Talk:Battle of Skopje

Name
Since there were no standard Macedonian and Bulgarian, we use transcription of the city as it is today, primary we take in mind the location of the city. So, Skopje is in Macedonia and we use Macedonian transcription into English. For those cities that are in BG you can use Bg transcription, but Skopje is in Macedonia. If you really want to use slavic transcription, use Old Church Slavonic because that was the official language at that time (and Greek too).--  MacedonianBoy Oui? 18:40, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Have you ever read about that period or you are making maps based on Bozhinov Encyclopaedia?--  MacedonianBoy Oui? 18:53, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
 * I have a couple of FAs on medieval Bulgarian history, no joking. But to answer your question with a question: did you really want to ask me what you just asked me, or were you just making chitchat? Todor→Bozhinov 20:05, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
 * There's no way you can argue with him on history articles. After all he knows everything about the Rosetta stone having a script in Macedonian. Ooops, that's Ancient Macedonian actually, after it comes Old Macedonian (the rest of the world calls it Old Church Slavonic or Old Bulgarian) and then comes New Macedonian, codified in 1944. They're all one and the same language which has changed only a little for that period. I'm sorry, but you can't read the article where it was since even MKpedians had a great laugh reading it. Sorry for the sarcasm, MacedonianBoy, but in this case it is dully deserved. And again - stop playing around, please.-- L a v e o l  T 22:34, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

Can you stop the lame chit-chat, all of you? I've blocked Laveol for violation of his revert parole. If I may nevertheless add my opinion here, prima facie I have to agree with MacedonianBoy. The most common modern spelling as used in present-day English is the primary candidate to be used here. Unless you have very solid evidence that modern English historiography consistently prefers a different spelling for those historical contexts (which I doubt, especially where the two spellings are really just that: entirely superficial spelling variants.) This is not an issue of "laying claim" to historical domains for this or that nation, so please spare us any lame arguments about whether a more Bulgarian-looking or a Macedonian-looking spelling better reflects who this event "belongs" to. Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:14, 24 November 2008 (UTC)


 * And we don't give translations of phrases in other languages. They serve no meaningful purpose.  Balkan Fever  09:35, 24 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Okay. It was MacedonianBoy's reasoning that made me react, not the edits themselves. Looking at his argumentation, the edits seem ridiculous, but I guess I should be treating them separately from their reasoning. Todor→Bozhinov 17:11, 24 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Hmm, yeah, it was him who switched it all into nationalist mode here, true enough. – By the way, on quite a different note, do you think you could find someone who could flesh out Devol (Albania) a bit? I stumbled accross the place name in one of these articles and found we had nothing on it. It looks like it would be of some interest to people interested in medieval Balkan history (Connections to St Kliment of Ohrid, to Stefan Dušan, and to the Crusaders and Byzantines.) Bg-wiki has a substantial article. Fut.Perf. ☼ 21:17, 24 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I think I can work on it, the Bulgarian article is a good candidate for translation + expansion. It was ruled by Bulgaria from the mid-9th to the early 11th century and was an important centre of the First Bulgarian Empire's southwest; from 1230 to 1246, it was again under Bulgaria. I think the Albanian name would be Devoll, though, judging by the Devoll River and Devoll District names. I'm not sure how relevant Albanian is, however, as it was a Byzantine, Bulgarian and Serbian fortress, so we should either have some Greek spelling or the Slavic/Slavicized (?) form Devol. I don't have my books with me now, but my educated guess would be that it was destroyed and abandoned during the Ottoman conquest and/or the Albanian ethnic expansion in the Late Middle Ages. If I don't have the time in the following days, you can drop a note at User:Gligan's talk, he's another Balkan history buff :) Todor→Bozhinov 22:53, 24 November 2008 (UTC)