Talk:Kildin Sámi orthography

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: No consensus to move to this or any other title. There seems to be no consensus on "Sami", "Sámi", "Saami", ... I recommend, pursuant this discussion, that that all articles with "Sami" spelling maintain that spelling throughout that article. I recommend similar consistency within any articles with alternate article title spelling. (non-admin closure) Red Slash 22:15, 14 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Kildin Sami orthography → Kildin Sámi orthography
• Northern Sami → Northern Sámi
• Skolt Sami language → Skolt Sámi language
• Genetic studies on Sami → Genetic studies on Sámi
• List of Sami people → List of Sámi people
• Sami cuisine → Sámi cuisine
• List of English words of Sami origin → List of English words of Sámi origin
• Forest Sami → Forest Sámi
• Northern Sami orthography → Northern Sámi orthography
• Sami in Alaska → Sámi in Alaska
• List of Chairpersons of the Sami Parliament of Sweden → List of chairpersons of the Sámi Parliament of Sweden
• Sami League of Nation → Sámi League of Nations
• Northern Sami Wikipedia → Northern Sámi Wikipedia
• Varanger Sami Museum → Varanger Sámi Museum
• Sami Church Council (Church of Norway) → Sámi Church Council
• Northern Sami Braille → Northern Sámi Braille
• Sami Bridge → Sámi Bridge

– WP:CONSISTENCY with all the other articles relating to the Sámi people and languages, their Sápmi homeland, etc., as well as with other unrelated languages (trawl through the listings at Category:Language families, where we use diacritics as appropriate for the case in question). We were using a wild mixture of "Sámi", "Sami", and "Saami", often in the same article (against MOS:CONSISTENCY). "Sámi" dominated in article titles. "Saami" seems to be decreasingly used in current reliable sources. When it comes to "Sámi" versus "Sami", WP's standard practice is to include diacritics any time they are reliably sourceable as belonging there, even if various sources omit them – often low-quality sources, journalism (which frequently omits diacritics for expediency), and sources pre-dating modern Unicode typography. I don't much personally care whether we use "Saami" (which is more familiar to me) or "Sámi", a long as it's consistent both in the titles and in the article text. Alternatively, all of these and all articles presently at the "Sámi" spelling (too many to list here right now) can be put at the "Sami" or "Saami" spelling (except where an official proper name uses another variant).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:53, 21 December 2018 (UTC) --Relisting. SITH (talk) 12:46, 30 December 2018 (UTC)--Relisting. SITH (talk) 09:45, 7 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Notes:

1. As a matter of both WP:CONSISTENCY and MOS:CONSISTENCY compliance, I manually moved various articles and used a consistent spelling within the articles' text, until Rua started reverting me (without any actual policy or source-based rationale), so I'm just opening this as an RM, and moving on.
2. After the RM, the related categories need to be WP:CFR/SPEEDYed to be consistent with whatever spelling is chosen.
3. Sami Siida of North America is omitted, as a proper name (their website is gone, but their official Facebook page doesn't use the diacritic).
4. What is currently List of Chairpersons of the Sami Parliament of Sweden needs lower-case c, per MOS:JOBTITLES and numerous previous RMs of such lists (e.g. here and here).
5. What is presently Sami League of Nation needs a plural, to fix the broken-English translation.
6. Saami Council is omitted as a proper name; the organization prefers the old spelling, in their English-language materials.
7. Northern Sámi Wikipedia is written in Northern Sámi and consistently uses the diacritic (in Sámi, the Sáme- combining form, Sápmi, etc.), though what Sámi itself does doesn't relate strongly to what to do in English; I'm adding it to this nomination list simply for WP:CONSISTENCY reasons.
8. Varanger Sámi Museum is a proper name, and the organization uses the diacritic, regardless of language (except in one heading on their website in which someone dropped it).
9. What is presently Sami Church Council (Church of Norway) has no need of a disambiguation parenthetical and should just be at Sámi Church Council (tag the redir left behind with {{R from unnecessary disambiguation}}{{R to diacritic}}); it is not technically a proper name but a translation of Sámi girkoráđđi (in a language that doesn't follow English's capitalization rules), so should just be given the same spelling for consistency.
10. The Sámi Bridge has no real proper name in English; it's another translation, of Sámi šaldi (and names in Norwegian and Finnish), so move for consistency.
11. This overall case is similar to place names, language names, and the like in Galician and other languages that are dominant in a particular area but minority languages at a national level. WP's practice is to prefer the names as spelled in that language, rather than exonyms from the nationally dominant language (Spanish, French, etc. – here analogous to Finnish, Swedish, etc.), unless the name has an English version that has been conventionalized in our language for a long time (e.g. we give München, Germany, as Munich, we call the German language German not Deutsche, and so on). No places, organizations, or other topics in the Sámi-speaking areas of Lapland have such traditional names in English. I.e., we should be using Sámi because it's what is done in Sámi; all of our references to things with this as an element of their names are loan terms and translations, except for a couple of proper names already addressed above. In particular, we render minority languages in their own endonyms for any case in which this is standard practice in reliable sources on linguistics (thus we have an article at Tok Pisin, not New Guinea Pidgin, and we do not strip diacritics from things like Kanoê language (we have literally hundreds of such language article names with diacritics preserved).

