Talk:balkanise

Tea room discussion

Note: the below discussion was moved from the Wiktionary:Tea room.

balkanise or Balkanise? Either? RJFJR 15:02, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

google books:intext:balkanise?complete=0&num=100 shows a clear preference for lowercase, especially among uses, but capitalized is not uncommon. google books:intext:balkanize?complete=0&num=100 (with a Z) is less clear, but still seems to prefer lowercase. —Ruakh_TALK 23:47, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

As usual I'll chip in with Chambers' rendition: Bal'kanize or Bal'kanise, vt (also without cap) to reduce to the condition of the Balkan peninsula, which was divided in the late 19th and early 20th centuries into a number of mutually hostile territories. In any case it's pretty clear that we are talking about the Balkans, which are generally capitalised, so any lower-case variant is a sort of assimilation of the original upper-case one. Equinox 01:12, 14 January 2009 (UTC)