User talk:Rubble pile

Re: jovian/Jovian
Hm. I think "Jovian" may actually be the accepted term. I just did a quick purusal of Google Scholar and most (but not all) articles used "Jovian." So maybe it needs to be changed. Serendipodous 14:50, 29 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks, I thought it looked odd. Rubble pile 14:53, 29 May 2007 (UTC)


 * It's not Jovial? ;) kwami (talk) 06:43, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Amalthea
I noticed that you shortened the leading section but longer lead was a condition for the article to be promoted to GA. You should read Talk:Amalthea_%28moon%29. Since I don't want it to lose it's status it would be helpful if you make lead longer again. Ruslik 08:46, 30 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Sorry about that. It seemed too detailed with all those numbers and references. I will rewrite it again. Rubble pile 16:16, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Featured picture candidates/Iapetus mountains
Hi Rubble pile,

Just to let you know that the Featured Picture Image:Iapetus mountains Larger.jpg is due to make an appearance as Picture of the Day on January 20, 2008. If you get a chance, you can check and improve the caption at Template:POTD/2008-01-20.  howcheng  {chat} 01:27, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

Greek names
Please leave the Greek names in the moon articles. Many people prefer a Latinate over Anglicized pronunciation, and the original Greek is the best way to convey that. It's going to take a while to go through the page histories and recover them all ... kwami 09:24, 10 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Are Greek letters the best way to communicate this? Most people can't read them. Surely the English pronunciation guides are more useful than Greek letters? Rubble pile 14:33, 10 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I removed the Greek letters from Titan (moon) because it's a featured article. I'll leave the rest for now, but I really don't understand the purpose. If there are multiple pronunciations, just give them in English, you can't expect people to be able to read Ancient Greek. Plus it looks ugly having three separate things in brackets after the name. Rubble pile 02:37, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
 * It'd be a lot uglier to have 4 or 5 English pronunciations, especially if they all are in both IPA and pronunciation respellings. If we just include the literary English pronunciation, people will delete it because that's not how they pronounce Greek names. If we don't include anything, people will complain that they can't find it in a dictionary. (Well, Titan yes, but not Thelxinoe.) If we include the literary standard and an approximation of the Greek, people will delete the latter because it's not the "proper" approximation of the Greek they were taught in school. Etc etc etc. It's amazing how irate people can become over this. If we just include the Greek (or Latin) orthography, people who want to pronounce these with an approximation of those languages will be able to do so, and for the rest of us the literary English pronunciation will work. kwami (talk) 00:14, 13 January 2008 (UTC)


 * I see you've started using the formula "or as" before the Greek, which improves the situation, making the purpose of the Greek clearer. Thanks. I suppose I see your point with regard to the obscurer ones. But if there is no 'official' pronunciation, then why is one version being given an IPA pronunciation and not others? For example, Enceladus currently reads "(pronounced /ɛnˈsɛlədəs/ en-SEL-ə-dəs, or as in Greek Εγκέλαδος)". Presumably you're saying that some people might prefer 'Enkelados' or something. But what is the criteria for spelling out one and not the other? I suppose what I'm asking is, what is the authority for choosing one pronunciation as the one that gets an IPA version? Just wondering. Oh, and also does this apply to every name? Is there really a debate over how to pronounce "Titan" or "Atlas"? Again, just wondering. Rubble pile (talk) 21:34, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, somehow I didn't see this until just now, when I came about renaming Seas of Titan "Lakes of Titan". (I'm sure you know what you're doing, but I've seen "seas" more often than "lakes" — maybe I'm just out of date.)

About the above: Yeah, I wish now I'd worded them all "or as Greek X", and I've started correcting this. True, Titan and Atlas are easy, but if we're going to indicate the pronunciations of moons, we might as well be consistent and do them all. (I mean, where do we draw the line between easy, not-so-easy, and downright fiendish?)

There's a fairly standard algorithm for generating "literary" pronunciations from Greco-Roman names, and that's what I've been rendering in IPA. These are the fully anglicized pronunciations you'd expect in Shakespeare, poetry, and the like. There are always exceptions: Uranus, for example, would be stressed on the U per the algorithm, but stress on the ra is well established, so we need to indicate both. There are other established cases of ambiguity, such as Tethys, which is commonly pronounced either TEE-thiss or TETH-iss. However, most of the time the convention is followed, and in the case of really obscure names nothing else is likely to have ever gotten established, so working out the IPA is usually straightforward. Mostly it's just a case of figuring out where the stress goes, for which you need to know the vowel lengths in Latin, but even with that, getting the vowels right isn't always simple, so it's a good idea to provide this for our readers.

