Fair, but Sheikh Zubayr sounds so much better than Shakespeare.
Is posting a tweet from a dweeb considered meming these days
can we latinize all names, they sound way cooler
Idk about that. “Geber” sounds like a downgrade from “Jabir Ibn Hayyan”
a bad latinization, Iabir would be more appropriate
or Iaber
Someone do this for romanized historical Chinese, Japanese, and Hindu names.
Okay, but it would be kinda awesome if you called ole Billy Shakes Sheri Zubayr? I might even start doing that?
It’s not to conceal the fact that they’re Muslim. It was simply the standard for a significant period of European history to Latinize names, as Latin was the common tongue of academia. Germans, Norse, and Slavs all suffered this same Latinization.
For that matter, translating names into the local language is far from abnormal in world history - the use of the local name is extremely recent in nearly all languages. Even personal names of people who were known, personally, was not abnormal - famously, T.E. Lawrence was known by his Arab allies as “Auruns”. In English, the Anglicization of Marcus Antonius as Mark Antony by Shakespeare still has currency some 400 years later, even as other Anglicizations of Roman figures have largely fallen out of favor.
This is making mountains out of molehills. It’s one thing to want the Arabic forms to replace the old Latinization - that’s valid. It’s another thing entirely to accuse it of being done to steal credit from Muslims.
OP you can’t talk shit about the Latin/Roman culture in favour of the “arabs”!! Don’t you know you will trigger a sensitive special dog we have on this site?
What do you mean “that sounds like a fascist zio with extra steps”? Please be more mindful next time.
It happens even today with Chinese names to Western, and vice versa. There’s nothing anti Muslim about this
“Stop latinizing”
We literally did centuries ago. No Arabic name is ever latinized because - aa it turns out - if you stop using Latin, you don’t need Latinization.
For existing names, I don’t see a problem with using the historic remnant. It was useful at the time because of Latin grammar and the Latin names are much more well established.
It happened with every name by the way. See Confucius, Nostradamus or Copernicus.
What localized name should you call Copernicus by the way?
The Latin Nicolaus Copernicus?
The Polish Mikołaj Kopernik?
The Middle Low German Niklas Koppernigk?
The Modern German Nikolaus Kopernikus?Turns out being a scientist in a multilingual region leads to a bunch of different names.
No, I disagree - same with countries names. Would be good to not anglicize or Latinize anything anymore. It’s ok if people expand their boundaries and pronunciation skills.
Call the person or thing by what they go/went by.
We recently did it with “Türkiye”.
But it’s so cringe when English speakers suddenly switch to a foreign accent to pronounce one word. And would you want to force speakers of other languages to do the same instead of using their own versions of English names?
It’s ok if people expand their boundaries and pronunciation skills.
Nobody is forcing anyone. It’s more about the purposeful latinization of something, i.e. the context of the OG post.
I even find it weird when people who do have that heritage do it. It just rings fake.
Theres a celebrity chef who is terrible for it. When 99% of the time on camera you have perfect American “non regional media diction” but pronounce “cilantro” or “Jalapeno” like someones abuela it comes across like someone putting on an act.
We did not do it with “Türkiye”. Also note that ü is a different letter from u, not just a u with decoration.
The Turkish government requested international organizations to refer to Turkey that way:
In May 2022, the Turkish government requested the United Nations and other international organizations to use Türkiye officially in English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey
Everyone else continues to call it Turkey, especially newspapers. It’s why the Wikipedia article continues to be called “Turkey”. Neither me nor you are a country or international organization.
Same with Ivory Coast and its official name “Côte d’Ivoire”.
That’s simply restating something that I said we should do differently.
A country requested to be called differently, and people still call it what they know it as. I’m saying it’s fine if we try to learn it.
Yes, u and ü are pronounced differently - more to my point.
The US prefers to be called “America” yet I still don’t call them by that name either.
I don’t need to abide by what some fascist Turk says you should call their country or not.
Maybe once Turkey stops trying to wipe out the Kurds I’ll respect what far-right Turkish nationalists want that country to be called.
Lol - That’s just deviating from the entire context of the discussion, but ok.
Guilty as accused.
TürkiyeThanks for the correction, edited it. Not so hard.
Dude. “We’ve always done it like that” is your argument? Can you not see how it would be beneficial to try and emphasise that a lot of contributions to science came from non-European scholars?
This was not good reading comprehension, if not malice
Disagree, he’s right on.
Nah, I’m arguing only to keep old and established names only. It makes in my opinion little sense to start referring to the one’s I mentioned as Kong Qiu, de Nostredame, or Koppernigk.