 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:53, 21 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose. Based on frequencies in published sources (Sami/Sámi/Saami, ... culture, ... language, .... people), the form Sámi is the least typical in English, and Sami is consistently (and strongly) the most typical. It's not a matter of stripping diacritics; it's simply the English name. The term Sami started appearing in English in the 1860s and 1870s, and it was probably not a modification of lexeme borrowed from written Sami. Doremo (talk) 15:37, 21 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • What this is completely missing is that Sámi (in English) is part of a major trend in the last few years to start applying diacritics where they belong, especially in endonyms and especially since it's become easy to use diacritics (versus even up to the late 1990s, before operating systems fully supported Unicode and included character-picker apps). This is why usage of Sámi has shot up since ca. 2002, while both Sami and Saami have both simultaneously dropped [1], a fact that your N-grams hid by being constrained to an upper bound of the year 2000. This isn't really distinguishable to me from a case of a tennis player whose name is often rendered in English without diacritics (because a lot of writers don't bother with them, and some organizations like sport governing bodies suppress them), but which we know for a fact (e.g. the player's own website) properly does have a diacritic in it. WP practice is to include the diacritic. We've already been doing it in the majority of Sámi-related article titles, and our text was incrementally moving to that spelling as well. "Sami" also has shades of calling the Inuit "Eskimos". Just because a particular name was the most common from the 1860s doesn't mean it's the most encyclopedically appropriate. Sticking exonyms on people is, in particular, a very iffy practice unless it's an exonym most of the subjects accept (e.g. Navajo for Dineh). It's clear that almost all Sámi institutions and organizations use the Sámi spelling, including in English. That makes it something of a WP:ABOUTSELF matter. Remember also that WP:COMMONNAME is not a style policy, and even if it we changed it into one, it is not one of the WP:CRITERIA at all, but simply the first, default name to test against the criteria and against all other applicable policies, guidelines, and other concerns. When the most common name and most common spelling of it run up against any of them, it's entirely normal for us to pick an alternative. (That might actually be Saami in this case.)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:39, 21 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support as general en.wp practice In ictu oculi (talk) 21:03, 21 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  "general en.wp practices"? Would you elaborate on that, please? GoodDay (talk) 23:26, 21 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  I already did, in great detail; I.i.o is just agreeing. However, the argument is dependent on Sámi/Sami being more common than Saami in English. General N-grams suggest this. So does Google Scholar results (including lots and lots of use of the diacritic). Tropylium's details below suggest it's Saami but the sources seem to have been (perhaps unintentionally) cherry-picked, since the Google Scholar results are directly and quite strongly contradictory. Anyway, I was going with Sámi because it was already dominant in our article titles, because it's preferred by most of the Sámi/Saami-connected NGOs, and editors have been incrementally changing the spelling in our article text to that one. It wasn't a personal preference (I was more used to Saami). The only strong feeling I have is that if we use Sámi/Sami is should be the diacritic version because RS tell us that name has a diacritic in it, and WP does not suppress diacritics. However, the more I look at journal usage statistics, the more clear it becomes that Saami is now a minority spelling in RS.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:37, 22 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  You should be considering what's easier for an english-only reader. GoodDay (talk) 12:25, 22 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  Total non-argument. WP does not censor away diacritics that RS tell us belong there. This is not my opinion or preference, it's 17+ years of consensus about this. What I might or might not "consider" is thus totally irrelevant. And English is not a diacritics-free language; many words in our language have diacritics (though most are loan words like façade, naïve, jalapeño, and sautée, English actually has native diacritics used to indicate pronunciation, though they are rather disused in the 21st century: cöoperate, learnēd as an adjective).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:53, 31 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose: Sámi is just the specific Northern Sami spelling and would need a stronger reason for precedence for all Sami-related articles. The other languages use different variants (Saebmie, Saami, Säämi, etc.).