Except for a few cases of ambiguity in these fully anglicized pronunciations, like Uranus and Tethys, most of the bickering is about Latinate and Hellenic pronunciations. For some this is an affectation, but a lot of people feel these aren't English and therefore it's bad form (or whatever they think it is) to pronounce them as if they were. It's rather like arguing over whether "Paris" is pronounced PARR-iss or pa-REE. Even among astronomers at NASA or JPL, there's no agreement as to whether Io should be pronounced EYE-oh (anglicized) or EE-oh (latinate). I remember an issue of Astronomy magazine where they discussed the "proper" pronunciations of the moons — the final e of Ganymede needs to be pronounced, Titan is stressed on the second syllable, etc. The problem is that there isn't any one "proper" way for someone with an English accent to pronounce Latin and Greek names. I could see Titan being, , or , and that's sticking with English vowels, which someone is bound to object to. (In fact, someone has!) Fortunately, anyone who wants to go this route will be able to if we just give them the Latin or Greek orthography (assuming we mark vowel length), and we can avoid that whole can of worms. — kwami (talk) 02:06, 12 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Okay, I guess the short answer is this: the literary pronunciation needs to be given for a lot of the names, because it's just too difficult to work out much of the time, but the latinate and hellenic pronunciations can be deducted by most of the people who would want to use them. Not everyone, of course, but the alternative is to transcribe even an 'easy' name like Titan as "variously pronounced ". — kwami (talk) 02:17, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi, I'm here because the name "Rubble pile" attracted my curiosity, and I'm glad I dropped by. So Kwamikagami is the originator of the "or as Greek" form? I've been changing it (whenever I had occasion to edit the article on other grounds) because it didn't make sense to me. I'm just enough of a language-freak to take umbrage at the notion that an Anglicized pronunciation is the only legitimate one, but it's also wrong to muddle pronunciation with etymology with spelling, and even now that I know what you're getting at it looks weird to say "You can pronounce it this IPA way, or you can pronounce it with Greek letters." How about this form?:
 * 10 Hygiea, from Greek 'Υγιεία, is ...

(This is weird, when I try to make "10 Hygiea" bold one of the ticks is ignored, leaving the whole line in bold and the rest of it in italics.) I'll also note in passing that no native speaker of the language for which the pitch/length marks were devised ever cared about the name of an asteroid. —Tamfang (talk) 04:45, 18 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Hey, that's fine by me, and pretty much what I had had previously, but I'd gotten into edit wars with people who want a classical pronunciation. I haven't yet figured out something that satisfies everyone and is still reasonably brief. — kwami (talk) 06:42, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
 * I sympathize. We'll keep on fumbling ... —Tamfang (talk) 23:41, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

This is a weird conversation in which replies happen only once a month or so, but here goes: I still don't understand why no citations are given for the pronunciations. If there is a common pronunciation for a name that deserves to be singled out, why are sources never cited? If there are sources, why not cite them and thus ignore the unsourced pronunciations? If there is a debate, cite the multiple opinions. But Wikipedia is meant to report debates between reliable sources not debates that take place among Wikipedians. There's a real lack of verification in these pronunciation things. Rubble pile (talk) 16:39, 15 April 2008 (UTC)


 * I think sources would be great. However, there are two problems:
 * A lot of these names are quite obscure, so you're not going to find them. Instead, we need to generate the pronunciations ourselves. Random Critic started an in-depth article on the standard literary English algorithm here. I wrote up a much more basic description here.
 * When we do find sources, they could be using different standards. This isn't a matter of right vs. wrong, but more like whether we follow U. Cambridge or the Catholic Church in the pronunciation of Latin. Personally, since the anglicized pronunciations follow a more difficult algorithm, and since they're more, well, more English, I think we should provide the anglicized pronunciations. The more "authentic" algorithms are much easier to follow. Merely providing the Latin or Greek orthography is enough, as long as we mark vowel length. If we try providing them overtly, we'll start mixing systems, and spark edit wars. (I've tried, and no matter what you do, it quickly becomes an argument.) Any name that is common enough to have an idiosyncratic pronunciation we will be able to find a source for. kwami (talk) 17:30, 15 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Yikes! OK, point well taken. But here's one small point: the Oxford English Dictionary states categorically that 'Titan' is pronounced "". Am I therefore justified in removing the 'or as Greek Τῑτάν' from that article and citing the OED? I feel the urge. Rubble pile (talk) 01:40, 16 April 2008 (UTC)


 * That's the anglicized literary pronunciation described at those two links. Nearly all dictionaries follow that scheme. However, not all astronomers do—in fact, very large numbers don't. I remember an article in Astronomy magazine years ago that claimed the 'correct' pronunciation was, because the Greek accent is on the second syllable. But if you write that, someone will come along and say it's wrong, because the Greeks didn't pronounce their α as , it should be ; and then a third will chime in that both are wrong, it should be . (I've had an argument very much like this.) Besides, a larger portion of astronomers follow the Latin stress rules, and pronounce it or . Easier to just write the original Τῑτάν and let people pronounce it as they like. Taxonomic nomenclature is similar. Many botanical sources state that these should be pronounced analogously to  or , and specifically reject the anglicized  approach. However, most horticulturalists use the anglicized forms. You get a lot of "My professor says it's X, and he's the foremost expert in the field, so you have to conform to him", and then another editor comes along whose professor says different. It's a mess. But people who have strong opinions about this can sound out the Latin or Greek orthography themselves, so I've gone through and added these to the many of the astronomy articles to head off edit wars. (Besides, they're a good way to verify that the anglicized pronunciations are correct for those names we can't find sources for.) kwami (talk) 06:36, 16 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Double yikes! OK, I promise to leave this issue alone in future, but I just wanted to understand the process. Thanks for explaining everything. Rubble pile (talk) 15:22, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:29, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

 * Asteroids + civil rights + Dr Who = worth coming back! Rubble pile (talk) 17:31, 22 October 2018 (UTC)