Talk:Prahova River

RFD discussion: February 2021–December 2022

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This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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Prahova River

Prahova County

Dâmbovița River

Bistrița River

Sum-of-parts entries. – Einstein2 (talk) 15:08, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

• Delete. And English Dâmbovița is probably a misspelling of Dambovita. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 15:47, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

  @Vox Sciurorum: I added cites; why “probably a misspelling”? J3133 (talk) 16:29, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

  When I searched the version with native English characters seemed dominant, though I didn't try to quantify. I don't believe English words with diacritics should be added unless they are common enough not to be considered a rare misspelling. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 17:04, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

  I do not consider rare forms misspellings (i.e., spelled incorrectly), as frequency is obviously not the only factor. Although diacritics (which are correct here) are generally less common now, they are a part of English and should not be discarded as “misspellings” due to the learnèd being outnumbered (and, evidently, losing the “battle”, if their spellings become labelled as incorrect). J3133 (talk) 18:10, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

  To emphasize how ridiculous your claim is, I do not expect you would write that the Wikipedia article should be renamed because it is “incorrect”. J3133 (talk) 06:12, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

  I think quite a large number of article titles on Wikipedia should be respelled as English words. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 14:02, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

• Definitely delete the three river entries. Our entries for river names regularly do not include the word "river". The county entry is more complicated, because our entries for U.S. counties (rather foolishly, in my opinion) do include the word "County". So if, say, Travis County isn't SOP, then Prahova County isn't either. Personally I think Travis County is SOP and should be deleted, but apparently at some point there was a consensus that it isn't. —Mahāgaja · talk 06:40, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

US counties are usually named after something or somebody, so adding the affix makes sense. The only English county with this treatment is County Durham, but in Ireland County Wexford is included in Wexford for some reason, the same with the other Irish and Northern Irish counties. Red River would look silly as just "Red". It's difficult to decide how to treat northern UK rivers affixed "water" or "burn", and Welsh rivers can use "afon", "river" or both. DonnanZ (talk) 10:42, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

Above: "Our entries for river names regularly do not include the word "river"." Here are the counterexamples: Yellow River, Pearl River, Mississippi River, Huai River, Yuan River, etc. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 02:38, 5 March 2021 (UTC) (modified)

• As a term, and something that would go in a dictionary, this is SOP, and refers to a river called Bistrița. For that matter, this is oddly spelled at that -- English writers use diacritics exceedingly sparingly, not least as diacritics are not a native feature of English orthography. I don't even know what to call that little T-shaped dash thingie under the second T in Bistrița.

As terms, we should ostensibly have entries for English Bistrita and English river. I notice we have an English entry for Bistrița; googling around just now, I see that the version without diacritics is roughly four times more common, so we would probably be better served to have our English lemma entry at Bistrita instead.

As a thing, there should be a Wikipedia article for w:Bistrita River.

If we are to have any Wiktionary entry for English Bistrita River, I see on Wikipedia that there are several geographic locations with this name, so presumably any entry here should also mention this. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 01:36, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

