view.

One can bring valid and objective arguments on how well one transliteration is better (more useful or accurate) than another, or how local specifics or other context-based variations require different codes. But that seldom happens.

Unless you address what I'm actually saying, there is no base for this discussion. Cheers, Arminden (talk) 09:43, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

I am not a linguist; (never said I was); but the first article I started in the I/P area was Sabri Jiryis. I had a hell of a time finding the books he has published in Europe, as he publish under several differen translation of his name for different countries. How do you solve that? Huldra (talk) 20:47, 8 December 2021 (UTC)