A question to all regarding titles

Hello everyone!

Newbie here, but keen to help the gallery out. I would like to know if there is an official policy on the language the titles of entries should use; should they be in the native language or in English? Recently I filed a suggestion to change “5 Reichsmark” to “5 Reichsmarks”, using the English plural. This question is especially relevant for coins and banknotes issued by multilingual polities; in many cases the English name would avoid siding with any single language, particularly in the case of polities such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Thanks in advance, happy collecting.

Stendec

Hello everyone!

Newbie here, but keen to help the gallery out. I would like to know if there is an official policy on the language the titles of entries should use; should they be in the native language or in English? Recently I filed a suggestion to change “5 Reichsmark” to “5 Reichsmarks”, using the English plural. This question is especially relevant for coins and banknotes issued by multilingual polities; in many cases the English name would avoid siding with any single language, particularly in the case of polities such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Thanks in advance, happy collecting.

Everything is described in the guidelines: https://en.numista.com/catalogue/contributions/instructions.php

Edit: And of course, welcome to Numista 🙂

Everything is described in the guidelines: https://en.numista.com/catalogue/contributions/instructions.php

 

Edit: And of course, welcome to Numista 🙂

Cheers! I'll cite the specific guidelines in future ^^

Stendec

Hello everyone!

Newbie here, but keen to help the gallery out. I would like to know if there is an official policy on the language the titles of entries should use; should they be in the native language or in English? Recently I filed a suggestion to change “5 Reichsmark” to “5 Reichsmarks”, using the English plural. This question is especially relevant for coins and banknotes issued by multilingual polities; in many cases the English name would avoid siding with any single language, particularly in the case of polities such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Thanks in advance, happy collecting.

I can't agree with your assertion that using English would avoid siding with any single language. You're simply siding with English, a language of no relevance to an issuer like Austria-Hungary. You won't find the word “Reichmarks” on any coin or note, so please don't try to anglicize the titles. It simply isn't an improvement.

Please do a little backtrack on this. In the future, we will list both english and local spelling, so this argument will loose all relevancy.

Inscription fields are already covering the search in local language, imo for instance titles can (and should) use french/english language without any issues at all for users (like plural forms notably)

No.

What an enormous waste of time this is going to be for referees.

May I suggest that you employ your time more usefully by perhaps assisting with filling in missing details in entries that need it rather than submitting dozens of change requests on a contentious issue when you yourself are not sure if such action is the correct way to proceed, as evidenced by your creation of this topic. 

And. You might have just sent me one change as a test, rather than carpet bombing the Finnish banknote section with these requests!

Regarding Finnish banknotes, I disagree with your assertion, as a justification for your change request,  that English should be used as a compromise because Finland has two official languages, neither of which is English. Why not use French? Indeed, Chinese would be more appropriate as there are more Chinese speakers than there are English speakers, and a lot of Chinese people collect banknotes. 

Finnish is the first language used on many of the notes. In some cases for early notes, Swedish is the dominant language on the face of the notes. In many cases both languages have equal weight. In Finland the majority of the population use Finnish as their first language. The titles reflect this. Where either language is the dominant one (that is, more than 50% of the text on the face of the note is in that language, or the face of that note is entirely in that language) on a banknote, it is used in the title. Where both languages have equal weight, Finnish is used, as it is the dominant language in Finland.

As such, for the Finnish banknote section, most titles use Finnish, and a few use use Swedish in the title.

Incidentally, there is little difference between the Finnish term for 10 Markka, the Swedish (10 Mark) and the English (10 Marks).

Politics doesn't come into it. If it did, all the titles would be in Finnish.😁

Surely, part of the fun of banknote collecting is learning the numbers in the languages on foreign notes.

You will have some fun with Irish banknotes, as the later notes are entirely in Irish on the face, and in English on the reverse. A design decision that was not influenced by politics.

I respectfully request that you withdraw all of these change requests. It will take me rather longer to address them than it would take for you to withdraw them.

As the referee for Ireland's banknotes, I heartily concur with Hibernia. We have carefully constructed the titles to reflect the languages used on the notes. Since this is a catalogue, that's the only thing that matters.

@ Stendec
Thanks for your pm. As you declined to withdraw your 37 modification requests, I have rejected them - it didn't take as long as I thought it would, so no worries mate.

I've got hundred of requests to chabhe Ruble/Rubles to Rouble/Roubles as well as change So‘m to Soum.

Yay or nay?

ngdawa

I've got hundred of requests to chabhe Ruble/Rubles to Rouble/Roubles as well as change So‘m to Soum.

 

Yay or nay?

If we're going to use the transliteration Ruble, we should also use transliterations of the proper plural forms rather than the hybrid “Rubles”. As for Soʻm, it's on the coins and notes, so why change it? We're getting foreign and local forms of all terms as separate fields at some stage, so I'd suggest keeping the local form where we already have it, then add the foreign forms when the new fields are introduced.

I apply the following:
Title uses the original spelling on the banknote or coin.
English language translation is in British English.

