Wikidata:Property proposal/Vocalized name

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Vocalized name[edit]

Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Generic

   Done: vocalized name (P4239) (Talk and documentation)
DescriptionItem name with full vowel marks.
Data typeMonolingual text
DomainNames, especially of places and people
ExampleThe value for Haifa (Q41621) will be "חֵיפָה".
Planned useAdd this property to confusing and frequently mispronounced geographical names in Israel, for example נָצְרַת for Nazareth (Q430776), etc.
See alsoThis is comparable to name in kana (P1814), but not identical to it.
Motivation

The modern Hebrew language has two standard spelling systems: vocalized and unvocalized. In vocalized spelling, signs known as Niqqud are added to letters to show the complete pronunciation of the word with all the vowels. The unvocalized spelling is used in most texts, such as books, signs, emails, newspapers, etc., while the vocalized spelling is used when it is important to show the complete pronunciation: poetry, children's books, some religious books, and some reference books, for example dictionaries.

The Hebrew Wikipedia is written in unvocalized spelling, and vocalization is used only on words where the pronunciation is not obvious. Article titles are always written without vocalization, because vocalization tends to break browsers and search engines, and because most people don't type it anyway. This is the practice in most other Hebrew language websites and encyclopedias. Nevertheless, systematic vocalization of some types of names is useful, especially geographic names of places in Israel. The pronunciation of some place names is easy and obvious, but others are complicated, and need a reference.

The property suggested here will store the name as it is written with niqqud. For geographical names, standard reference books of the Israeli names committee will be the usual source. It may also be used for some other, non-geographical private names if there is a reference for a standard vocalization for them; for example the personal name אורי can be both אוֹרִי (Ori) and אוּרִי (Uri). However, it should not be used for all generic words—that's what dictionaries are for.

Simply using an alias would not be sufficient. There can be several aliases for different reasons, whereas a standard vocalized name is a well-defined property, which can be used in Wikipedia infoboxes and elsewhere. It's also not the same as IPA transcription (P898), which is a generic pronunciation system for all languages; a vocalized name is another way of writing the name in the same alphabet.

Perhaps this can be used for Arabic names, because the Arabic language has a similar feature, but it's better if somebody who knows Arabic would decide about its usage for that language. It may be better to create a similar, separate property for Arabic, ane use the one proposed here only for Hebrew. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 11:55, 5 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion