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Greek versus Latin suffixes

It has been a long convention in the Western world, which received largely Greek sources through Latin, to use the Latin suffix -us where the Greek -os, and sometimes -as normally was (and therefore we have Evagrius instead of Evagrios, Anastasius instead of Anastasios, Odysseus instead of Odysseas, etc.). While there is a historic reason for this, a correct transliteration of Greek names to English does not have any reason to pass through the grammar of Latin. Unless a name has a much more common form in English (Gregory instead of Gregorios or George instead of Georgios), it is not correct to use Latin grammar for Greek names. A policy of rendering Greek names (ancient, medieval and modern) according to their native grammar, should be adopted. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.80.178.1 (talk) 17:37, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

There is an actual reason for it: it is normal in English text (we should not use -us in feminine placenames, where it is no longer normal); our readers will come to us having seen Anastasius, Odysseus, Heraclitus, and will see those forms elsewhere.Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:27, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Come to think of it, Odysseas? I see it has become the Demotic usage; but it is not Homer (nor Thucydides, nor Vergil). This is the English Misplaced Pages; there is no need to introduce modern -er- tweaks. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:08, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Latinization rules

The page appears to be trying to describe how to "construct" the correct anglicized/latinized form for Greek names. This is futile. The only thing the guideline needs to be aware of is "most common form in English usage".

It isn't predictable whether Aristarchus or Aristarch is the form used in English. This is simply a matter of checking with reputable secondary sources. There are special cases like Ulysses that are completely irregular.

This page should give advice on where and when close transliteration ("lang:grc-Latn") or pronunciation details should be given, but the question of anglicizations of latinized Greek is beyond its scope. That simply falls under the main "stick to English usage" rule. --dab (𒁳) 09:27, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the improvements to the article. I appreciate the effort to streamline and clarify, and I was pleased to learn that grc is a recognized language for Template:lang; I hope this will help editors make sure that ancient names are provided in Ancient Greek as opposed to Modern Greek. Now, the one thing that gives me some pause is that the sentence The normal English practice is to use the Roman standard, rather than attempting a phonetic transcription. was simply removed rather than edited into something more logical. I wouldn't want to see a chaos of moves (for example Philodemus to Philodemos, where "most common" is not as effortlessly clear as, say, Euthyphro vs. Euthyphron) justified by the absence of any guidance here. Would it be acceptable to include a statement that when Latinized and transliterated forms are both in use, the longer-established Latinized ones are generally preferred? Wareh (talk) 14:29, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

You are right, The normal English practice is to use the Roman standard, rather than attempting a . But this isn't really the scope of this page, it's simply a matter of WP:UE. I.e. "Philodemus" is already English and thus "Naming conventions (Greek)" shouldn't even be invoked. I didn't like the appearance that Misplaced Pages is prescribing "use the Roman standard" when this is simply an observation on the de facto situation in English (and of course there are exceptions, like "Athens"). In my book, Philodemus is lang=en, i.e. it is simply a name to be used in English language context without any markup. Philodēmos is a transliteration, to be italicized and tagged as lang=grc-Latn, and Φιλόδημος should of course just be tagged as lang=grc. --dab (𒁳) 10:16, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

eta with acute accent

In Ancient Greek ή is supposed to be translitterated to ḗ (e with macron and acute accent), or am I missing something? In other words, is this right? --A. di M. (formerly Army1987) — Deeds, not words. 00:53, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

It is much more common to ignore accents when transliterating (magnētis lithos). But there's nothing incorrect about representing the accent as you have done (though I wonder whether everyone will be able to display such an exotic character). Wareh (talk) 02:39, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflict) My concern was about the availability of ḗ in common fonts. I wanted to know whether the most common solution was not giving a damn about poor fonts, not giving a damn about macrons (i.e. magnétis líthos), or not giving a damn about accents (magnētis lithos). So it's the last one. Thanks. --A. di M. (formerly Army1987) — Deeds, not words. 10:29, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

Depends on the purpose; Nagy's discussions of Homer require the macrons, others may not. The most common - and usually the most useful - is to omit both. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 00:18, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I agree. This isn't "required", but it's a nice extra. I think Unicode has ḗ and ṓ precisely for this purpose (seeing that the equivalent characters for a, i, u are missing). --dab (𒁳) 10:09, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

I know Vietnamese can use diacritics and tone marks on the same vowel, too. I don't know whether e and o can have a macron and other vowels can't, so I couldn't tell whether they were included for Vietnamese or for translitterated Ancient Greek. BTW, does anybody know how common fonts lacking them are? I guess that most readers would prefer to see ē rather than � or a box, so if there are many fonts lacking them I'm going to remove the accents. --A. di M. (formerly Army1987) — Deeds, not words. 10:29, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

The Vietnamese alphabet doesn't use macrons afaik. As for macron+acute, you can use combining diacritics, i.e. ā́ (yields ā́). This may misplace the diacritics in rendering, but it's better than seeing �. ḗ (ḗ) is probably canonically equivalent to ḗ, so it won't matter which you enter since they'll be collapsed server-side. --dab (𒁳) 14:13, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium?

Why are we following this reference work for specialists again?

I've just spent a weekend at a Byzantine conference, and had an odd moment when I realized that none of the written material (handouts and such) followed this system:

• Most people Latinized in the traditional manner (Palaeologus, Demetrius)
• A minority transliterated as though from Demotic (Dimitri)
• Judith Herrin Anglicized Christian names, and used -os for surnames, but she did so consistently (John, Constantine, and Theophylact; not Theophylaktos).

Why are we using a "standard" which nobody follows, and which will detach lay readers (for whom we are supposed to care) from nine-tenth of the existing literature? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:17, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I think you're right that Latinized names are still current among Byzantinists, and since Misplaced Pages normally uses them for Ancient Greek, there's the extra argument for uniformity. I think the preference of Greek writers in English is perhaps exerting more influence than the ODB. Wareh (talk) 22:05, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Another instance of this practice has come up at Maximus Planudes - occasionally Maximos Planoudes; can anyone see a genuine reason why we should prefer the eccentric style of one Oxford reference to impose on all Byzantines a style which is used for neither ancient nor modern Greek? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:25, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

Because it is actually used, and by a great many scholars? And why is Maximos Planoudes eccentric, when it represents an accurate and straightforward transliteration of the name? Constantine ✍ 10:04, 5 November 2010 (UTC)