Talk:Roberto Azevêdo

The Happy Idiot Ashton Mr. Kutcher
Foo We Been Talking About You Sense Your Downfall And Sense Seeing Is Believing That Actualizes.

"Standard Orthography"
Texts following the names of RA and his wife were added with the explanation: Standard orthography name, according to the 1943 Orthographic Formulary; Brazilians often carry names as they were registered by their parents, either in obsolete or fancy alternative spellings, but they are tolerated errors, not standard forms. There is no article standard orthography, a brief mention in Portuguese names, but no information on this in Reforms of Portuguese orthography, Portuguese orthography or. If there are indeed no Brazilian laws on names, it is difficult to characterise them as "errors" - perhaps "tolerated variants" would be better?

But in any case, unless reliable sources have written about RA and his wife in this respect, these additions look like WP:OR. These people seem to use only the names they were given. Of course many sources use "Azevedo", but I can find nothing to suggest that this is anything to do with changes in orthography - the non-use of diacriticals generally is commonplace in English-language writing. However, "Maria Nazaré Farani Azevedo" is hardly used at all (907 Google hits, compared with 218,000 for her actual name).

While writing this I see that the text has been changed to footnotes. This is still OR, I think. (And I am not sure in any case that the 1990 agreement is the relevant one, rather than the 1943 Brazilian reforms.) Davidships (talk) 00:16, 10 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Had not seen this, thanks for the tip at my talk page. In fact, there are laws — they are just summarily ignored by a significant part of the population, with the general tolerance of others.  The laws do reference the 1943 Orthographic formulary, thus making it part of legislation.  The 1990 agreement changes nothing in this, as it focuses on minorating differences between Portugal and Brazil.  The article on reforms does not need to touch this, as it was not a focus of any reform, only a natural consequence.  Even if there was no specific law, names are still words, thus subject to orthography; it is only a social more that allowed people to preserve archaic forms as they were baptised and registered, and ended up creating chaos where the less educated effectively invent aberrant forms of traditional names.  I probably should write something up referencing a few works on this, but it is quite self‐evident, thus I have not come around to find in which article it should go and do the hard part, which is writing.  And then, it feels useless, as this is the country of ‘presidenta’ (something like ‘presidentress’) Dilma… Leandrogfcdutra (talk) 18:41, 14 May 2013 (UTC)


 * First, I changed it to a footnote for being disruptive to the text. I didn't checked which Orthographic Accord was correct (because I really don't care about it and keep writing in the old sense like many people. My personal opinion is not much favorable to Grammar in general, least when it's decided up-down without proper discussion like it was done; but I digress...), just repeated the info and put the link to it. If it's wrong, please substitute for the correct one. Second, I'm not very familiar with the English Wiki policies regrading this subject, but in the Portuguese Wiki the convention of nomenclature is to use the most recent form (with a note about how it was originally written), and for the living people to use the form they declare themselves. In this particular cases, almost every article and reference about him, even not in Portuguese (with a few exceptions) use the "Azevêdo". That's why I created it with the diacritic, and I see no problem with maintaining this (now) footnote, since is a logical consequence of those Accords, not merely WP:OR. PS.: The use of ‘presidenta’ was registered before, even if not being commonly used, and it was a political choice of her; as also would be if she had choosen the other form. But let's not make this into a forum about it, or it would be a long discussion and someone is bound to call the other a (Grammar)Nazi ;-) ZackTheJack (talk) 15:33, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Thank you both for these explanations and observations. That's very helpful. I'm not sure that I really quite understand in what way the reforms were really expected to, and actually do, affect personal names. I can see that in the 1943 formulário personal and geografical proper names are supposed to follow the new rules where they are "portuguese or adapted into portuguese" (and elsewhere I saw that the rules do not apply to personal names in other "languages"), except that individuals were permitted to retain their "customary signature". Obviously nobody born after 1943 could have a qualifying signature, so was the idea that all new birth registrations would have to be compliant? From the look of this it may be so in Portugal, but clearly not in Brazil. Indeed, not much hope if my late father-in-law, a conservative Brazilian congressman, would include amongst his children "Luiz" and "Tereza" (though without the "h") - I'm not sure about "Vianney". But my question remains: since RA and his wife seem not to use the postulated standard spellings, is their inclusion without citations Original Research? Davidships (talk) 20:17, 17 May 2013 (UTC)