Topic on User talk:Harmonia Amanda

Hi there! You told me I could ask questions, so here goes ;-) In the description of José Q2190619 it says: (male given name (use Q29043257 for Spanish and Q29043256 for Portuguese). This gets a bit messed up when compound names like Francisco José Q47484032 has both Portuguese and Spanish set as languages, but uses the Portuguese José (Q29043256 ). What is the thinking here? And doesn't mixing them cause problems with properties like Soundex and Caverphone? What about the etymology?

For a clearer example, there is the last name Falla Q20519159. This is a family name in both Spain and Norway, but they are only *spelled* the same way - they don't share pronunciation, etymology or much anything else. Wouldn't names like these be better kept as separate entities?

I don't understand at all the thinking there. The majority of the Names project agree that all three "José" should be merged together, in line with all the other names but a contributor is really intent in keeping them separated, even though it doesn't really make sense. I only use the generic "José" and know of no one using the specialized ones.

Soundex and Caverphone are based on writing, deducing a pronunciation as it would be said in English. It doesn't indicate the real pronunciation.

The idea of the project is that in most cases we can't know if someone use the name "Falla" as the Norwegian or Spanish name (and for many names you'll also have Spanish immigrants to Norway, or the reverse, or cases like these muddling the waters). Everything depend on context and context is something we can't really have for all entries in our database. We can know how it's written and we use that. Everything more specific go to the person/family item.

For etymology, we can use based on (P144), and we can precise with applies to part (P518) for the language. We precise the same way IPA transcription (P898) with qualifiers.