Talk:The Fair at Sorochyntsi (short story)

Sorochyntsi / Sorochintsï

We need to rationalise the spelling of this word. In the articles on the place and the traditional fair, it’s spelled "Sorochyntsi". But in the articles on Gogol's short story and Mussorgsky's opera, it’s "Sorochintsï".

I don’t support "Sorochintsï", on 2 grounds:

• it’s inconsistent with the other spellings; the spelling of the name of a place should govern the spelling of the names of things named after the place
• an umlauted "i" (ï) is not a recognised character in English, and this is, after all, English Wikipedia.

Now, we should generally leave opera and book titles alone, no matter if they’re misspelled by their authors. But in this case, Gogol and Mussorgsky used a correctly-spelled Russian title "Сорочинская ярмарка". This can have a variety of translations, but they should all be correctly spelled.

Traditionally, it was "Sorochinsky Fair", but these days that’s not supported as it’s using a Russian adjective rather than an English one (it would be like calling Moscow University, "Moskovsky University"). So, we’re down to either "<name of place> Fair" or "The Fair at <name of place>". The latter seems to have prevailed in the literature, although the former is also seen. For the reasons stated above, the best option would seem to be "The Fair at Sorochyntsi", and that’s what I propose we move the short story and opera articles to. -- JackofOz (talk) 01:25, 8 July 2008 (UTC)