Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2019 February 14

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February 14

Huseyn Mahammadov article name

The article itself names him as Hüseyn Məhəmmədov, so is it correct in translating 'ə' to 'a' rather than to 'e' in the article title? And in general where should I look to find standard transliteration used by Wikipedia, Thanks...GrahamHardy (talk) 09:34, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

@GrahamHardy: The only source I found in Wikipedia is Azerbaijani alphabet#Transliteration, but it doesn't appear very helpful with its Cyryllic-to-Latin transliteration Ә ә → Ə ə...
Some historic notes on the letter can be found in section Azerbaijani alphabet#Schwa (Ə). --CiaPan (talk) 09:49, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

P.S.

Please note the two letters on the left side of the arrow above are not the same as those on the right side. The left-hand side pair are cyryllic letters with Unicode codepoints U+04D8 & U+04D9, the right-hand side pair are latin U+018F & U+0259. (You can also find them at List of Unicode characters.) --CiaPan (talk) 10:19, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

Indeed, it is important that distinction be made between identical-looking characters. Latin Əə is distinct from Cyrillic Әә, and the lowercases of both are distinct from that of Latin Ǝǝ. Our article notes that the Latin letter Əə is currently used only in Azerbaijani, in a dialect of German, and in a dialect of Halkomelem (which is a North American language with around 500 speakers), so it's a quite uncommon letter. In international contexts, even Azerbaijanis themselves often make their names easier to read by replacing ‹ə› with ‹a› (or sometimes with ‹e›), and also ‹ü› with ‹u›, ‹ş› with ‹sh›, ‹c› with ‹j› and so on. Wikipedia customarily does use such simplified spellings of Azerbaijani names, although I'm not sure if this is an official policy of the project. See for example the archives of the talk page of Ilham Aliyev (İlham Əliyev) for a discussion that took place back in 2006. By contrast, the names from almost all other Latin-written languages (including Turkish, whose alphabet is very similar to that of Azerbaijani save for the lack of ‹ə›) retain their original spellings when cited in English contexts – only the diacritics are sometimes omitted (which makes the names harder to read, because the diacritics do have their meaning and significance). --Theurgist (talk) 12:08, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

Did we reach consensus here? Should the article be renamed to Huseyn Mehemmedov, or remain as is...Thanks GrahamHardy (talk) 17:39, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

I would advise you against making such a move. The ‹ə› is much more commonly replaced with ‹a›, an exception being the Persian-borrowed surname suffix -zadə which usually becomes -zade or even -zadeh rather than -zada. Either leave it as it is or use the original, Hüseyn Məhəmmədov. Wikipedia's general policy is to use what the most sources use. --Theurgist (talk) 23:28, 18 February 2019 (UTC)