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The Latinizing of Names
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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"Stop latinizing"
We literally did centuries ago. No Arabic name is ever latinized because - aa it turns out - if you stop using Latin, you don't need Latinization.
For existing names, I don't see a problem with using the historic remnant. It was useful at the time because of Latin grammar and the Latin names are much more well established.
It happened with every name by the way. See Confucius, Nostradamus or Copernicus.
What localized name should you call Copernicus by the way?
The Latin Nicolaus Copernicus?
The Polish Mikołaj Kopernik?
The Middle Low German Niklas Koppernigk?
The Modern German Nikolaus Kopernikus?
Turns out being a scientist in a multilingual region leads to a bunch of different names.
No, I disagree - same with countries names. Would be good to not anglicize or Latinize anything anymore. It's ok if people expand their boundaries and pronunciation skills.
Call the person or thing by what they go/went by.
We recently did it with "Türkiye".
We did not do it with "Türkiye". Also note that ü is a different letter from u, not just a u with decoration.
The Turkish government requested international organizations to refer to Turkey that way:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey
Everyone else continues to call it Turkey, especially newspapers. It's why the Wikipedia article continues to be called "Turkey". Neither me nor you are a country or international organization.
Same with Ivory Coast and its official name "Côte d'Ivoire".
That's simply restating something that I said we should do differently.
A country requested to be called differently, and people still call it what they know it as. I'm saying it's fine if we try to learn it.
Yes, u and ü are pronounced differently - more to my point.
The US prefers to be called "America" yet I still don't call them by that name either.
I don't need to abide by what some fascist Turk says you should call their country or not.
Maybe once Turkey stops trying to wipe out the Kurds I'll respect what far-right Turkish nationalists want that country to be called.
Lol - That's just deviating from the entire context of the discussion, but ok.
Guilty as accused.
Türkiye
Thanks for the correction, edited it. Not so hard.
Dude. "We've always done it like that" is your argument? Can you not see how it would be beneficial to try and emphasise that a lot of contributions to science came from non-European scholars?
This was not good reading comprehension, if not malice
Disagree, he's right on.
Nah, I'm arguing only to keep old and established names only. It makes in my opinion little sense to start referring to the one's I mentioned as Kong Qiu, de Nostredame, or Koppernigk.
Feel free to use whatever name you like. Whether you choose to use the romanized or established latinized name is none of anyone's business.
You're saying this as if the process is latin specific. Just like how we can see Sheikh Zubayr written in the post in English, you could do the same in other languages, too.
It's deliberate whitewashing of scientists that's disgusting and your defending it here that's appalling.
I never claimed it was specific to Latin? You can see it with the example of Copernicus that it was Latinized, Polonized (?) and Modern-Standard-Germanized.
Franz Liszt is called Liszt Ferenc in Hungarian. That's because Ferenc is the Hungarian variant of Franz and Hungarian names are spelled backwards for some reason.
I could provide so many more options where people were given several names because they did not live in a monolingual region.
In Czech, women's last names take on the -ová suffix. Even if they aren't Czech, didn't speak Czech or never set a foot into Czechia. For example: Hillary Clintonová
I frankly don't care enough about what languages do to names. If the intent is to wipe out other cultures then it's obviously bad. Like colonizing Brits did with native landmarks (e.g. Uluru -> Ayer's Rock). If the intent is to adjust the name to a cultures grammar, pronunciation or similar, I couldn't care less.
Except the intent is very much likely to wipe out other cultures here and not just to match grammar or pronunciation.
Franz -> Ferenc isn't as drastic a change as Ibn Sina -> Avicenna
The former retains similarity to the original whereas the latter makes it completely unclear the origin was Arab.
Ibn Sina -> Avicenna seems to sound similar though, but I can't speak Latin or Arabic.
At least the cenna and Sina part, you can see they're related. The people Latinizing the name did not just roll a die I presume and had respect for the people who came up with something. It's why algorithm and algebra are both directly from Arabic, algorithm from the guy who wrote this book:
Al-Jabr
At least in my opinion the Latinization does not seek to hide the fact it's Arabic. In fact, it just takes (directly) untranslatable Arabic terms and puts them into Latin.
No idea how "Ibn -> Avi" makes sense though, I'd be surprised if it was done with any hostile intent though.
It doesn't come off as Arabic and for a long time I myself, despite having known the Arab name, thought it was a different western guy.
This is is a largely unpopular take if you look into criticisms of how the west names things, provided one has a radicalization towards seeing things such as whitewashing etc.