Talk:Jebel Aqra

Latest comment: 8 years ago by 100.15.120.162 in topic bad link

Merger with Hazzi

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The Hazzi article currently has no sources, and all the sources I can find for it suggest that Hazzi was the Hurrian name for Mount Aqraa, not the name of the god associated with it, which was Teshub. As such, Hazzi should redirect here. Neelix (talk) 15:45, 26 November 2012 (UTC)Reply

Aqraaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

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Moooooooooooooove.

A well-intentioned but underinformed editor moved this page from Mount Aqraʿ to Mount Aqraa but (I) Wikipedia's romanization of Arabic is the ALA-LC format (WP:MOS-AR); (II) even bending the rules to avoid an unusual character in an article title, the loose form of ⟨ ʿ ⟩ is ⟨ ` ⟩ or possibly ⟨ ' ⟩, but never ⟨ a ⟩; (III) Syria officially uses Modern Standard Arabic, so any weirdness in Levantine Arabic doesn't get addressed here (not that ‘ayn seems to have turned into an A in any case); (IV) if we're bending the rules anyway, the usual treatment of ‘ayn is to drop it completely (as in the title and lead sentence of its own article); (V) the mountain is mostly on the Turkish side of the border anyway, as is its peak, so if we're not using the COMMON ENGLISH name, we should be using the Turkish one... (VI) in its more common English form that ignores the diacritics and odd form of I.

(For the curious, yes, this seems to have been completely WP:OR on the editor's part. Google vanilla isn't reliable for numbers but is displaying "5000ish" pages that have copied Wikipedia's version. There are precisely 4 actual books which use it: 2 because of optical reader mistakes, 1 because it's a cut-and-paste of Wikipedia articles, and the last because it was self-published in 2011 and the author was presumably cribbing this article. Google Scholar likewise has exactly 1 hit, from a 2013 article that was looking here.)

The usual policy is WP:USEENGLISH WP:COMMONNAMEs, but that doesn't seem to work here. "Mount Casius" gets the most hits at Books and Scholar[n 1] (~400/299) but it's not really a name we'd use for the modern mountain any more[n 2] and it includes hits on a classical mountain in Egypt. Taking those out gives numbers (~340/87) around "Mount Zaphon" (~290/"Mount+Zaphon"+-wikipedia 146) but some of those are just sources arguing that the Biblical mentions should be seen as allegoric references to Mount Zion. Obviously, those numbers are bigger than the modern results for pure Latin (~420/30), Greek (~190/4), anglicized Hurrian (~110/26), or anglicized Akkadian (~100/27) forms. Of the modern names, "Kel Dagi" picks up ~30 at Books but more than half of those are Turkish texts (all the Scholar articles are Turkish); there's ~20 for "Mount Kel" but most are OCR mistakes (5 English-language Scholar hits, though); "Cebel-i Akra" picks up ~10/28 (mostly Turkish); "Jebel Aqra" gets ~90/28; "Jebel al-Aqra" ~50/35; and "Jebel el-Aqra" ~70/45. "Mount Aqra" gets nothing at all on Scholar and only 5 hits on Books.

So even within Turkey, the Arabic name is quite common and some form of Jebel Aqra (not "Mount Aqra" or "Mount Kel") is more common in English. Ngram shows "Mount Casius" still crushing the modern names but "Jebel Aqra" tout suite as the most common of the remainder by far.

  1. ^ Google Books' initial numbers are less wrong than vanilla Google's but you still have to click over to the end of the list make it accurate. Scholar gives accurate numbers.
  2. ^ If someone finds the name being used in Lonely Planet or sth, then we should move it there but it doesn't seem like it's much of a tourist destination or gets much notice in the modern world.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by LlywelynII (talkcontribs) UTC 23:38, 21 August 2015

Works for me. Paul August 13:22, 3 September 2015 (UTC)Reply
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I don't know if this is vandalism or a typo, but at the bottom of the page, "Zaphon" is supposed to point to an external source and the rest of the text suggests that it's a book published by Eerdmans. The external link actually points to something in Chinese. Fix the link. 100.15.120.162 (talk) 14:58, 22 December 2015 (UTC)Reply