Talk:John Caradja

untitled
The name mentioned in the article is Jean Georges Caradja. The title of the article should not be different. This is the name of a princely family which is spelled Caradja, Caragea being an incorrect transliteration of the former cyrillic alphabet. Therefor the title of the article should be Jean Georges Caradja consistent with the name mentioned in the article.Afil (talk) 02:06, 8 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Did my Solomonian wisdom do the trick? Dahn (talk) 14:10, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Requested move 26 March 2021

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion. 

The result of the move request was: Moved. -- Calidum 20:16, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

John Caradja → Ioan Caragea – Most common name, "Ioan Caragea" has 6,260 results in Google and 140 in Google Scholar while "John Caradja" has 2,080 and 10, respectively. See Google Ngram results for both names. Also, we don't Anglify Romanian names such as "Ioan/Ion". See Alexandru Ioan Cuza, Ioan Culcer, etc.. Super  Ψ   Dro  11:49, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Support 1812 is edging into the modern era. In ictu oculi (talk) 16:26, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

I support the move discussed above too GhettoInvestigator (talk) 15:06, 4 October 2021 (UTC)

Move
I dont object to the move, (though I find it a bit ironic that we get such pompous declarations about the Greek identity of Phanariote figures who are utterly obscure until Romanians write about them); I dont even object to the proclamation themselves; but I do beseech you: next time you make such bold moves, even against the apparent consensus, could you at least make a decent, non-perfunctory, effort to actually change the article text accordingly? We dont exist to write articles for you, watch you as you operate sweeping changes to what you find ready-made for you, and then clean up after you -- in other words, this is not the Phanariote era. Dahn (talk) 18:12, 17 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Well, sorry for any inadvertent 'pompous declarations'; but the article itself stated, before my move, "was a Phanariote Greek Prince of Wallachia", so the pompous declaration isn't mine. And Caradja is not "utterly obscure until Romanians write about them". I appreciate a lot your work in this article, but the fact is that he is a figure who is not solely defined by his tenure as prince of Wallachia; of course, if you only rely on Romanian sources, then the end result will skew heavily towards that. But he was a figure who was also very much involved in the Greek War of Independence and early independent Greece, and there is ample literature about him in Greek as well, that has obviously not been used. This is not a criticism, BTW, since I don't expect you to know Greek or have access to the relevant literature; I am just stating the obvious, that this is a figure who played a large role in the history of at least two countries, and should be portrayed (and named) accordingly.
 * On violating consensus, I don't see it: there are two votes above, in a discussion that apparently went pretty unnoticed by the wider community (I would have opposed, had I been aware of it). Furthermore, the move decision relies on the ngram, which doesn't prove anything, since it fails to distinguish Romanian-language from English-language sources. Accordingly I was WP:BOLD. I was about to have another look at the article today, fully aware that I probably did not catch every necessary change the last time around because I did not have enough time; I think my record on WP is enough to show that I don't usually do things in a half-assed way, nor that I am driven by nationalist POV. Hence while I do apologize for not getting everything right, and thank you for your edits, I do not appreciate your tone, or the snarky comparisons with the 'Phanariote era'. Constantine  ✍  11:59, 18 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Nevertheless, I will take to heart the request to not do bold moves like this again. Constantine  ✍  12:05, 18 June 2023 (UTC)


 * [Edit conflict] I need to emphasize again that I do not oppose the move (I actually prefer the current spelling, and only used the Romanian one because it was the article title at the time -- I generally accommodate to what I find). I would however prefer such moves to be stable, complete (not the random changes you made in the text, leaving me to do the rest), and properly discussed -- the previous move to "Caragea" had at least been requested (note: not by me). You left editors who have seen a point to using the Romanian name without a possibility of arguing their point, however correct it may or may not be, thereby introducing the theoretical possibility of a needless back-and-forth.
 * The rest of my comment was indeed snarky, referring to how this article was in a pitiful state (like so many articles on the Phanariotes are), and how it seems to have caught your attention long after the expansion, and only because of the name. You write: "he was a figure who was also very much involved in the Greek War of Independence and early independent Greece, and there is ample literature about him in Greek as well, that has obviously not been used" -- before I edited the article and brought in quite thorough sources on his involvement (the ones I could find and could read), there was zero mention of his and his sons' involvement in that war. Can you see the discrepancy?
 * And yes, I do get snarky when I have to make lots of small changes to a text after a sweeping move that I am implicitly asked to endorse. It is, or at least seems, arrogant on your part. That said, I do accept the apology, and please make sure that in the future you complete the workload you create. Make bold moves, by all means, but make them when you actually have the time to complete them. Regards, Dahn (talk) 12:15, 18 June 2023 (UTC)