A look-over of recent scholarly projects and literature in English (these are mostly though in my area of speciality i.e. linguistics) actually reveals, pace OP, a very consistent heavy lean towards Saami for this purpose:

Projects:

• Encyclopaedia of Saami Culture
• Giellagas Institute for Saami Studies
• Álgu: Etymological database of the Saami languages
• Giellatekno, the Research group for Saami language technology
• Saami Linguistics Online

Monographs:

• Feist 2010, A Grammar of Skolt Saami
• Rydving 2013, Words and Varieties. Lexical Variation in Saami
• Wilbur 2014, A grammar of Pite Saami

Articles (limiting myself to one per author):

• Aikio 2012, "An essay on Saami ethnolinguistic prehistory"
• Bye, Sagulin & Toivonen 2009, "Phonetic duration, phonological quantity and prosodic structure in Inari Saami"
• Blokland & Rießler 2011, "Komi-Saami-Russian contacts on the Kola peninsula"
• Holopainen 2018, "Indo-Iranian loanwords confined to Saami?"
• Hyllested 2010, "Saami Loanwords in Old Norse"
• Kallio 2009, "Stratigraphy of Indo-European Loanwords in Saami"
• Kuokkala 2018, "Finnic-Saamic labial vowels in non-initial syllables"
• Nystad 2018, "How do North Saami children acquire negation?"
• Rauhala 2014, "Adaptation of loanwords of the suffix type *-eTA in Finnish and Saami"
• Saarikivi & Lavento 2012, "Linguistics and Archaeology: A Critical View of an Interdisciplinary Approach with Reference to the Prehistory of Northern Scandinavia":

  "The material discussed in the present paper is mainly from the field of Northern Fennoscandian prehistory and is connected especially with the Saami groups."

• de Smit, 2014, "Proto-Uralic Ergativity Reconsidered"

  "The accusative *-m is represented in Saami (-n or -0 in all Saami languages except South Saami, where *-m is retained)."

• Türk, Lippus, Pajusalu & Teras 2014 : "The ternary contrast of consonant duration in Inari Saami"
• Viitso 2012, "Early Metallurgy in Language: The History of Metal Names in Finnic"

  "The Finnic and Saamic names for gold are borrowed from different Germanic sources (…)"

• Ylikoski 2016, "The origins of the western Uralic s-cases revisited"

  "The paper presents a comprehensive reappraisal of the origins of the so-called s-cases in Saami, Finnic, Mordvin and Mari."

On a quick look I can only find one recent work to use Sámi fully generally (Frog & Saarikivi 2015, "De situ linguarum fenncarum aetatis ferrae, Pars 1") and a few that are about Northern Sami specifically (e.g. Hirvonen 2016, "The life and writings of Pedar Jalvi – a writer from the tundra of Sámiland"). Plain Sami seems also very rare, to my surprize. Probably there would be a few more of both, but unlikely to rise to a majority. The rise of "Sámi" in English sources to me seems to mostly come from well-meaning but uninformed journalists.

