Talk:Čačak

Armenian community

@PajaBG: Please read once again what Wikipedia is not. Wikipedia is not a newspaper, and also - trivia sections should be avoided. The whole section is based on a news article, which is about the topic of recently published book. I do find this information ([1]) interesting, but it shouldn't have a place on Wikipedia. At least, not now.--AirWolf ^talk 17:43, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

It is always time for an interesting information and, at the moment, the place is perfect. Newspaper guideline is not even a guideline, it is an essay/opinion. Newspapers are good sources and even within the scopes of the essay, this is not a current affair, it is something from 140 years ago. “The whole section” are several sentences and so what if its referenced by one (newspaper) source? The other reason you keep naming, trivia, is even worse. First, the policy says only that the Trivia sections should be avoided. Second, labeling as trivia mention of an ethnic community which was part of the economic (they owned the coffee market) and social elite (benefactors, founders of the local Red Cross) may even be offensive.

In general, when it commes to Wikipedia, its 5,6 million articles and talks about the encyclopedic or trivial information, that train has left the station a long time ago. There are tens (hundreds?) of thousands of unneccessary articles on fictional characters, shady subjects, self-promotional texts, painfully badly written or constructed pages so labeling this as ‘trivia’ seems harsh. How would you then categorized this ultra-detailed crap: Farma (Serbian TV series)?

Wikipedia constantly grows and it is natural that when one level of information and knowledge is reached in one article, the adding of the information will continue bringing it to the next level, whether expanding the same page or spilling over into a new one. That’s what Wikipedia is about – it will grow as long as it exists, which was the intention I guess. Unless they change the essence of Wikipedia and began locking the articles when they are “done”. But the knowledge is never "done". Plus, no one can make all the articles that he is interested in to look exactly and only the way he likes it. PajaBG (talk) 18:19, 12 May 2018 (UTC)

@PajaBG: Saying "the train has left the station" about "tens (hundreds?) of thousands of unneccessary articles on fictional characters" is an invalid defense. See WP:Other stuff exists. Thnidu (talk) 12:28, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

@Thnidu: I don’t know about defense but it is a valid argument in a debate. I have nothing against the articles I mentioned, I am not for deleting them, nor I said that because there is an A, there must be a B. And I used it as an illustration for the real-imaginary constellation. If the policy suggests it differently, well...it may suggest it. In this case, it was part of the wider context that editors, in this case in an earnest desire and good faith, have idea of uniforming all articles of the same variety and in doing so become nitpicky, deleting every other information. Speaking of proper encyclopedias, they have more or less the same sections for the same types of articles, but they are variously written and not copy-paste of itch other, with exactly the same data and looking exactly the same. The editors which are fixing the articles on Serbian towns and municipalities seems to be doing just that – unifroming them to look the same.

Same goes for the subject of this conversation: sections on ethnicity are being reduced to one sentence which says that XY nation has a majority, followed by the table. There are parts of the towns and municipalities which are mixed (some now, some historically), or some overall minority has a majority in some local settlements, there might be an interesting story behind settlement of certain nationalities, interesting ethnic history, etc. And then the table may come at the end or as the sub-section. If those editors are not interested into writing this data, it is absolutely OK, but they shouldn't delete information already written by the others, because now is not the time. Time for whom?

By the way, I have nothing against tables, I used them myself, but unless the article or a section is a list, they are only illustrations of the text. Table is not a content, otherwise, articles wouldn’t be encyclopedic material but merely a statistical yearbook. PajaBG (talk) 12:32, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

Etymology

The infobox for Čačak says

Etymology: Mud (sr. blato)

Google Translate confirms that blato is Serbian for "mud", and offers no equivalent even remotely resembling čačak. And § Middle Ages includes the sentence

The town's name was changed from Gradac to the current Čačak, Ottoman Turkish for 'mud'.

Now, Google Translate gives çamur as Turkish for "mud". That's somewhat similar to Čačak, which would be spelled Çaçak in Turkish (Turkish ç and Serbian č are both pronounced like English ch as in "church"), but it's not close enough to be a convincing etymon. In the absence of any other suggestions, I am deleting this implausible etymology from both the infobox and the text.

History of the "etymology": Forgivenday, whose edits are all in articles related to Serbia and whose English is obviously not native, originally added this (15:27, 17 September 2012) as part of a larger edit:

Word čačak means mad in turkish language. Turks came here in 1459. Church became mosque. Suleiman the Magnificent, Catib Çelebi and Evliya Çelebi in 16th century and 17th century were talked about Čačak as main place in qadi.

Ivacc changed (20:09, 27 January 2013) "mad" to "mud", and has made no other edits before or since. My best guess is that Forgivenday, unfamiliar with Turkish or etymological analysis or both, thought that çamur was close enough to Čačak to be its source, but typoed "mad" for "mud",

--Thnidu (talk) 01:49, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

@Thnidu: You are right about the non-Turkish origin of the name. Name Čačak was mentioned for the first time in 1409, before the Turks conquered those areas, nor there is a word in Turkish language which corresponds to it. As per professor Dragomir S. Popović (1899-1986) from Čačak.

Modern word čačkati, sotimes jokingly used as the origin of the town’s name per folk etymology, means to pick something, like the nose or the teeth (čačkalica = "toothpick"), or on someone (when you are provoking someone apparently docile but possibly stronger than you, we say ne čačkaj mečku, "don’t pick on a she-bear"). Of course, it has nothing to do with the town’s name.

Several Serbian dictionaries from the 19th and the 20th century still mention word čačak as being used in Syrmia, Slavonia and Dalmatia. Vuk Stefanović Karadžić in his Srpski rječnik mentions adjective čačkovit, explaining it means the same thing as čagalj or "frozen mud". Another philologist, Đuro Daničić wrote that čačak means lump of frozen or dried mud (in Slavonia) or stone protruding from the ground (in Dalmatia). Daničić’s idea was that the possible origin of this variant might be the word skak (skakati = "jumping"), which professor Miodrag Jaćimović expanded as meaning something that jumps or protrudes out of something else.

Professor Popović mentioned two possibilities: the town was named either after the dried and frozen mud, as the region was regularly flooded until the mid-20th century, or because of the monastery "jumping out" high above the town, concluding that the mud origin was more likely.

It is also not clear was Gradac name of the town, or it was only the monastery, while the settlement itself, which developed along the road, was named Čačak from the start. Or there were originally two settlements - Gradac adjoining the monastery and Čačak along the road.

The word completely disappeared by today and the name variants which survived appear to be of unknown origin to modern people. One of the surviving toponymy of the same origin is the name of the Čakor mountain. Being two kilometers high, I guess both possible meanings (frozen or protruding) are an option here.

By the way, the document from the Republic of Ragusa which mentions Čačak for the first time is dated on the 7 December 1409. The Ragusan court served papers to their merchants Marin and Mile Lebrović, father and son, who lived in Čačak's Ragusan merchant colony at the time, notifying them that they still owe money to Ragusan nobles Pavle Gundulić, Klement Bodačić and Nikola Ranjina. Ah, bureaucracy, what would we do without it. This also raises a question whether the Ragusans named the settlement as Ragusa (Dubrovnik) is in Dalmatia where the word was used, while Čačak is not. PajaBG (talk) 12:35, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

Most of I wrote you can find here: [2]

@PajaBG: Thank you, that information is helpful. As you understand it better than I do, would you consider editing it into the Etymology section? That might involve adding a paragraph or two. --Thnidu (talk) 19:08, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

@Thnidu: Sure, no problem. I will ad it later. PajaBG (talk) 09:57, 16 June 2019 (UTC)