Talk:Astarte

Page move

(from WP:RM)

January 15

`Ashtart → Astarte or Ashtart

I'd do this myself, except that the page histories are such a mess that my privileges aren't sufficient to sort the whole thing out. No such thing as "ASCII spelling" exists; ASCII is an encoding mechanism, and the backtick, apparently used here to represent a glottal stop, has no meaning on its own—least of all in the English language. The English name of this well-known deity is most commonly Astarte (through the Greek) but more accurately Ashtart; both of these are widely used by scholars and either are thoroughly acceptable to me. ADH (t&m) 11:25, Jan 15, 2005 (UTC)

prima facie. Should go to Astarte. Rd232 00:48, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

• Comments: (a) the mark you reference is being used to represent not the glottal stop but a pharyngeal consonant, more commonly represented (as in the rest of the article) with ‘ or ^c, and (b) ASCII is in fact a character set, and the author clearly means that, using only characters available in ASCII (thereby excluding the characters I cited), the name with the pharyngeal is best represented as `Ashtart, which is accurate, I would say. It needs clean-up (Englished), to be sure.
  — Ford 01:53, 2005 Jan 16 (UTC)
  • ... which I have now done. The version that ADH is referring to is here.— Ford 03:27, 2005 Jan 16 (UTC)
  • The pharyngeal consonant I'm familiar with, but only as a superscript letter c, and the backtick is not a left single quote. Even accurate transliterations are only preferable when an English-language name is not common (Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)), which is clearly not the case here. ADH (t&m) 03:31, Jan 16, 2005 (UTC)
    • Common transliteration in cases where ‘ (pharyngeal fricative) and ’ (glottal stop) are not available — when the character set is confined to ASCII, that is — is to use ` for ‘ and ' for ’. I have seen that convention for quotation marks, for Semitic phonemes, and in other situations as well. You may have missed it elsewhere on the web. But it was pretty clear from the article itself that ‘ (for the pharyngeal) was being used, so it could not have been too difficult to figure out what ` was standing in for. And your last comment may support Astarte, but it argues against Ashtart, which is neither as accurate nor as common.
      — Ford 03:46, 2005 Jan 16 (UTC)
• Support. I get 50 times more hits on the classical Greek Astarte than Ashtart (with or without the backtick), so I'd prefer a move to Astarte. Editors should avoid introducing ad hoc spelling conventions into Wikipedia, especially where, as in this case, the entity in question already has a well established name known to English language readers and in use by English language scholars. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 13:27, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I went to implement this, but got blocked by the compression bug. I feel there is significant history to Astarte so the following steps should be taken:

1. Delete Astarte
2. Move `Ashtart to Astarte
3. Undelete Astarte to restore history.
4. Edit Astarte to restore proper version, if needed.

- UtherSRG 14:42, Jan 21, 2005 (UTC)

• Support. Astarte was a godess known to several Semitic nations. There isn't much sense in preferring incorrectly rendered transcription of one of several variants of her name to the much more common Astarte. -- Naive cynic 01:21, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I've done a swap of the pages - I couldn't see much point waiting with the page in the 'wrong' place. if anyone feels strongly about merging edit histories, delete Astarte, move `Ashtart over it and undelete - but you'll need to wait for the compression bug to be sorted out first. -- ALoan (Talk) 13:48, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Inconsistent transliteration/transcription of Phoenician

In some cases of romanisation of Phoenician in the article, some of the vowels are spelt out and others are not: miqdōš bnʾ la-ʿAštōrt št Baʿl bnʾ bʿlʾ ha-Myddm . This is odd and confusing and I've never seen such a thing in a proper scholarly text on the subject. It should be either a consistent transliteration with no vowels or, more problematically, a consistent transcription of the reconstructed pronunciation with all the vowels. 87.126.21.225 (talk) 21:20, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

Voltaire's Astarté

Added Voltaire's use of the name Astarté in his work Zadig to the "In popular culture section. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mfryc (talk • contribs) 03:55, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

Corrected Greek Form

Changed Greek form of Astarte from Ασταρτη to Ἀστάρτη (added breathing and accent mark). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mfryc (talk • contribs) 04:02, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

WP:COMMONNAME on Egyptian articles, odd transliteration

While perusing the article, I noticed a number of obscure names used in place of more commonly-used variants (for example: Pitaḥ instead of Ptah, Sūtaẖ instead of Set/Sutekh, Knmt instead of Kharga, Pisīḏat instead of Ennead/Pesedjet). I'm unsure of why this is, and would like to know if it would be favorable to change them to the more commonly-used names of these subjects under WP:COMMONNAME. Also to note is that the transliteration of certain names appears to be potentially conjectural or WP:OR such as Pisīḏat, though presently don't have access to all of the sources cited to be sure. Star11308 (talk) 17:26, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

I certainly agree, but these strange spellings are part of a larger problem. The article text includes entire sentences that are quoted in their original writing systems (cuneiform or hieroglyphs), then transliterated, then translated into English. That looks to me like a fixation on the primary sources at the expense of readability.

Some editors seem to forget that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia for general readers. A scholarly book or journal may quote an ancient source in the original language for other scholars to analyze, but there's no benefit for most readers if Wikipedia does the same. If an ancient text is worth quoting, it should be quoted in translation. Transliterations should generally be reserved for individual words that are particularly significant, like the name of a deity in the article about that deity, or a term such as maat that the scholarly sources often don't translate because its exact meaning is difficult to render into English. In nearly all cases, we should be rendering terms into their common names in English: Set instead of Sūtaẖ, Ennead instead of Pisīḏat, and so on. A. Parrot (talk) 20:14, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

Two words are erroneously hot-linked to the same location.

At the time and date I'm typing this, both "Canaanites" and "Phoenicians" have hot-links that end up in the same place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canaanite_religion If that's really the way it's supposed to be, then how about combining "Canannites and Phoenicians" into one hotlinked blue/purple phrase that leads to that link. It's rather misleading to imply that two nouns are going to link to two different articles.2600:1700:6759:B000:E894:BFCC:705D:880 (talk) 07:12, 2 May 2024 (UTC)Christopher Lawrence Simpson