Talk:Jules Siegel

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This article was nominated for deletion on 2007/01/30. The result of the discussion was keep.

It has been noted that Jules Siegel is a spontaneous contributor to Wikipedia, after several anonymous edits of the Thomas Pynchon article, see Talk:Thomas Pynchon. Nixdorf 20:16, September 6, 2005 (UTC)

On the history page you'll see that I've changed Cancún back to Cancun, with a brief explanation. Here in Cancun, we generally use Cancún in Spanish and Cancun in English. I'd have to do a lot research to find out why, but it may have something to do with the fact that English-language type faces available in the early days here did not have accented characters, or the operators did not know how to access them. The Spanish is not really correct either. In Spanish, the accent usually falls on the second syllable. In the case of a two-syllable word, you would only use an accent to indicate that the stress falls on the first syllable, as in López.

One of the early maps of the island labels it Cancu-en. There's also a site in Guatemala called Cancu-en. Cancu-en refers to a snake totem, usually identified with Kukulcan or Quetzalcoatl (the Plumed Serpent). The romanization of Mayan words is not very well regularized (to use another barbarism), but it is common to use an apostrophe to indicate a kind of glottal stop. I would speculate that some Yucatecan or Mexican Mayanist wrote the name as Cancu'en, which was turned into Cancún by someone at the predecessor of Fonatur, the Mexican government tourism development fund that created Cancun.

This is discussed in mind-numbing detail in my book, Cancun User's Guide in a chapter called "A Brief History of Ekab." I should put this explanation on the main Cancun page, I guess, and maybe someday I will. Meanwhile, I think that the accent should be left off here. --Jules Siegel 23:14, 27 January 2006 (UTC).