Talk:Sumeria (disambiguation)

we should, of course, link to ("did you mean?") Sumer, but we cannot say Sumeria " is a common name used to describe" Sumer, since that's not correct English. --dab (𒁳) 20:04, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

ok, does "Sumeria" see any use in the sense of "Sumer" in English? Yes. I get 28,000 google hits for "Ancient Sumeria". But that just makes it a common misspelling. "Sumeria" is an obvious back-formation from "Sumerian". Google books gives me 611 hits for "Ancient Sumeria", mostly from dodgy or non-scholarly titles like "Voices of Light: Spiritual and Visionary Poems by Women", "Lost Cities of Atlantis" etc. But there seems to be some academic use in the 19th early 20th centuries. "Ancient Sumeria" is mentioned in Donald A. Mackenzie's Myths of Babylonia and Assyria. --dab (𒁳) 09:33, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

"Misnomer" is a rather strong term, since it implies that the "correct" term for various entities in written on tablets of stone somewhere. However if Sumer is the term preferred by ancient historians nowadays I defer to their judgement. In my view "Sumeria" should be a redirect to "Sumer", which should have a hatnote pointing to the asteroid, all other entries here are too obscure or tangential to be worth bothering with. PatGallacher (talk) 20:57, 4 December 2009 (UTC)


 * I favor keeping this page, or at least listing it for discussion rather than a single editor determining its fate. It makes sense to me that there would be a disambig page, and arguments like "too obscure and tangential in my view" are a tad subjective, this being wikipedia. Tangential to what? Til Eulenspiegel (talk) 01:33, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

There are 2 issues here. A lot of respectable English words were originally back-formations. In any case, we appear to be agreed that "Sumer" is the most important meaning of "Sumeria", however colloquial or scholarly it may be. The asteroid is a legitimate alternative meaning, but the "in popular culture" meanings are not worth taking seriously. I would refer people to Wikipedia guidelines on disambiguation, according to which disambiguation pages are not just a collection of free associations. The first is not an article at all, and we have a song and a comic story which includes the word "Sumeria", without these being articles in their own right. PatGallacher (talk) 01:56, 6 December 2009 (UTC)


 * What one person finds "worth taking seriously", someone else might not.   What you don't find "worth taking seriously", trust me - someone else does.  We should have plenty of room to accomodate everyone without imposing our own notions of what topics people "ought to" be caring about.  Til Eulenspiegel (talk) 02:08, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

I'm in favor of keeping this page as a disambiguation - and clearly state that Sumeria is a misspelling. The "did you mean Sumer?" solution certainly gets my vote. Wilstrup (talk) 18:43, 6 December 2009 (UTC)