Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/French alphabet

This page is an archive of the discussion surrounding the proposed deletion of pages entitled French alphabet and English alphabet.

Further comments should be made on the articles' talk pages rather than here as this page is kept as an historic record.

The result of the debate was to keep the pages, which had been largely rewritten since their original VfD listing.

seems to be wrongly named disambiguation pages for French and English. No content about alphabets, though. Rmhermen 00:58, Nov 25, 2003 (UTC)
 * An individual has taken the trouble of redoing the English alphabet page. Still, the page is redundant, there already existing a page on Latin alphabet, which, incidentally, seems the more appropriate term. I beg that either the pages be rendered as redirects, or be Deleted. Lord Emsworth 01:29, Nov 25, 2003 (UTC)
 * I agree that French alphabet and English alphabet are both largely redundant. I'd suggest that they become redirects, and that any peculiarities be added to their respective entries at latin alphabet. Dduck 15:38, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)
 * French alphabet should be kept, unconditionally. Most of the the English-specific stuff from Latin alphabet should be moved to Latin alphabet, and Latin alphabet used for, well, the alphabet used for Latin? (A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X Y Z), with a list of adaptions, and perhaps notes on common ones. Morwen 07:22, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)
 * Note the "Latin alphabet" doesn't just mean the alphabet used in Latin, it also refers to modern alphabets derived from Latin. Onebyone 11:45, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)
 * Perhaps the best solution would be to retain the Latin alphabet page as is and have a page of Alphabets derived from the Latin which would show the actual alphabets for French, English and other vernacular languages? Bmills 11:56, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)
 * I disagree. The English alphabet doesn't come entirely from the Roman one: The current letter Y, was, in Shakespeare's time, a slightly diffent symbol with a phonetic pronunciation equal to the Greek 'theta'- a Th sound. That's why, for a while, the word 'You' was spelled 'Thou', and 'The' and 'Ye' (as in Ye Olde Shoppe) meant the same thing. In the modern words, sometimes the sound won and sometimes the spelling won. Keep. -Litefantastic
 * Not totally relevant, but this isn't quite right. Y was a letter in its own right. The thorn was used at times in writing English, but the Europe-imported printing press lacked it, and so the similar-looking y was used. You and thou were, however, always different words (though they did rhyme, unlike today's renditions). (Bigger digression: Greek theta used to be a t-, not a th- sound, though the latter is in Modern Greek.) -- VV 04:44, 26 Nov 2003 (UTC)
 * Which is why I think a page showing how modern language alphabets vary from the Latin would be a good way to organise this material. Bmills 13:02, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)
 * That's exactly what I did: Alphabets derived from the Latin. BTW, what that (UTC) thing stand for? -Litefantatsic 8:24, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)
 * Off-topic, I know, but look it up: UTC == Coordinated Universal Time
 * Keep in light of Litefantatsic's work (no pun intended). Bmills 13:53, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)
 * Keep. Stub needs work but could be very useful in beginning comparitive language research. Davodd 21:10, Nov 29, 2003 (UTC)
 * Keep. The alphabets are different. They deserve different articles. Kingturtle 03:43, 30 Nov 2003 (UTC)
 * Obviously nothing should be deleted. We are discussing the organisation of the pages, not their existence. Things might be redirected, but never deleted. And towards that discussion, I'd just suggest that Latin alphabet (the generic term), English alphabet et al, and List of alphabets derived from the Latin (note proper naming convention) each contain contents appropriate to their names. -- Toby Bartels 22:54, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)
 * Delete. I oppose the very notion of a "french alphabet". We, writers of french, indeed use letters with diacritic marks like "é", or ligatured letters like "&oelig;", but these do not really count as letters, for instance they do not count as special letters when classifying words in the alphabetical order. That's much different from the cases of "ch" in czech or "ll" in Spanish. --FvdP 23:31, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC) (native french speaker, if that counts.) I admit an article on french writing conventions could be useful, though (if a paragraph on that subject doesn't exist already somewhere in Wikipedia).
 * Just a note: "ll" in Spanish has been normalized and is now considered as two l's instead of a separate letter, so maybe a better example would be "ñ". Anyway, in my opinion, even if the "French alphabet" article isn't deleted it should be corrected. After all, it consists of 26 letters, but maybe a note on diacritics and ligatures would be needed. Sabbut

Remember (see top): this is an archive, it was decided to keep the pages.