CZ Talk:Romanization/Ancient Greek

Accurate romanizations as well?

Given that most of our readers will not be able to decipher IPA, should we mandate that articles provide more accurate romanizations at the top of the article (along with the name in the Greek alphabet, and IPA). E.g. we'd say something like:

Achilles (Ancient Greek: Αχιλλευσ; more accurately romanized as Achilleus or Akhilleus)

to let people have an idea how to pronounce it properly? J. Noel Chiappa 17:56, 5 May 2008 (CDT)

I am all for giving folks help with pronouncing languages. Perhaps we should begin the article

Achilles (Ancient Greek: Αχιλλευς Achilleus)

I don't know how to put the intro together, but I think it makes the most sense, for helping with pronunciation, to help with pronunciation with the same style of romanization that we use for other words (what I described under Other words on the main page). I am assuming that our Ancient Greek article will have help on pronunciation, but it might also be nice if we provided a link to pronunciation help for the new reader, perhaps with the romanization-- this might even be something nice to do with any and all romanization. Perhaps something like this:

Achilles (Ancient Greek: Αχιλλευς Achilleus)

We might also want to give a few other common romanizations, or not-- I can see arguments for both sides. (and speaking of Achilles, I just checked out the Wikipedia page, which is really very lacking. Instead of logically giving pride of place to the version of the legend in Homer, it gives a weird amalgamated version of the myth-- very strange, and perhaps very easy to improve upon!) Brian P. Long 18:22, 5 May 2008 (CDT)

Your formulation ("Achilles (Ancient Greek: Αχιλλευς Achilleus)") I like better than mine.

I seem to recall Wikipedia does something like what you suggest with the link (except I think they use a little superscript '?', IIRC I think) for Japanese names, to explain the ordering thing. J. Noel Chiappa 21:06, 5 May 2008 (CDT)

Fine, but what about the diacritical marks for the Greek? They are rather important... Martin Baldwin-Edwards 18:39, 5 May 2008 (CDT)

My sense is that we'll definitely want to have them in the actual Greek, but it's probably beyond the scope of our romanization scheme (with the exception of rough breathings). At the point when our readers start worrying about the nuances of Greek pitch accent, I think it is time for them to buckle down and learn to read the alphabet-- which, now that I think about it, would make a pretty great tutorial subpage. Brian P. Long 19:00, 5 May 2008 (CDT)