Talk:Robert Viren

Requested move 21 November 2015

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The result of the move request was: moved. Jenks24 (talk) 06:19, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

Robert Wiren → Robert Viren – This Russian admiral's name is Robert Viren, in Russian Роберт Николаевич Вирен, and on the Russian wikipedia. The Russian В is transliterated exclusively as 'V' (see Romanization of Russian). The W does not exist in the Russian alphabet, nor does the sound in the Russian language. Scholarly sources use Viren almost exclusively. Google books returns 19,400 results for Robert Viren. For 'Robert Wiren' it produces 9,120 results almost all of which refer to other people. At the very best 'Robert Wiren' is perhaps an archaic form, or comes from the transliteration of the name into languages with different phonetic forms (eg. Finnish). 'Robert Viren' should be the main title as being clearly the WP:COMMONNAME as used in English, both in scholarly and popular sources, and 'Robert Wiren' used as a redirect. 129.67.116.126 (talk) 22:12, 21 November 2015 (UTC)


 * I imagine that the W comes from the fact that he was of ethnic German extraction and German uses a w for the English v or Russian в (cf. Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel). V/Wiren's son emigrated to the US and used "Alexis R. Wiren" as his name there.  However, as you note, the W spelling seems deprecated in English sources, so...


 * Support per nom. —  AjaxSmack   04:48, 23 November 2015 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Requested move 30 April 2019

 * 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 to "Robert Viren". (closed by non-admin page mover) Thanks, -- DannyS712 (talk) 00:20, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

Robert von Wirén → Robert Viren – After an undiscussed reversion to the Wiren usage, despite the RM above. Apparently on the justification of his "Ltheran faith and buried in a lutheran cemetery". Which has nothing to do with his WP:COMMONNAME, which as a Russian raised in Russia and who served in Russia his whole life, used the Russian form of his name. He is, as has been pointed out above, exclusively referred to as Viren in reliable sources, such as Evan Mawdsley's The Russian Revolution and the Baltic Fleet and Norman Saul's Sailors in Revolt: Russian Baltic Fleet in 1917. Can list more if required. Spokoyni (talk) 20:44, 30 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Support Russian. In ictu oculi (talk) 21:32, 30 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Against He was not Russian; he was a Baltic German by ethnicity, a Russian subject, and an officer in the Russian Navy. He of course used the Russian form of his name when writing in Russian (Cyrillic alphabet), but if he ever travelled in western Europe, his carte de visite would have been in French, and his name and title would have been something like this: Robert Reinhold von Wirén. Contre-amiral de la marine de sa majesté impériale russe. All family members emigrated abroad.  The sons lived and died in the United States. They spelled their last name von Wirén. Creuzbourg (talk) 16:34, 1 May 2019 (UTC)
 * They may have used it, but he certainly didn't. This is not about the naming of his descendents, its about his name. And whatever his theoretical name in French had he happened to have travelled to Western Europe might have been, it was certainly not the one he used. Other sources using Viren - Cove and Westwell's History of World War I, Getzler's Kronstadt 1917-1921, Kowner's The A to Z of the Russo-Japanese War, etc. Spokoyni (talk) 17:14, 1 May 2019 (UTC)
 * It seems that your perception of name use in the multicultural and multilingual Russian empire is somewhat flawed. One used Cyrillic letters and spelling writing in Russian, and Roman letters and spelling according to your ethnicity if writing in a Western European language. Since English is a language using Roman letters, the name should be spelled accordingly. Anything else is ahistorical. Creuzbourg (talk) 18:04, 1 May 2019 (UTC)
 * That's why we have Romanization of Russian which transliterates Роберт Николаевич Вирен as Robert Nikolaevich Viren, which as you admit, is what he wrote his name as. Not any form of von Wirén, especially when the W does not exist in Russian. As to being ahistorical can you show me English language sources using Robert von Wirén or have you made that up? Similarly can you show me this carte de visite form of "Robert Reinhold von Wirén. Contre-amiral de la marine de sa majesté impériale russe" or is this your WP:OR? Spokoyni (talk) 18:17, 1 May 2019 (UTC)


 * The article should be moved back to Robert Viren for procedural reasons per the RM above (which I supported). The burden should not be on the nominator here to make the case for a title that has already been through the RM process.  However, Google Books hits I get are "Robert Wiren" admiral: 1200, "Robert von Wiren" admiral: 40, "Robert Viren" admiral: 175 and "Robert von Viren" admiral: 0.  Spellings with W predominate; am I missing something?  —  AjaxSmack  01:47, 4 May 2019 (UTC)


 * Support and agree with, this could have been a procedural speedy close. Andrewa (talk) 23:01, 7 May 2019 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

As the writer of the Finnish Wikipedia article fi:Robert Wirén I'd like to mention couple things that came up when I was searching information from Finnish language web sources: Viren/Wirén had Finnish ancestry. His grandfather was born in Virrat, Finland, and changed his name from Viinikka to Wirén when he served as a lutheran priest in Koporye [among Finnish-speaking Ingrians, I assume]. Admiral Wirén's father, Nikolaus Wiren, served as a gymnasium rector in Tallinn and died in Riga [among German-speaking communities, I assume], and he apparently began to spell his surname as "von Wirén" after he was ennobled in 1896. Wirén's mother and his father's mother both had German-sounding names so they were probably Baltic Germans, although the sources I read did not specify that. There was also no mention of his native language. Anyway, the Finnish sources all spell his name with a W (Wiren/Wirén/von Wiren/von Wirén) and so apparently do the German sources used in this article. --Risukarhi (talk) 20:44, 20 March 2021 (UTC)

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