Talk:Astarte
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[edit] Page move
(from WP:RM)
[edit] January 15
[edit] `Ashtart → Astarte or Ashtart
I'd do this myself, except that the page histories are such a mess that my privileges aren't sufficient to sort the whole thing out. No such thing as "ASCII spelling" exists; ASCII is an encoding mechanism, and the backtick, apparently used here to represent a glottal stop, has no meaning on its own—least of all in the English language. The English name of this well-known deity is most commonly Astarte (through the Greek) but more accurately Ashtart; both of these are widely used by scholars and either are thoroughly acceptable to me. ADH (t&m) 11:25, Jan 15, 2005 (UTC)
- prima facie. Should go to Astarte. Rd232 00:48, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- Comments: (a) the mark you reference is being used to represent not the glottal stop but a pharyngeal consonant, more commonly represented (as in the rest of the article) with ‘ or c, and (b) ASCII is in fact a character set, and the author clearly means that, using only characters available in ASCII (thereby excluding the characters I cited), the name with the pharyngeal is best represented as `Ashtart, which is accurate, I would say. It needs clean-up (Englished), to be sure.
— Ford 01:53, 2005 Jan 16 (UTC)- ... which I have now done. The version that ADH is referring to is here.— Ford 03:27, 2005 Jan 16 (UTC)
- The pharyngeal consonant I'm familiar with, but only as a superscript letter c, and the backtick is not a left single quote. Even accurate transliterations are only preferable when an English-language name is not common (Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)), which is clearly not the case here. ADH (t&m) 03:31, Jan 16, 2005 (UTC)
- Common transliteration in cases where ‘ (pharyngeal fricative) and ’ (glottal stop) are not available — when the character set is confined to ASCII, that is — is to use ` for ‘ and ' for ’. I have seen that convention for quotation marks, for Semitic phonemes, and in other situations as well. You may have missed it elsewhere on the web. But it was pretty clear from the article itself that ‘ (for the pharyngeal) was being used, so it could not have been too difficult to figure out what ` was standing in for. And your last comment may support Astarte, but it argues against Ashtart, which is neither as accurate nor as common.
— Ford 03:46, 2005 Jan 16 (UTC)
- Common transliteration in cases where ‘ (pharyngeal fricative) and ’ (glottal stop) are not available — when the character set is confined to ASCII, that is — is to use ` for ‘ and ' for ’. I have seen that convention for quotation marks, for Semitic phonemes, and in other situations as well. You may have missed it elsewhere on the web. But it was pretty clear from the article itself that ‘ (for the pharyngeal) was being used, so it could not have been too difficult to figure out what ` was standing in for. And your last comment may support Astarte, but it argues against Ashtart, which is neither as accurate nor as common.
- Support. I get 50 times more hits on the classical Greek Astarte than Ashtart (with or without the backtick), so I'd prefer a move to Astarte. Editors should avoid introducing ad hoc spelling conventions into Wikipedia, especially where, as in this case, the entity in question already has a well established name known to English language readers and in use by English language scholars. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 13:27, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I went to implement this, but got blocked by the compression bug. I feel there is significant history to Astarte so the following steps should be taken:
- Delete Astarte
- Move `Ashtart to Astarte
- Undelete Astarte to restore history.
- Edit Astarte to restore proper version, if needed.
- UtherSRG 14:42, Jan 21, 2005 (UTC)
- Support. Astarte was a godess known to several Semitic nations. There isn't much sense in preferring incorrectly rendered transcription of one of several variants of her name to the much more common Astarte. -- Naive cynic 01:21, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I've done a swap of the pages - I couldn't see much point waiting with the page in the 'wrong' place. if anyone feels strongly about merging edit histories, delete Astarte, move `Ashtart over it and undelete - but you'll need to wait for the compression bug to be sorted out first. -- ALoan (Talk) 13:48, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)
[edit] NW Semitic?
The article says that Astarte was a NW semitic god, cognate to the Eastern semitic Ishtar, but the same god, Astar, was worshipped in Ethiopia during Aksumite and pre-Aksumite times (as well as in Sabaean Yemen). The lack of the final t makes the name similar to the Eastern semitic god, but the "A" instead of "I" at the beginning is closer to the NW semitic god. Either way, both NW and Eastern Semitic languages are geographically far removed from South Semitic languages, and it wouldn't make more sense on a geographical basis to include Astar in one or the other. Astar seems to be a god, and not a goddess, though, later associated with the Greek god Zeus. What should be done? Is there a third article for South Semitic that I'm missing? Should a separate article be created for it, cognate to both NW and E Semitic?
Yom 23:48, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
[edit] External Links?
The second external link (to the 'Asteroth Rising' Tarot deck) has almost nothing to do with the content of the article and seems like an advertisement. --Sgorton 02:31, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
