[Cz-editcouncil] CZ EC Resolution 0010

[M. BALDWIN-EDWARDS]

Dear Editorial Council member,

The period for private discussion has now ended for Resolution 10 (Romanization). Below are the comments communicated to me.

With best wishes

Martin Baldwin-Edwards
Secretary
CZ Editorial Council


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I voted 'aye', and supplied link to ALA-LC site with Romanization tables for many languages.

 Anthony.Sebastian

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This proposal, which would centralize discussion of Romanization, seems eminently sensible to me. To recap, the process for settling on a system of Romanization would be that interested parties have a discussion of the issue at the Romanization talk page and hash out an Romanization policy. Those participating in the discussion have a vote (on the analogy of ad hoc proposals, I suppose) and the Romanization policy becomes policy-- without the mediation of the Editorial Council. Excluding the Editorial Council from the process makes sense in this case, because there are likely to be very few members of the EC qualified to judge the Romanization policy for each individual language.

The policy is a very good one, but upon reflection, I see two issues. The first is that I would like to know what the procedure would be for amending Romanization policy, once formally adopted. My understanding is that the situation might be rectified by a EC Resolution, but I would like to be clear on it.

The second issue is more serious, and results from some discussion at the 'Osama bin Laden' talk page. Just how would CZ:Romanization dovetail with CZ:Article Mechanics and CZ:Naming Conventions? If we decide that we will romanize Sanskrit a certain way, does that mean contributors are justified in renaming articles and editing article text? I would have assumed so, but the Osama bin Laden discussion made it clear that this is not necessarily the case.

Thanks,
Brian P. Long

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I am in favor of both resolution.

Thanks,

Gordan

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I support the Romanization proposal as it stands, including creation of
the CZ:Romanization page and its subpages

Simon Overduin
CZ Editorial Council

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This resolution is a technical necessity if Citizendium is to succeed in a multi-lingual world in which many languages do not originate in the conventional Roman character set. 

Roger Lohmann 

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I think CZ P #10 is a good idea. However, here are some problems that I think need to be resolved in order to make this endeavor useful to the average person.

1) When a user of a Roman Language writes a common word which belongs to a non- Roman language, he/she will usually use one of the generally accepted ways of spelling it, even if it is not correct by other standards.

For example, Jujutsu--Jujitsu--Ju Jitsu

Many people are not aware of the existence of other spellings and will proceed with what they know and most people will understand and accept those words.

Even if they are aware of the other ones, they probably have some reason for using the one they do instead of the other one(s).

The only way for me to make sense of us going through all of this trouble is if we make the existence of the spellings we deem correct known to all and enforce their use on Citizendium's pages. 

Otherwise, why do we need a proposal to put up a page that just contains more information about another subject?

2) The different spellings have different pronunciations. So aren't we really determining how the words should be pronounced rather than how they should be spelled? Of course, some sounds must be an approximation since not all sounds are included in the Roman languages.

If that is true, once we determined how a word should sound, then each Roman language would need it's own spelling, since not every Roman language has all of the same sounds associated with the same letters (and indeed, not even all of the sounds at all).

Perhaps, we should limit this project to English Romanization and see what happens.

Sincerely,
Gary Giamboi
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