Talk:Al-Ubaid

Whatta mess
We don't need links to the Ubaid culture and El-Obeid spread across 15 different dab pages. It seems all of these are romanizations of the same Arabic name: we should pick one as the base form (per MOS's Arabic guidelines?) and link all the rest there. The treatment at Ubayd Allah seems exactly right, although I left the specific name pages alone for now since I assume those romanizations might be fairly consistent. There's probably enough iffiness, though, that it's better to bring those together as well on a page with a treatment like Ubayd Allah. Maybe one for the given name and one for the surname to keep it from growing too large? — Llywelyn II   09:34, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

Merge Al-Ubaid and Abeed
These two articles are about exactly the same Arabic word. Onceinawhile (talk) 11:24, 1 August 2021 (UTC)
 * I neither speak, nor write Arabic, but I've learned a little bit about how it works, and to me they seem to be not identical, but just related:
 * The root is ABD (عبد, ʿabd).
 * The plural of ʿabd is ʿabeed (عبيد).
 * ʿubeid seems to include an addition (I wouldn't call it suffix, because both words end in -d) which makes ʿubeid into the diminutive of ʿabd.
 * The Arabic script renditions we have are clearly different
 * عبید for ʿubeid
 * عبد for ʿabeed.
 * So closely related, but clearly distinct. There is a good justification for strongly connecting the two pages, but unless we introduce ʿubaid as a separate paragraph on a new ʿabd page (as of now there's only a disamb. page for ʿabd), along with a separate paragraph on ʿabeed, I see no reason to combine them into one.


 * Abeed is apparently a slur and there are attempts of stopping its use, while this doesn't apply to ubeid (or not necessarily?), as it simply means slave/servant - besides, and apart from it meaning as "servant", slavery in its more traditional form still exists in the Arab-speaking world, so it's more than a fossil word from history.


 * PS: I find the spelling of Ubayd Allah, used as the title of a page, very particular, might not be the most searched-for form, nor very close to the more common scholarly transliterations. Arminden (talk) 11:32, 17 August 2021 (UTC)


 * Oppose merge. Abeed is an article. Al-Ubaid is a DAB page, which includes several places with the name. Narky Blert (talk) 08:22, 18 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Oppose merge, for the reasons stated by . Leschnei (talk) 12:34, 4 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Closing, given the consensus not to merge. Klbrain (talk) 14:09, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Abyad is something else
Abyad means "white". Unless there are cases where Westerners decided to spell ubeid as abyad for whatever weird reasons, it simply doesn't belong here. If you know of such cases, please bring them forth; until then, I'll remove Abyad from the lead. Arminden (talk) 11:37, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

I have found "Wadi al-Abyad or al-Ubayyid", a wadi in Iraq. Dictatorships and nationalist regimes tend to replace names which sound bad to them or are ideologically inconvenient with more neutral or "patriotic" ones. Is this such a case of whitewashing ('white' replacing 'slave'), one of poor transliteration, or just a valley with two different names (very possible)? Anyway, I'll add it to the "see also" cases. Arminden (talk) 12:23, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

Ubaidi - isn't it different?
Doesn't Ubaidi, with an -i in the end, have a slightly different meaning, i.e. "smb. from Ubaid"? Arminden (talk) 13:01, 17 August 2021 (UTC)