Feel free to use whatever name you like. Whether you choose to use the romanized or established latinized name is none of anyone’s business.
You’re saying this as if the process is latin specific. Just like how we can see Sheikh Zubayr written in the post in English, you could do the same in other languages, too.
It’s deliberate whitewashing of scientists that’s disgusting and your defending it here that’s appalling.
I never claimed it was specific to Latin? You can see it with the example of Copernicus that it was Latinized, Polonized (?) and Modern-Standard-Germanized.
Franz Liszt is called Liszt Ferenc in Hungarian. That’s because Ferenc is the Hungarian variant of Franz and Hungarian names are spelled backwards for some reason.
I could provide so many more options where people were given several names because they did not live in a monolingual region.
In Czech, women’s last names take on the -ová suffix. Even if they aren’t Czech, didn’t speak Czech or never set a foot into Czechia. For example: Hillary Clintonová
I frankly don’t care enough about what languages do to names. If the intent is to wipe out other cultures then it’s obviously bad. Like colonizing Brits did with native landmarks (e.g. Uluru -> Ayer’s Rock). If the intent is to adjust the name to a cultures grammar, pronunciation or similar, I couldn’t care less.
Except the intent is very much likely to wipe out other cultures here and not just to match grammar or pronunciation.
Franz -> Ferenc isn’t as drastic a change as Ibn Sina -> Avicenna
The former retains similarity to the original whereas the latter makes it completely unclear the origin was Arab.
Except the intent is very much likely to wipe out other cultures here and not just to match grammar or pronunciation.
Honestly, this is a racist stereotype. A European person does something involving other cultures, therefore it must be an act of extermination. You’re stereotyping everyone of European decent as a plundering imperialist.
Why assume malice when there are perfectly reasonable explanations? Specifically, the perfectly reasonable explanation of “to make the words pronounceable in the local tongue.” Different languages have different structures and phonemes. Hell, some languages are tonal. Different languages have entirely different alphabets and pronunciation rules.
If there is a major historical figure whose name originates from a foreign culture, you’ll still want to talk about that person. However, very few people will be able to correctly pronounce the name. So, what every culture does, what every culture has always done, is to give historical figures a local name appropriate to the local language.
This is something humans have been doing since the dawn of time. Hell, living people do it today. Immigrants often pick a local name when locals can’t pronounce their name properly. And this happens in both directions. People coming to western countries often adopt local names, and westerners often adopt local names when moving to other countries.
This is something humans have been doing for tens of thousands of years. But no, go ahead and make some racist assumption about it being some evil thing those evil white people do.
Racial stereotyping isn’t cool, regardless of who you’re stereotyping.
No, this is just playing the victim.
Let’s not pretend whitewashing as a means of cultural appropriation doesn’t exist.
Deflecting that by saying “Racist!” isn’t the defense you think it is.
You’re stereotyping everyone of European decent as a plundering imperialist.
Didn’t make this claim. You’re strawmanning my argument entirely.
Ibn Sina -> Avicenna seems to sound similar though, but I can’t speak Latin or Arabic.
At least the cenna and Sina part, you can see they’re related. The people Latinizing the name did not just roll a die I presume and had respect for the people who came up with something. It’s why algorithm and algebra are both directly from Arabic, algorithm from the guy who wrote this book:
The Concise Book of Calculation by Restoration and Balancing (Arabic: الكتاب المختصر في حساب الجبر والمقابلة, al-Kitāb al-Mukhtaṣar fī Ḥisāb al-Jabr wal-Muqābalah; or Latin: Liber Algebræ et Almucabola)
At least in my opinion the Latinization does not seek to hide the fact it’s Arabic. In fact, it just takes (directly) untranslatable Arabic terms and puts them into Latin.
It is not certain just what the terms al-jabr and muqabalah mean.
No idea how “Ibn -> Avi” makes sense though, I’d be surprised if it was done with any hostile intent though.
It doesn’t come off as Arabic and for a long time I myself, despite having known the Arab name, thought it was a different western guy.
This is is a largely unpopular take if you look into criticisms of how the west names things, provided one has a radicalization towards seeing things such as whitewashing etc.
Eh, as long as it’s just the proper noun, I don’t really care that much. Languages can have their own versions of nouns based on the cultural context at the time. Is calling Deutschland Germany a problem? Zhongguo China? Nah.
You wanna call Shakespeare something different, go for it, it just means he was important enough to have a moniker in another language.
It’s a bad analogy because calling Deutschland Germany doesn’t make you think Germany is an English concept, whereas rebranding all scientists in a whitewashed manner projects an image of all scientific breakthroughs being owed to the west.
