Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2019-11/CFI policy for foreign given names and surnames

Voting on: Whether the following section should be added under WT:CFI#Given and family names, after the section starting "For most given names and family names":

Foreign given names and surnames, as in given names and surnames that originate from other languages, are only considered attestable if either use as a given name or surname by native speakers (as passed onto their descendants) or immigrants undergoing language shift and keeping their given names or surnames in their original forms is attestable per the usual criteria for attestability in that given language, or if the name has a consistently used pronunciation or spelling (not including transliterations) that is markedly different from the source language.

Schedule:

• Vote starts: 00:00, 11 November 2019 (UTC)
• Vote ends: 23:59, 10 December 2019 (UTC)
• Vote created: — surjection ⟨?⟩ 14:04, 4 November 2019 (UTC)

Discussion:

• Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2019/October#Place and given names in other languages
• Wiktionary:Requests_for_deletion/English#Akihito
• Wiktionary talk:Votes/pl-2019-11/CFI policy for foreign given names and surnames

1. Support As proposer. — surjection ⟨?⟩ 07:40, 11 November 2019 (UTC)
2. Support — SGconlaw (talk) 08:47, 11 November 2019 (UTC)
3. Support--Makaokalani (talk) 17:12, 11 November 2019 (UTC)
4. Support Stelio (talk) 15:33, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

   Support. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 17:22, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

   Support. 𐌷𐌻𐌿𐌳𐌰𐍅𐌹𐌲𐍃 𐌰𐌻𐌰𐍂𐌴𐌹𐌺𐌹𐌲𐌲𐍃 (talk) 08:02, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

5. Support. KevinUp (talk) 19:15, 13 November 2019 (UTC)
6. Support Supevan (talk) 00:10, 17 November 2019 (UTC)

1. Oppose "Foreign given names"- This is a multilingual dictionary. "use as a given name or surname by native speakers (as passed onto their descendants)" Impossible to determine in most cases. This vote is incoherent and racist. Names (of people and things) are fundamentally different than other words and inventing absurd requirements to arbitrarily assign language categories to them isn't going to help. DTLHS (talk) 19:23, 13 November 2019 (UTC)
2. Oppose For the same reason as DTLHS. While the criteria voted on might be the actual racist criteria by which one sheds names as native or foreign, their use is exceeded by making them objective rules which they aren’t: These criteria, as convenient as they appear privately – which is why so many have been charmed by them –, only append a new source of inconvenience, for with them a new subject is to be studied to decide which language a name belongs to, and that for nothing as Wiktionary is put one step farther from the truth about language by treating it according to genealogy, as genealogy has nothing to do with language. Fay Freak (talk) 21:03, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

   Most given name and surname entries have the right language statement, because editors intuitively know which names are used by speakers of their native tongue. This CFI addition is needed to prevent and remove absurd entries as those in Category:English male given names from Slavic languages where an editor added an English entry to every Serbo-Croatian name he created, or to "translation" tables like Wolfgang based on Wikipedia article links of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. So Mozart's name is Wolfgang also in Finnish and Hawaiian? Try to remove that non-information and you might be called a vandal. Pronunciation should be the main criteria for deciding whether a name is mere code-switching, and statistical data (not genealogy) for usage by native speakers comes as a last resort. If you are not a native speaker and cannot find the other information, don't make an entry for a name. Leave it for others. --Makaokalani (talk) 13:51, 16 November 2019 (UTC)

   The pronunciation stuff you say is not in the vote. The voted passage emphasizes genealogy, and also the pronunciation arguments do not work as you intend. According to these logics most given names that are common in Germany aren’t German because they have such un-German features like ending in -a instead of schwa in female given names which violates German pronunciation rules; and if we have the same vote for place names then Berlin is clearly no German name with the end stress etc. but Polabian. Neither do I know what those native speakers or immigrants undergoing language shift are. So is Yılmaz a German surname or isn’t it? Are Cem (spoken also by Germans though there basically is no in German words), Şükrü and Burak German male given names or aren’t they? Why wouldn’t they according to that logic, since Turks continue to use the Turkish names even if they speak no Turkish any more? Only because they are used by Turks, hence the assertion is correct that this vote is incoherent and racist. Or maybe people don’t actually have anything against Cem and Şükrü being claimed German, having German sections, only if Wolfgangs and Heinrichs appear in Finland after Germans gastarbeiters or refugees go to Finland and perhaps have children who only learn Finnish there shouldn’t be Finnish sections because anti-German sentiment is hip, and anti-Japanese purges that are the motivation of this vote are also cheap. It’s like WW II has never ended.