If So'm were to be changed to its English language version, it seems to me that it ought to be Som, not Soum [both apparently are valid spellings of the translation, according to my google search on it].

I seem to recall a discussion over the spelling of Ruble, can't find it now. However, Ruble sounds phonetically more accurate than Rouble imho.

I dont know for Soum but Rouble is indeed the correct spelling in british english

Hibernia

I apply the following:
Title uses the original spelling on the banknote or coin.
English language translation is in British English.

 

If So'm were to be changed to its English language version, it seems to me that it ought to be Som, not Soum [both apparently are valid spellings of the translation, according to my google search on it].

 

I seem to recall a discussion over the spelling of Ruble, can't find it now. However, Ruble sounds phonetically more accurate than Rouble imho.

An issue with Google is that they default to American English at all times. A problem with a lot of foreign websites is that they sometimes throw things into translation software without ever checking the results. Goznak's English website consistently uses the spelling “rouble”, but the Central Bank of Russia's website is inconsistent because some articles are written in Russian and then run through translation software instead of being manually translated. When Russian government materials are written in English they tend to hold to the Oxford spelling.

The Central Bank of Uzbekistan's website is also inconsistent, some parts of the website seem to have been run through translation software while others were translated by someone who speaks English. The gallery of current and withdrawn banknotes on their website lists some issues with the spelling “sum”, but the current set of banknotes are all listed as “soum”.

The official translation of the Uzbek constitution cites the currency as the soum (Article 150).

Which country suffix are you referring to when you mention ‘google’?

An inference I would take from the tone and content of your reply is that you are presupposing that I rely on google.com as a first level source of information. 
Not so. 
I suppose that I was not sufficiently precise in my post when I loosely used the term ‘google’ in mentioning that I used google to find websites as sources of information. Generally, the inference from the usage of the term ‘google’ in this context would be that google was being used to access websites which would provide information rather than relying on google itself as a source of information. Sorry for any lack of clarity there.

Google is a search engine. I use it to find websites which might provide me with answers to my questions. We look through the list of websites and chose a few to view before arriving at a conclusion. One rarely accepts the first result on a google search. Google’s competitors are also frequently useful.

Note, I make use of google with varying suffixes: .ie, .fi, .com, .pl, .ro, depending on what I am looking up.

Hibernia

Which country suffix are you referring to when you mention ‘google’?

 

An inference I would take from the tone and content of your reply is that you are presupposing that I rely on google.com as a first level source of information. 
Not so. 
I suppose that I was not sufficiently precise in my post when I loosely used the term ‘google’ in mentioning that I used google to find websites as sources of information. Generally, the inference from the usage of the term ‘google’ in this context would be that google was being used to access websites which would provide information rather than relying on google itself as a source of information. Sorry for any lack of clarity there.

 

Google is a search engine. I use it to find websites which might provide me with answers to my questions. We look through the list of websites and chose a few to view before arriving at a conclusion. One rarely accepts the first result on a google search. Google’s competitors are also frequently useful.

Note, I make use of google with varying suffixes: .ie, .fi, .com, .pl, .ro, depending on what I am looking up.

I meant .co.uk, all of the English on it is American English (color etc.)

Glad to hear you don't use it as a primary source. It appears you use it in the same way I do. 

ceh2019

ngdawa

I've got hundred of requests to chabhe Ruble/Rubles to Rouble/Roubles as well as change So‘m to Soum.

 

Yay or nay?

If we're going to use the transliteration Ruble, we should also use transliterations of the proper plural forms rather than the hybrid “Rubles”. As for Soʻm, it's on the coins and notes, so why change it? We're getting foreign and local forms of all terms as separate fields at some stage, so I'd suggest keeping the local form where we already have it, then add the foreign forms when the new fields are introduced.

I agree!

Me personally would like to see the following:

• USSR catalogue: Kopeyka → Kopeyki → kopeek; Rubl → Rublya → Rubley
• Russian catalogue: Kopeyka → kopeek; Rubl → Rublya → Rubley
• Transnistria catalogue: Kopeyka → Kopeek; Rubl → Rublya → Rubley
• Belarus catalogue: Kapeika → Kapeiki → Kapejek; Rubiel → Rubli → Rublow
• Ukrainian catalogue: Kopijka → Kopijky → Kopijok; Hryvnia → Hryvni → Hryven

I know I'm a vast minority about this, so I have't even bothered to raise the question about it.

I also want to clear that I wpuldn't mind if the spelling of Ruble changed to Rouble, but that should be an easy fix for the Numista Robot, right? I have currebtly 200 requests.

When it comes to Uzbek So‘m I am more conservative and would not accept a change to Soum. I could see a reason if they still used the Cyrillic script – Сўм – as the letter ў could be confusing to many. But now they use the Latin script, to why change the spelling? Also, to me “Soum” would be pronounced as “zoom” (but with an s), while the letter O‘, Cyrillic Ў, is more pronounced as “o” in “boy”.