• Delete all, in addition, they should be written without diacritics in English. We should also consider deleting the English entry for Chișinău too. --Robbie SWE (talk) 19:16, 20 February 2021 (UTC)
• Keep or remove diacritics - In Wikipedia:British English, River usually comes before (corrected) the river's name, e.g. Wikipedia:River Thames, although Thames River and just Thames redirect there in WP. I think if we're going to have these geographical features that we voted for, we should put them in their (native) English name or the most common English translation of the (non-English) name. Facts707 (talk) 00:24, 14 May 2021 (UTC)
• Literally look up some quotes The problem is solved immediately if no quotes can be found- deletion for lack of attestation. The problem is put under a more nuanced light if quotes can be found. The only answer is to make the attempt to find cites and then go from there. I have found three quotes for Bistrița River and I've added them on the Bistrița River page and the Bistrița page. Now we aren't making a decision in a vacuum.
  The idea that certain geographical terms "should be written without diacritics in English" is proscriptive, which is a fine rule but is not descriptive of the actual condition of the edge of 21st century English as it interacts with other languages. Not everyone has to know the name of the "little T-shaped dash thingie" for a word to be a legitimate part of expert-level English. This same type of issue came up a week back. I took a situation like this and literally blew it out of the water by finding relevant cites- see Jõgeva. You can scream "code-switching" til you're blue in the face, but English language sentences are talking about non-English speaking areas, and those authors are using some diacritics like we know what's going on. Here's Chișinău in English: [1]. The dictionary is descriptive not proscriptive, and the expert English users DO use the diacritics of other languages in English, journalists &c. left aside. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 00:35, 14 May 2021 (UTC) (modified)
• Hey @Einstein2, Facts707, J3133, Robbie SWE, Vox Sciurorum@Donnanz, Eirikr, Mahagaja: I have added three durably archived citations for the three 'River' entries above (see those pages). Now we know for sure that these concepts are used in English language documents, and the only question is whether Wiktionary will include them as entries. I'm invested in the topic because I like my citations on Yellow River, which extend to the early Modern English, and I'm afraid of a "SOP for all 'Name+River' entries" policy. (I guess I could move all my cites to the yellow page if needed, but it might be strange.) Anyway, I'm doing the mass reply to see if anyone's opinions are changed by any of this or my two comments above. If your opinions haven't changed, no need to respond. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 11:31, 10 June 2021 (UTC) (modified)

  For Yellow River, we can define Yellow as a proper noun, "{{place|en|river|c/China}}, full name Yellow River." And follow this model for rivers in general. A dictionary defines words. An encyclopedia defines concepts; Yellow River on Wikipedia needs both words. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 14:02, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

  The problem with that is that "Yellow" isn't a proper noun. Based on the citations, no one calls the Yellow River "the Yellow" or anything similar. Either we shouldn't cover it at all, or it should remain at Yellow River. Anything else would be a glaring inaccuracy on our part.

  Your last point also confuses me. A dictionary defines terms, not just words. Should we delete all multiword entries? Binarystep (talk) 10:16, 10 June 2022 (UTC)

  @Vox Sciurorum: As @Binarystep said, Yellow is not the normal way to refer to the river. But perhaps alien lects (e.g. Murrican?) find it unusual to omit River from the names of rivers. I know Thai and related languages have difficulty omitting classificatory words from names of types of birds, fish and sometimes fruit. --RichardW57m (talk) 12:03, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

• Keep all until we have a better idea how to systematically treat this. E.g. Bistrița River seems attested as spelled[2], with diacritics, and we should go by attestation; if this is non-standard and we have good reason to believe so, it should be so marked. The problem is that River is capitalized, making it part of the proper name. Various treatments are possible, including a redirect. The rationale "sum of parts" does not do any real analytical work, and does not point to any previous analytical work done. We sure want Yellow River, we have Hudson River, Mississippi River, and Lake Ontario, but Talk:Jordan River shows deletion (the delete votes are mostly rationale-free, though). See also Talk:New York City. Talk:Washington State was nearly unanimously kept. Talk:Lahore Division was kept. There are quotations at Citations:Dâmbovița River. Amazon River is a redirect. As for the county, WT:CFI#Place names says "Countries and their administrative divisions: states, provinces, counties, etc.", so its seems includabe. “Lake Ontario”, in OneLook Dictionary Search. finds multiple dictionaries. --Dan Polansky (talk) 19:26, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

Keep all. New York City passed RFD despite the fact that New York is in common use, because City is part of the name. The case of Prahova County is clearer, because Prahova is immediately followed by County in every cite we have for it. - excarnateSojourner (talk | contrib) 18:36, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

{{look|nocat=1}}

No consensus to delete. Perhaps another solution is available, but well over a year of discussion here has failed to yield a consensus for deletion. bd2412 T 21:40, 8 December 2022 (UTC)