Talk:Arkticheskiy Institut Islands

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So, I heard they renamed it to metapod island - shall we change the article title? ZachattackGO (talk) 06:55, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

No, unless you can provide a verified source of such a name change. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.173.146.91 (talk) 20:58, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

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That revision by user talk:66.130.59.102 to Arkticheskiy Institut Islands was made by user:Peter Horn Peter Horn User talk 01:12, 6 November 2010 (UTC)

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Further explanation of my edit to the section regarding the name.
Originally this section said:

''The combination "Arkticheskiy Institut Islands" is technically incorrect, for it is a strange combination of Russian and English. Even so, the name "Arkticheskiy Institut Islands" has become popular and its use has been widespread in this manner for many decades and in many modern maps and atlases. "Arctic Institute Islands", which would be the grammatically correct way of naming these islands in English, is very rarely used.''

Without examples in Russian, or a description of how the islands are named in Russian, or links to the grammatical concepts the name violates, this section is confusing. It simply says that the name is a strange combination of English and Russian, and this could be interpreted to mean that the problem is that "Arkticheskiy" and "Institut" are Russian words and simply should not be included alongside the word "Islands", which would also be a problem with names like "Soviet Union"(as opposed to "Workers Council Union") or "Venera 13 Lander"(as opposed to "Venus 13 Lander"). A comment in this section said "ever heard of loan words?" indicating that this interpretation was not uncommon, and I interpreted it this way at first too.

The issue this section is actually pointing to has to do with the grammatical case system. My Russian is not perfect, but here is what I know: In Russian, nouns and adjectives that describe them are declined into cases, indicating their relationship to other words. "Острова Арктического института"(Ostrova Arkticheskovo instituta) is in the genitive case, which denotes ideas like possession or derivation, so something like "Islands of the Arctic Institute". Arkticheskovo Instituta is genitive in the Russian name, but the English name uses Arkticheskiy Institut in the nominative case, which is the dictionary form used for the subject of a sentence. This system is necessary in Russian because unlike English, the order of words in Russian is completely fluid. English sentences like "Paul ate a hamburger" and "A hamburger ate Paul" mean different things, but Russian speakers would decline the word hamburger to indicate it is the thing being eaten, so both word orders would be valid expressions of Paul's actions at the expense of the hamburger. (A quirk of the Russian accusative case means this isn't literally true because declining a masculine noun to the accusative case implies it is animate, so this would mean Paul ate a hamburger that was alive. The example still makes the point about word order.)

Because the name "Arkticheskiy Institut Islands" uses the nominative case for these words and the relationship between "Arkticheskiy Institut" and "Islands" has to be inferred from word order this inference would not be possible in Russian and the grammatical case system would be needed to prevent it from meaning something like "Institute of Arctic Islands" or "Islands Arctic Institute" or just being some grammatically nonsensical collection of three words. The name "Arkticheskiy Institut Islands" is also problematic to me because it is neither a translation nor a transliteration. "Vladivostok" loses meaning in English, but reflects the sounds Russians make to refer to this city. "Rostov-on-Don" preserves meaning (the fact that the city lies on the Don river) but does not sound anything like what a Russian would call this city. "Arkticheskiy Institut Islands" accomplishes neither, it isn't clear to an English speaker what it means and a Russian would find it weird to say and calls it something else entirely.

While I personally found this section interesting to make sense of, I think it might read as pedantic if someone does not understand the point it is making, and as someone who is fairly knowledgeable about this and can read Cyrillic, I was only able to understand the point of this section after looking at the original name of the islands in Russian.

The section also used a lot of subjective and ambiguous words like "many", "strange", "popular", and "widespread" without any citations or evidence, so I tried to cut down on that as much as possible and removed the incorrect implication that there is only one correct translation to English.

Whether or not this section should exist is a decision for people more experienced with Wikipedia editing than myself, but I personally like it as a Russian language learner and I think the way I reconstructed it makes it more useful to the average person by explaining what the problem is with the English name, providing links for further reading on the concepts that make it problematic, and it may make it easier for people interested in the islands to track down more information on them by considering other potential names. I also make the point that these other names will be preferred by Russian speakers writing in English who find the construction "Arkticheskiy Institut Islands" unnatural, and I provide an additional citation for this as well as reuse a citation where the name is fully translated("Arctic Institute Islands") in both cases. The websites cited also graciously list a Russian address on the same page. How lucky is that? I think this section now has a purpose besides being a fun fact, which is to warn that the naming is inconsistent and that you may find these islands referred to by a different name.

Thank you for reading this long explanation of a fairly straightforward edit. I think I made this section stronger but I am new to editing Wikipedia and there are potential problems with my edit:

-It does make this section longer, and raises topics like Russian grammar in an article that isn't very related. Given how short the article is, this section still stands out somewhat.

-I use the phrase "grammatical case system" in a link that leads to "Russian Declension" because I personally think this has a clearer meaning to people who do not know much about grammar, but I don't know if this is stylistically valid and admittedly I have only heard the expression "grammatical case system" in language learning environments. I don't know if a linguist would say something like this.

-I include my own transliteration, and I could not find a similar transliteration used in an atlas or article but I thought it was important to mention more than one approach to naming the islands in English as opposed to the original paragraph that implies one correct way. We sometimes take a similar approach to other islands like "Novaya Zemlya" or towns like "Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk". I suspect for instance that Google maps would do something like this, perhaps omitting the word "Ostrova" or translating it, but on Google maps the islands are incorrectly labeled "Bolshoi" after the largest island of the archipelago so I couldn't rely on this. Its worth mentioning that the article lacks a transliteration at the top or I would have used that, and that the absence of this transliteration may incorrectly imply that the English name reflects Russian pronunciation, but I don't know if I'm the person to provide this transliteration. This is why I use the framing "Transliterations like" in my edit, despite not personally being able think of a better way to transliterate the Russian name. I'll look more at how other articles transliterate Russian words and if its straightforward I'll add one myself.

-I am not fluent in Russian and while I don't think I said anything incorrect and I double checked everything, a fluent speaker may have a better explanation or a correction. Russian grammar is complicated and people get things wrong. Given that my edit is more descriptive, it has more potential to be wrong.

-The question remains open whether or not this section should exist in the first place. Cyrusabyrd (talk) 11:06, 26 April 2024 (UTC)