   And native speakers do not know themselves how to pronounce names. Only locals know, at least before the 2019 media coverage, that Lügde is pronounced , and Jever is often pronounced incorrectly with voiced instead of voiceless labiodental fricative. And now people want native speakers to know native pronunciation for names that aren’t even in their language area! In that Beer Parlour discussion someone asserts “We need a section for Srebrenica in every language where people talk about Srebrenica and need to know how it's pronounced in their tongue.” Big question mark, since in German I pronounce this name like in Serbo-Croatian and I am a German native speaker so I should know (for example using the voiced uvular fricative for ⟨r⟩ in Srebrenica is quite ridiculous and makes the name unrecognizable, adapting the stress of Russian names to the German stress makes the names unrecognizable, and newsreaders get briefed how to pronounce certain names – it is also asserted for any language of education that educated pronunciation is to be given as standard but the more education there is the more names are pronounced in a foreign manner, another incoherence). Fay Freak (talk) 15:22, 16 November 2019 (UTC)

3. Oppose strongly per above. פֿינצטערניש (Fintsternish), she/her (talk) 22:19, 17 November 2019 (UTC)
4. Oppose The current situation may lead to absurdities, but the proposed policy will as well. It is too vague, too general, proposes criteria that are very difficult or even impossible to verify, etc. A lot more discussion is needed before a sensible policy on this issue can be voted on. MuDavid 栘𩿠 (talk) 03:54, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
5. Oppose There will be indefinite such names everywhere. In Asia, common words can be used to name a person (like Mr. "Red", Miss "Green", etc) I do not want these words/senses spreading around without any special meaning. --Octahedron80 (talk) 04:20, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
6. Oppose Allahverdi Verdizade (talk) 08:36, 25 November 2019 (UTC)
7. Oppose — Saltmarsh. 08:00, 26 November 2019 (UTC)
8. Oppose. DonnanZ (talk) 10:19, 2 December 2019 (UTC)
9. Oppose, while a sensible rule in general, I think there are occasionally good reasons to depart from it. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 14:54, 2 December 2019 (UTC)
10. Oppose. --Droigheann (talk) 17:06, 5 December 2019 (UTC)
11. Oppose. The immigrant criterion is hard to quantify–anyone with any name can immigrate to an English-speaking country at any time. Julia ☺ ☆ 02:38, 10 December 2019 (UTC)

1. Abstain. I misread the proposal. And now that I've thought about it more, I think I'm not a fan of basing attestation on the language of the person who has a name rather than the language of the person writing about them. However, I'll refrain from opposing, because I think names need to be treated somewhat differently than regular words, and I'm mostly not a fan of the sort of attestation suggested here for practical reasons. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 06:56, 14 November 2019 (UTC)

   You can oppose these absurd and racist criteria, and then later propose your own way of treating names differently. פֿינצטערניש (Fintsternish), she/her (talk) 22:20, 17 November 2019 (UTC)

2. Abstain I agree that the current situation is absurd, and am inclined to support. However, DTLHS and Fay Freak's comments give me pause. Maybe we should introduce a new header, ===Name===? Canonicalization (talk) 13:53, 16 November 2019 (UTC)

   No, using a name header does not solve anything. An appendix would be a better solution. But before we start moving name entries to Category:Surname appendices and Category:Surname appendices, some cleanup is needed to remove nonnative names from language X because some editors have been duplicating content from one language to another. KevinUp (talk) 12:02, 17 November 2019 (UTC)

3. Abstain I would support a proposal that would prevent the creation of entries for languages where those given names aren't used; however I don't think this proposal works in the best way. 𐌷𐌻𐌿𐌳𐌰𐍅𐌹𐌲𐍃 𐌰𐌻𐌰𐍂𐌴𐌹𐌺𐌹𐌲𐌲𐍃 (talk) 23:47, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

Fails 6–11–3. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 01:31, 12 December 2019 (UTC)