User:PeterKa/Diacritics proposal

Is it "pho" or "phở"? Why Vietnamese diacritics don't belong in English-language writing.

1. The major U.S. style guides, including The Chicago Manual of Style, APA, AMA, and MLA, recommend Merriam-Webster spelling. British style guides recommend Oxford spelling. Both Merriam-Webster and Oxford give Vietnamese names without diacritics, as you can see from the charts below.
2. Besides the Merriam-Webster dictionaries, other standard library reference works that cover Vietnam also remove the diacritics: Britannica, Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War (2011), Encyclopedia of Modern Asia (2002), National Geographic Atlas of the World, and Lonely Planet Vietnam. Britannica is edited by University of Chicago Press copy editors trained in Chicago style, which is the most widely admired editing style.
3. Go on Amazon and search for "Vietnam" books. I guarantee that no book that comes up in the top twenty will use Vietnamese diacritics in the running text.
4. They're "distracting," according to the style guide of National Geographic. We want readers to focus on the content of the article rather than the style it is written in.

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Should our guidelines on diacritics and spelling be rewritten to reflect the recommendations of major style books?

Executive Summary: Wikipedia guidelines recommend resolving diacritic and style issues by doing a Google Book search in order to determine “general usage.” This is an “invented here” approach not recommended by any published style guide. It is also laborious when it done correctly (as it rarely is) and is easily manipulated by partisans. The current proposal would revise the guideline to emphasize the use of reference works, in line with the recommendations of the major style guides.

Wikipedia is built on the idea that our article on Foo should reflect what reliable sources have to say about Foo. By the same logic, our guideline on diacritics should reflect what published style guides have to say about this subject. No guide advises editors to “follow the general usage in reliable sources,” do a Google Book search, and count how many books use a diacritic and how many don't. GBooks isn't structured to do this type of research, and counting diacritics is an unusual skill with application only on Wikipedia. As for Ngram, it may be able to tell you which name is more common or which spelling is more common. But it doesn't detect diacritics with any accuracy.

We need guidance that is short, sweet, and based on the advise of style specialists. All the major guides recommend that editors consult a widely available reference work, preferably a general purpose dictionary from a major publisher. The current guideline includes the parenthetical clause "including other encyclopedias and reference works." This clause suggests that editors are already permitted to follow the approach outlined below. But it needs to be made clear that this is the preferred approach, the one the experts recommend. The guides recommend various dead tree dictionaries for use as a first reference. But their online counterparts obviously make more sense for our purposes.

I propose replacing the following standard for diacritics:

Issues concerning style, spelling, and diacritics may be resolved by consulting a widely available English-language reference work. Online dictionaries are available from American Heritage, Collins, Merriam-Webster, Oxford, Random House, and Webster's New World College Dictionary. Encyclopedia Britannica and Columbia Encyclopedia may also be consulted.

The Chicago Manual of the Style recommends Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (for American spelling), Merriam-Webster’s Geographical Dictionary (for place names), and Merriam-Webster’s Biographical Dictionary (for personal names). The Associated Press Stylebook recommends Webster’s New World College Dictionary. The Oxford Style Manual recommends The Concise Oxford Dictionary (for British spelling) and The Dictionary of National Biography (for the names of British individuals).

Here are some examples:

Wikipedia	Merriam-Webster		American Heritage	Oxford	Webster’s New World	Encyclopedias
	Collegiate	Biographical				Britannica	Columbia
Edvard Beneš	Be•neš, Edvard	Be•neš, Edvard	Be•neš, Eduard	Beneš, Edvard	Beneš, Edvard	Edvard Beneš	Eduard Beneš
Tadeusz Kościuszko	Koś•ciusz•ko, Tadeusz Andrzei Bonawentura	Koś•ciusz•ko, Tadeusz Andrzei Bonawentura	Kos•ci•uśz•ko or Kos•ci•us•ko, Thaddeus	Kosciusko, Thaddeus	Kosciusko, Thaddeus	Tadeusz Kościuszko	Thaddeus Kosciusko
François Mitterrand	Mit•ter•rand, François (-Maurice)	N/A	Mit•ter•rand, François Maurice	Mitterrand, François	Mitterrand, François (Maurice)	François Mitterrand	François Maurice Mitterrand
Ngô Quyền	N/A	Ngo Quyen	N/A	N/A	N/A	Ngo Quyen	N/A
Hideki Tojo	Tō•jō Hideki	Tōjō Hideki	To•jo, Hideki	Tojo, Hideki	Tojo, Hideki	Tōjō Hideki	Tōjō Hideki
Mihály Vörösmarty	N/A	Vö•rös•marty, Mihály	N/A	N/A	N/A	Mihály Vörösmarty	Mihály Vörösmarty