That a far more complex, multifaceted issue, TBF, but I can understand your feelings and they’re valid. 🙌🏼
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I remember when I first listened to a newscaster in aljazeera saying: Gerhard Schröder Sometimes it makes it worse trying…
I’ve never heard of any of those names, latinised or not, what did they do?
Ibn Sina is probably one of the most influential philosophers in history, because he was the authority on Greek philosophy - in particular Aristotle - and his commentaries would become the authoritative version of Aristotlean philosophy.
From the philosophical perspective the Arabic philosophers where instrumental for their commentaries on Aristotle. Early edieval philosophy in Europe was mainly rehashing Plato’s philosophy within the framework of catholicism.
Aristotle was all but forgotten in western philosophy until the Arabic translations and commentaries started to get translated into Latin again.
There was this window in the fourteenth century where there was this great interchange between Arabic and Christian philosophy. This was when these Arabic scholars got their Latin names, as they were seen as part of the same tradition. A lot of Arabic tems where incorporated in western like algebra and algorithm. (Maybe op wants is to revert those words too?)
Unfortunately in the late Middle Ages this exchange was severed as, like Galileo and Bruno the free thinking philosophers crashed with hard line religious figures. In the Islamic region the philosophical tradition was curtailed whilst in Europe it managed to survive and propagate the names of these important thinkers.
My point is that the latinization is not out of spite, but out of respect. It was never about polarization between culture but rather in celebration of the exchange of ideas. Furthermore in modern philosophy books since at least the eighties the Arabic names are mentioned.
Avicenna was a Persian polymath whose writings on a variety of topics were extremely learned and influenced academia in both the Muslim world and Christian Europe for hundreds of years.
Averroes was a Spanish Muslim philosopher and translator who transmitted a significant portion of the corpus of Classical literature to Christian Europe by his (Arabic) translations and commentaries on them, as Christian Europe had largely lost the texts.
Jabir (“Geber”) ibn Hayyan was a chemist, apparently.
Are you saying these folks aren’t Arabs?
But why would they have Arab names instead of names from their own language?
So peculiar.
Edit: on further thought maybe we’re ready for a lemmy ask history community. This could have been a great discussion if it started with a question about Latin naming instead of an assumption of cultureal erasure.
I mean, they all wrote in Arabic, and Ibn Hayyan was an Arab.
Ya that’s kinda what I’m trying to get at. Like Latin, Arabic was useful and so it was used.
If such Latin erased them then arguably such Arabic equally erased them. Or maybe there was no erasure but instead pragmatism 🤷♀️
EDIT: Of COURSE I recommend the comm today…
Me: wow we already have that? can’t wait to be approved!
The comm:
As for paleontology, I personally think it’s just a bunch of hogwash if we go further back than around 5,000 years
Me: 🤮
Yeah, I picked a fantastic day to recommend the comm.
I guess we have a !askhistorians@piefed.social
In addition to that, there’s a tendency in mathematics to name a formula or theorem after the mathematician that discovered them if they are of western origin, meanwhile discoveries by arab/muslim/non-western academics are often referred to by a name that conceals the identity of the person behind them.
It may be a small thing, but it definitely skews the perception around scientific progress in a eurocentric direction, willingly or not lending support to ideas of superiority of some ethnicities over others.
This is not surprising, pretty much everyone did this for names back in the day. Kings, popes, cities and countries all have different names based on the language.
Forget kings. Even chefs do it.
You think that’s how they spell that name in Italy? The modern brand “Chef Boyardee” is run by a big food conglomerate. But initially it was the product of a real individual, an actual Italian chef. He had a restaurant and started selling his recipes in cans for customers to take home.
His name? Ettore Boiardi
He Anglicized his name. He cared more about people pronouncing it right rather than spelling it right, so he sold his food under a English phonetic spelling of his last name. Boiardi became Boyardee.
Hell, he even adopted a local first name. His birth name was Ettore, but he actually went by Hector in the US.
People still do it nowadays. I’ve see Spain’s king Felipe VI anglicized as Phillip VI countless times
You should avoid using letters that do not exist or have different pronunciation. Or accept that people pronounce names offensively wrong. Noone cares enough to know every language and place of origin before reading about a thing.
And most people cannot even read the alphabet (IPA). Foreign scripts even less so.
Sounds like this guy doesn’t care about proper pronounciation, though. And Arabic isn’t really a language that’s completely unrecognizable when you pronounce the alphabetized names with most european accents (not including English), in contrast to Chinese.
Hearing people pronounce Qatar should drive this home. English lacks the glottal “k” sound from Arabic so everything is on the table.
Meh, close enough. I’d be surprised if Europeans pronounce even one letter right when reading “Zhōngguó” (China).