I feel that the section about the language of the currencies has created more problem and confusion that what it was intended to. Maybe it should be corrected to only cover currency names written in other scriots than Latin? Otherwise we have quite a few Krona/Krone/Korun/Korona varieties that, according to the new guidelines, should be changed to Crown.

Thank you.

I already asked the requestor to stop making these requests for now. As someone mentioned here already, in most cases, we have “local” spelling for now, which sometimes differ from English dictionaries. As we will have local and english fields in the future, it is not really needed to change local to English now and then look up the local version again and add it. In my opinion it would be better to wait a bit, until we have both those fields and then update/correct all at once.

Jarcek

I already asked the requestor to stop making these requests for now. As someone mentioned here already, in most cases, we have “local” spelling for now, which sometimes differ from English dictionaries. As we will have local and english fields in the future, it is not really needed to change local to English now and then look up the local version again and add it. In my opinion it would be better to wait a bit, until we have both those fields and then update/correct all at once.

So, I am free to reject all requests? 🤪

And again, please review the guidelines' phraseology, as this is the reason for the confusion: “All currencies are listed in English in the database, according to the main listings (not alternative forms) of Oxford English Dictionary and Wiktionary.com.”

In many countries and languages you no longer translate names. In older Swedish texts, you will find lots of “Swedifications” of names. For example, the French city of Bordeaux was spelled Bordå, to match the pronunciation.

Also, you may know of Martin Luther, he who wrote the Luther's Catechisms and the Ninety-five Theses. At this time the name Martin was unheard of in Sweden, so here he was known as Mårten, since Mårten was a common name.

Well, it probably goes without saying that we don't do this anymore. So to me it sounds very weird to translate names. Transliteration from other scripts, on the other hand, is a totally different thing.

Thank you!

ngdawa

When it comes to Uzbek So‘m I am more conservative and would not accept a change to Soum. I could see a reason if they still used the Cyrillic script – Сўм – as the letter ў could be confusing to many. But now they use the Latin script, to why change the spelling? Also, to me “Soum” would be pronounced as “zoom” (but with an s), while the letter O‘, Cyrillic Ў, is more pronounced as “o” in “boy”.

Materials which appear to have been originally written in or manually translated into English rather than machine translated, such as the Uzbek constitution and many parts of the CBU's website, do use “soum” as the English form. This appears to be because they transliterate via Russian rather than directly from Uzbek into English (the Russian version of the name is “сум”). While Uzbek does use a Latin alphabet today, it is more common to see words transliterated from the Russian versions. For example one usually sees the name of the capital city written as “Tashkent” in English, which is the transliteration of the Russian name.

Stendec

ngdawa

When it comes to Uzbek So‘m I am more conservative and would not accept a change to Soum. I could see a reason if they still used the Cyrillic script – Сўм – as the letter ў could be confusing to many. But now they use the Latin script, to why change the spelling? Also, to me “Soum” would be pronounced as “zoom” (but with an s), while the letter O‘, Cyrillic Ў, is more pronounced as “o” in “boy”.

Materials which appear to have been originally written in or manually translated into English rather than machine translated, such as the Uzbek constitution and many parts of the CBU's website, do use “soum” as the English form. This appears to be because they transliterate via Russian rather than directly from Uzbek into English (the Russian version of the name is “сум”). While Uzbek does use a Latin alphabet today, it is more common to see words transliterated from the Russian versions. For example one usually sees the name of the capital city written as “Tashkent” in English, which is the transliteration of the Russian name.

Oh, don't get me started on the former USSR. 😅

Even the countries' names are from Russian. Uzbekistan in Uzbek is O‘zbekistan, and as you said, Tashkent in Uzbek (O‘zbek) is Toshkent.

Here we also find “the lost -stan country”, Armenia, which is called Hayastan in Armenian.

The problem with taking the dictionary form of a currency is that the dictionaries are seldom uodated. Yes, new words are being added, but spellings are rarely updated. Whwn was “Soum” added to the dictionary? And how much is the word used that people has find a reason to revise the spelling?

ngdawa

Oh, don't get me started on the former USSR. 😅

Even the countries' names are from Russian. Uzbekistan in Uzbek is O‘zbekistan, and as you said, Tashkent in Uzbek (O‘zbek) is Toshkent.

Here we also find “the lost -stan country”, Armenia, which is called Hayastan in Armenian.

 

The problem with taking the dictionary form of a currency is that the dictionaries are seldom uodated. Yes, new words are being added, but spellings are rarely updated. Whwn was “Soum” added to the dictionary? And how much is the word used that people has find a reason to revise the spelling?

I presume the reason so much stuff is transcribed from Russian is because few scholars in, say, Georgia, could speak English and few English-speaking scholars could speak Georgian, so they used Russian to communicate with each other (unrelated but interesting point: when China and Albania were best buddies nobody in China could speak Albanian and nobody in Albania could speak Mandarin, so they had to talk to each other in Russian, the language of their mutual enemy!)

Dictionaries are a difficult one, which is why I used Uzbek government websites as a source.