Talk:Kŭrdzhali

Does this town really have a standard English spelling with a non-standard English letter (ŭ) in it? — Hippietrail 09:47, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)

The standard English transliteration of Bulgarian does use ŭ, so inasmuch as this is a transliteration of a Bulgarian word, ŭ is acceptable (older transliterations seem to have used a). However there doesn't appear to be any basis for "Kh-", it should be Kŭrdzhali. Wikipedia uses no breve: w:Kurdzhali_(region).

However the more common variants on the Web appear to be Kardjali and Kurdjali, with the latter having some prominent hits such as Weather Underground and Tourist association “Kurdjali”, but with Kardjali more common overall (12,500 Google hits); Kardjali is used on the Bulgarian Government's website. PCL Maps collection though has Bulgaria maps that generally use the ŭ, minus one with just u, and another that doesn't have Kŭrdzhali on it. —Muke Tever 17:08, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Well if it's just a foreign word written in one transliteration, it doesn't really belong. We can add the English word and the word in other languages in their native scripts, but we don't add just any old transliterations we come across. A very few languages have very standardized transliterations much used by English speakers or speakers of latin-alphabet languages. Japanese Romaji and Chinese Pinyin being the obvious ones. Other languages have a miriad of non-standard systems (Arabic and Thai), or several competing systems which haven't fully caught on (Korean).

I think entering Pinyin and Romaji is wise - there are many many print dictionaries which do this. Other languages we should just stick with the "usual" English word (vague though that may be), and the native word in its native script(s).

— Hippietrail 03:52, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)

This city and region do not seem to be popular enough to have a "usual" name, but it has been written about in English and I think we do have to catalogue that—and until something happens in Кърджали that brings it to the fore of English-speakers' consciousness and makes them (or the Кърджали government) settle on a standard form, it has to go somewhere, Note that the CIA maps [1] do use English forms, such as "Sofia" for София (Sofiya), the capital, so "Kŭrdzhali" is not a matter of straight transliteration, but informed romanizations.

I do think that (in absence of a standard form) other attested English forms of the word should be listed, especially ones used by major English-language sources about Bulgaria, but also Bulgarian-speakers in English contexts. (Researching this I have also found variants with final -y instead of -i...) Forms that get chosen as standard are occasionally weird (find rants about Cracow vs Kraków lying around, or "Corea") and in the absence of a standard, what should we use instead? A prescriptive or descriptive form? —Muke Tever 06:31, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Well sometimes description can get out of hand. Have a look at the spellings of Muamwar Gadhaffi sometime - we could probably do dozens of entries just on his name. But would that be sensible? — And that would only be the ones without diacritics! If we wanted to describe every way of writing it that we could find, we could probably give somebody a full time job!

Anyway, there are rare exceptions, but generally when a word is borrowed into English it doesn't keep any diacritics which may be used in transliterations/romanizations (informed or otherwise). English is very resistant to diacritics. (It isn't me - I love the curly little things - really)

Anyway, Sofia is the usual way to write it. I know that some ex-USSR countries are asking that certain English spellings of place names are changed - mostly to remove Russifications. Sofiya might be one of these new spellings. Belarus has done the same. I know Kiev has a new spelling now too.

If a word is being ranted about, that's probably good enough reason to describe it. I'd vote in favour of including Corea. I'd vote against including Koreja, Koreya, Korêya, Karėja, Korejă, Qurijai, Qūriyâ-yi, Korejai, Kôreyâ-yi, Kūriyā, Kōriyā-ye, Kore-ye, Koreyā, Koriyā, Kore'ā, Qōrē'a, Koréa, umm well maybe I've made my point...

I'm saying use the ones that are used in general English writing, don't use the ones that appear to be descriptions or the pronunciation or the native spelling, but are not used otherwise.

— Hippietrail 07:12, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)

We don't have to make entries for all these... But if they are used, they should be listed as alternate spellings (and linked, so that if someone tries to look it up by a different name, they can get to it from "What links here"—btw, is there any way we can get that list included in the There is currently no text in this page message? That could be inordinately useful...)

Any case, while English may be resistant to diacritics in general, when it comes to place names it's different: if a word is spelled both with and without a diacritic, the sans-diacritic version may be more common (since people can't type many of them) but the plus-diacritic is felt as more correct (cf. w:Zürich, w:São Tomé and Príncipe, w:Côte d'Ivoire), and people look to dictionaries to tell them where the diacritics should stand... I expect that if Кърджали made it into the news tomorrow it would be Kurdzhali, mainly because the u-breve isn't in Latin-1, but in sources that have access to proper typography, it will be Kŭrdzhali. (However there is at least one authority resource that lists "Kurdzhali": Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names.) —Muke Tever 17:41, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Quite a big discussion, huh. There's been some regulation since the 1950s saying that the phonem Ъ should be transliterated as "ŭ". But I don't think that this makes sense cuz a typewriter doesn't have this character. In my book, the page should be moved to Kardzhali. The English letter "a" most closely resembles Bulgarian "ъ". But nobody will ever type Kŭrdzhali - or at least no Bulgarian. Some people write "y" at the end of such words, because they think that this will make English speakers to pronounced "Kurdzhali" as a long 'e'. I personally don't think that's correct - I mean, replacing "i" with "y" at the end of words. --Webkid 19:57, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Actually I think the standard spelling in English would be Kurdzhali, which actually reflects the pronunciation better—a may suggest a ъ-like sound in general (You're Bulgarian — we're talking schwa here, right?), but before r suggests a sound more like /ɑr/ (as in English "are"). [Note again that "Kurdzhali" is what Wikipedia uses.]

Looking at it now I expect that the common name "Kurdzhali" took hold in English (as an accentless rendering, over the 1:1 Romanization "Kŭrdžali", which can't drop its accents unambiguously) and that the breve, while not essential, belongs according to the diacritics-make-better-spelling "rule" I mentioned above. —Muke Tever 15:54, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)