 * , I want to note, since I proposed the move to the Romanian title, that the Google Ngram results I used were specifically in the English language, as you can see if you click on the link, so it's not true that it fails to distinguish Romanian-language from English-language sources. On Google Scholar "Ioan Caragea" gets 75 results on specifically English-language sources while "John Caradja" gets a total of 11 ; "John G. Caradja" gets zero. Further, whatever the person did in their lifetime is irrelevant to the title we use in their article. If Caragea was a Greek or identified as a Greek and also contributed to Greek history, WP:COMMONNAME overrides all of that anyway. This is how we have for example articles on Lithuanian figures using Polish names, see arbitrary examples such as Paweł Holszański or Romuald Giedroyć. It is in fact common in Wikipedia that we title non-Greek figures with their Greek names because it turns out those were the ones that ended up being the most used ones today.
 * To me it seems like this move is not justifiable by any single policy and is a disruptive way of acting even if done in good faith. I would've reverted if it wasn't for Dahn whose preference on the article title I wish to respect for them being the main writer of the page. I think it would be better to hold a formal RM and if that is not done I reserve the right to hold one in the future. Super   Ψ   Dro  22:53, 18 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Also worth noting that WP:CONSISTENT with Caragea's plague is now broken, I remember it was in fact this inconsistency between these two articles that made me propose the move. "Caradja's plague" has no use in English-language academia, alternations such as "Plague of Caradja" or "Caradja plague" also have none . "Caragea's plague" gives 12 , including by some authors whose surnames indicate they're not Romanian.  Super   Ψ   Dro  22:59, 18 June 2023 (UTC)
 * I see your point, and yes, it is unusual (the same for "Caragea's Law"); but as long as the article notes that his name in Romanian is "Caragea", the reader will be able to pick up that the plague and law were primarily defined by his Romanian subjects. I don't think it is more of an inconsistency than leaving the Uganda Plan be called that, even though it was about resettlement in Kenya. Personally, and for this reason, I would urge that the modern Romanian version of his name in the lead be referred to as the second bolded variant before the first parenthetical: "John G. Caradja or Ioan Caragea". Not only for the reasons you mention, and not only because he was fully aware of the Romanian version of his name (he used Cyrillic, but this is now the standard transliteration of Romanian Cyrillic), but also because plenty of English-language sources exclusively use "Caragea" to refer to the prince, not just to his law and "his" plague. : What say you? Dahn (talk) 07:29, 19 June 2023 (UTC)


