Talk:Alexander Goedicke

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Goedicke or Gedike?
I'm a bit mystified about the proper English-language rendering of this composer's name. I have always known him as "Goedicke", but I see some more recent sources give "Gedike", including imslp.org, an on-line score library which includes works by him. What brought this up just now is that I am saving PDF files by him and his father, and I am wondering which spelling to use in the file-names. ("Goedicke" does look a bit like a Germanization of his name. But I don't know the actual pronunciation of the name.)

I realize that Russian names often have more than one rendering in English, and sometimes one does not seem to take complete precedence over the others. I've heard that Tchaikovsky himself spelled his name in 21 different ways.

I am wondering whether Wikipedia policy offers guidelines on which version of a Russian name to give preference to. Is it the one that is best known? The one that, pronounced phonetically, resembles the Russian pronunciation most closely? And there is the curious case of Rachmaninov, who seems almost universally to be "Rachmaninoff" in the U.S., but "Rachmaninov" in the rest of the English-speaking world.

Anyway, just wondering.... M.J.E. (talk) 10:09, 22 January 2021 (UTC)


 * More the other way around: Gedike is the Russification of his family name Goedicke, as his ancestry was German. So in Roman alphabet contexts this was his version. Cyrillic doesn’t have an equivalent of the oe of German, but uses e, and certainly ck would be k. Like many in similar situations back then he probably kept both as ‘correct spellings’ depending on alphabet. But some sources simply transliterate directly from his Cyrillic name rather than his ‘fully German’ one, probably those more exposed to Russian sources. Harsimaja (talk) 22:32, 7 October 2023 (UTC)