Vietnamese cities
Wikipedia	Britannica	Columbia	Encarta	American Heritage	Collins	Oxford	Random House	Merriam-Webster	U.S. Board on Geographic Names (approved)
Ho Chi Minh City	Ho Chi Minh City	Ho Chi Minh City	Ho Chi Minh City	Ho Chi Minh City Formerly Saigon	Ho Chi Minh City	Ho Chi Minh City	Ho Chi Minh City	Ho Chi Minh City	Thành Phố Hồ Chí Minh
Hanoi	Hanoi	Hanoi	Hanoi	Hanoi	Hanoi	Hanoi	Hanoi	Hanoi	Hà Nội
Haiphong	Haiphong	Haiphong	Haiphong	Haiphong	Haiphong	Haiphong	Haiphong	Haiphong	Hải Phòng
Cần Thơ	Can Tho	Can Tho	Can Tho		Can Tho		Can-Tho	Can Tho	Cần Thơ
Da Nang	Da Nang	Da Nang	Da Nang	Da Nang or Da·nang	Da Nang	Da Nang	Da Nang	Da Nang	Đa Năng
Biên Hòa	Bien Hoa	Bien Hoa	Bien Hoa		Bien Hoa	Bien Hoa		Bien Hoa also Bien-hoa	Biên Hòa
Huế	Hue	Hue	Hue (city)	Hue	Hué	Hué	Hué	Hue	Huế

Wikipedia	Merriam-Webster		American Heritage	Oxford	Webster’s New World	Encyclopedias		U.S. Board on Geographic Names
	Collegiate	Geographical				Britannica	Columbia	Conventional	Approved
Istanbul	Is•tan•bul	İs•tan•bul	Is•tan•bul	Istanbul	Istanbul	Istanbul	Istanbul	N/A	İstanbul
Jyväskylä	Jy•vas•ky•la	Jy•väs•ky•lä	N/A	Jyväskylä	N/A	Jyväskylä	Jyväskylä	N/A	Jyväskylä
Kinmen	Que•moy	Que•moy	Que•moy In Pinyin Jin•men	N/A	N/A	Quemoy Island	Quemoy	Quemoy	Jinmen Dao
Lübeck	Lü•beck	Lü•beck	Lü•beck	Lübeck	Lü•beck	Lübeck	Lübeck	N/A	Lübeck
Ploiești	Plo•iesti or Plo•esti	Plo•ieş•ti or Plo•eş•ti	Plo•ieş•ti or Plo•eş•ti	Ploieşti	Plo•ieş•ti or Plo•eş•ti'	Ploieşti	Ploieşti	N/A	Ploiești
Zürich	Zu•rich	Zü•rich	Zu•rich	Zurich	Zurich	Zürich	Zürich	N/A	Zürich

BGN sets U.S. government usage in geography. The atlases and gazetteers generally get the names they use from BGN, although they may adjust them to fit their house styles. The “conventional” name is the name BGN deems suitable for English language usage. The “approved” name is the official name in the local language (or official Romanization if the script is non-Latin). Although I used the chart to focus on difficult cases, it is common for all the references, including Wikipedia, to be in agreement, as you can see here. In other words, the way editors currently determine article titles is much closer to the proposed method than to the GBook counting approach.

Raw data dump

• “The best advise is to treat any one item consistently within a given text and follow the newest edition of a suitable dictionary, such as the Concise Oxford Dictionary.” Oxford Style Manual, p. 160.

• “For general matters of spelling, the University of Chicago Press recommends using Webster’s Third New International Dictionary and its chief abridgment, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary...if the Collegiate disagrees with the Third International (as sometimes happens) the Collegiate is the one to follow as it has been revised more frequently and represents the latest lexical research." Chicago Manual of the Style, p. 350.

• “Although the University of Chicago press uses Webster as its spelling authority, the use of other standard dictionaries such as the American Heritage Dictionary and the Random House Dictionary of the English Language is also acceptable.” CMOS, p. 350.

• “For the names of well-known deceased persons, Chicago generally follows the spelling in Merriam-Webster’s Biographical Dictionary or the biographical section of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.”, CMOS, p. 387.

• “For the spelling of names of places, consult Merriam-Webster’s Geographic Dictionary.” CMOS, p. 403.