 * One of the reasons to use "Caradja" or "Karadja", despite what appears to be a slight preference for "Caragea" in modern variants, is that the oldest mentions of his name in English are with "-dj-" variants (see Shelley). It can also be argued that the "-ge-" variant is awkward, as it has the exact same phonetic value, only in the Romanian spelling (which most English users will not know how to pronounce). In that reading, the Romanian is a merely spelling variant, just like the Italian "Caraggia". Another reason, which is actually mentioned in the article, is that more modern members of the family actually disliked the Romanian spelling. Finally, it is also of note that any "-dj-" name is not the Greek pronunciation, and cannot be vocalized by your average Greek; it is roughly the Turkish pronunciation, which reflects the family's unusual pedigree and its primary status as Ottoman bureaucrats. (It just dawned on me: the Prince himself must have preferred the Turkish pronounciation, rather than "Karatzas". Otherwise, Shelly would not have known him as "Caradja", and the Italian press would not have printed his name as "Caraggia".)
 * What I would take issue with, though, is the initialism "G.", which seems to be an awkward way to avoid discussion about this move (other options would have required to copy the text into an existing redirect). I don't see it as a major problem that we "invent" a variant of the name, but it is striking that we wouldn't call the article either "John Caradja" or "John George Caradja". The "G." is also eerily Romanian -- like the "I. C." in Ion I. C. Brătianu. Dahn (talk) 08:24, 19 June 2023 (UTC)
 * the -dj- sound is close to the Greek pronunciation of -τζ-; the former is a dʒ, but Greek lacks the ʒ sound or any letter to represent it, therefore it transliterates and pronounces it as dz (except in dialect, where dʒ is actually heard pretty often, likely under Slavic and/or Italian influence). The Turkish pronunciation would indeed be dʒ, which is probably why (likely via French and Italian), it became 'dj' in English.
 * On the initialism, I have no problem with omitting it. A stated, it is his patronymic, which is usually omitted unless one wants to distinguish between people of the same name; from the previous history of the article, I assume that in Romanian, it was rendered as a middle name instead, which is why I kept it as a perhaps unfortunate compromise.
 * On consistency with Caragea's plague, I am of the same opinion as Dahn, which is also why I did not alter it in the article. It is a proper name for an event, in a purely Romanian context, and therefore the Romanian form of the name is appropriate. It is also made clear that Caragea was the Romanian form of his name, so no confusion should arise.
 * On sources,, the link to GScholar you give has quite a few Romanian-language sources, and almost all authors AFAICT are Romanian: naturally they will favour this form, which is familiar to them. I can offer some counter-examples, for "caradja" Wallachia in GScholar, or another ngram that can be interpreted as showing prevalence of 'John Caradja', but in the end it is all the same: a) there is an obvious preference for the Romanian form in Romania-related topics and b) the difference in usage is not overwhelming, or, put another way, we really would need to manually count individual sources to come to a conclusion. That there is no established form is pretty clear in the usage of Britannica: Caradja when writing about a Greek figure active at his court, Caragea in an article about Romanian law (Caradja himself doesn't merit an article, apparently). On the other hand, this is a figure who had an English spelling of his name while he lived: it is 'Caradja', which is how Byron and Shelley knew him. Constantine  ✍  17:18, 19 June 2023 (UTC)
 * To clarify my point: the "g" in "Caragea", in Romanian, is pronounced exactly the same as the Turkish "dj", which is also a sound native to Romanian (Romanians have traditionally viewed the inability to pronounce that sound as a Greek shibboleth; apparently, Caradja himself was able to pronounce it, and insisted on using it in his name -- or else we would not have variants from his lifetime using "dj", "ggi", "џ", and the like). This is an additional reason why I do not think we should insist on the (modern) Romanian spelling being used at as the title of the article. I would however urge you to consider that maybe it should be indicated as a second bolded variant in the lead -- currently, we do not use that, but I think both the frequency of the "Caragea" spelling and the fact that it is the modern variant of his Cyrillic Romanian name (which he used as a signature during his reign, which appears on the cover of his law treaty etc.) warrant its appearance in bold; I also think that this helps the reader understand why references to the plague, in this very article, use a different spelling that the prince's name. Do you agree? Dahn (talk) 17:50, 19 June 2023 (UTC)
 * I agree, it would be good to have it bolded in the lede. Constantine  ✍  17:54, 19 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Thank you. Dahn (talk) 18:01, 19 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Very well, I guess it can be kept, though I think removing the middle name from the title might be better. Sources do not seem to use it after all. If you both are okay with it I can do a quick request at WP:RMT. Super   Ψ   Dro  21:07, 19 June 2023 (UTC)
 * No objection (sorry for the delay in replying). Dahn (talk) 22:12, 19 June 2023 (UTC)


 * As an aside: does anyone know how to reconstruct his Osmanli name? Dahn (talk) 18:01, 19 June 2023 (UTC)