Talk:Nikolai Golovanov

Transliteration
Who created this page with a "c" instead of a "k". The name Николай (Nikolay) is clearly spelled with a "k". A five year old can see that. When editing text, I can understand slips, personal preferences, and ignorance. But creating a page, to which many others will be linked? C'mon people, do your homework! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ivan Velikii (talk • contribs) 22:00, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Hi Ivan. Before pouring too much scorn on the intelligence of your fellow Wikipedians, you might reflect that the Cyrillic and Roman alphabets are two separate scripts.  So your statement that the name Николай (Nikolay) is clearly spelled with a "k" is literally incorrect: it's clearly spelled with a "к", but a Cyrillic "к" is not the same thing as a Roman "k".  In fact, some words spelled with a Cyrillic "к" are usually spelled with a "c" in English -- Moscow being one prominent example, Nicholas II of Russia being another, the composer Alexander Scriabin -- I could go on.   Just to make things even more interesting, there are actually more Google hits for Nicolai Golovanov than for Nikolai Golovanov.  So perhaps you should do your homework: in any case, please lay off the personal attacks.  Cheers. Grover cleveland 18:36, 27 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I have to agree with Ivan Velikii, though, that "Nicolai" is a very non-standard romanization of Николай. Do we know, for example, that that's how Golovanov spelled his own name when writing in English?  There's also WP:Romanization of Russian, which says "Selecting the most frequently used variant based on a search engine test is not acceptable ... When in doubt, use WP:RUS", which gives the English k for the Russian к, with no alternatives such as c.  I'm sure most authoritative sources will have "Nikolai (or Nikolay) Golovanov".


 * In any event, we certainly can't have an article titled "Nicolai ..." which starts out "Nikolay ...". --  JackofOz (talk) 06:09, 19 March 2009 (UTC)


 * On reflection, disgregarding whatever Google might say (and there are in fact more hits for Nikolai than Nicolai, but that's irrelevant), we really do need to adopt WP:RUS here (Nikolai), unless we have evidence that Golovanov actually spelled his name "Nicolai" in Roman.  We use the same approach for Sergei Rachmaninoff: it would normally be Rachmaninov (or even Rakhmaninov), but we know he wrote his own name "Rachmaninoff" in the US.  --  JackofOz (talk) 20:45, 29 October 2009 (UTC)