Getting to brass tacks, this all I think adds up to a possible argument for maintaining Sámi when talking about the Northern Sami in particular (so Northern Sámi, Northern Sámi Wikipedia, Northern Sámi Braille; maybe also e.g. Sámi Church Council), but moving everything general or specific to the other Sami groups to Saami. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 22:04, 21 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose per Trɔpʏliʊm. Rreagan007 (talk) 23:45, 21 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Rreagan007: See below; Tropylium's sourcing doesn't hold up statistically.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:37, 22 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Rebuttal from nominator: The preponderance of scholarly sources prefer Sámi/Sami by a wide margin over Saami (and frequently use the diacritic); the journal sources selected above in favor of Saami appear to be, well, selected, though maybe unintentionally. (It may just be coincidence that Tropylium's preferred journals use the Saami spelling more.)
  • "Sámi/Sami people" produces 7,940 hits in Google Scholar [2], while "Saami people" produces only 1,720 [3].
  • "Sámi/Sami language" produces 3,460 hits in Google Scholar [4], while "Saami language" produces only 895 [5].
  • "Sámi/Sami culture" produces 3,730 hits in Google Scholar [6], while "Saami culture" produces only 812 [7].
  • "Sámi/Sami society" produces 1,020 hits in Google Scholar [8], while "Saami society" produces only 253 [9].
  • The exact numbers may vary by searcher's settings and location (Google is notorious for producing different results on such bases, but not by a very wide margin), and some individual hits include multiple spellings (i.e., some sources show up in both sets of results), while a few results returned will not be in English. But overall the stats are good.
  • On each of these, you can "Sort by date" in the left sidebar, and you'll see that sources using Sámi are current, not obsolete. (Same is true of Saami, and the diacritic-stripped Sami). It really is just a case of a Sámi/Sami vs. Saami random-preference usage split, and a further tendency of some publishers to jingoistically avoid diacritics.
  • Sámi with the diacritic is very common in high-quality sources, more than enough proof that the presence of the diacritic is proper on Wikipedia.
  • Tropylium's claim that the diacritic is only used in Norther Sámi isn't correct, since it's also used in Lule Sámi in the Western Sámi language sub-family, and probably in several others (our own articles on most Sámi languages are missing the endonymic names for them). I'm not sure it matters much that Skolt uses the Finnized spelling Säämi, or that Kola is written in the Cyrillic alphabet; as a class, they appear to be all given the same spelling in English, though the spelling varies individually by writer/publisher (Sámi, Sami, or Saami; there's virtually no use in English sources of Säämi, Saebmie, etc., except in providing the full endonym as a non-English phrase). I have no opposition to using a variant spelling for a particular language, though. We're already doing that in other cases (e.g. various creoles and pidgins, rendered Kreol, Pisin, etc., on a case-by-case basis).
  • The previous N-gram data, above, shows that Sámi/Sami outnumbers use of Saami in general publishing (though just a bare search on Sami is useless, since it's a common given and family name in multiple languages, as well as a placename in numerous countries that have nothing to do with the Sámi/Saami).

If somehow Google Scholar and Goole Ngrams are lying to us, and someone can prove that, then a mass-RM of all Sámi articles to Saami would be in order, possibly with an exception for Northern Sámi and some other Sámi languages and articles strongly tied to them (unless RS in English also prefer Saami for those, too), and aside from organizational proper names that use Sámi or Sami. However, the evidence so far points in exactly the opposite direction. Even if we went that route for some reason, there were far more articles already at the Sámi spelling before I started normalizing others to that spelling. If the current RM closed in favor of Sami or Saami, or with no consensus, it will just preserve the status quo of us having inconsistent article names for no reason. (The moves I made in the Sámi direction have been reversed, re-deepening the inconsistency back to what it was three days ago, i.e. a completely random mess.)
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:37, 22 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose. "Sami" is the form normally found in English. We'd no more retain the diacritic than we would for Hui Chinese. Per MOS:CONSISTENCY, I'd move the titles with teh diacritic to "Sami". — kwami (talk) 03:26, 27 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Agree. I note the article on Sámi people was recently moved (by nom) to add the diacritic, was this discussed? Except in the lead, the simpler term Sami is currently used throughout that article. Andrewa (talk) 09:42, 29 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. If the simplest, English orthography spelling is common in sources, then that's what we should use. And it is, and it's Sami. Andrewa (talk) 09:42, 29 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment. If this is closed as "no consensus" (or "consensus not to move"), it implies that the related moves performed on December 20 (Sami history to Sámi history, Sami people to Sámi people, Sami flag to Sámi flag... how many are there?) should be reversed pending further discussion–it seems clear that those moves were not uncontroversial. Dekimasuよ! 20:58, 29 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• The answer seems to be quite a lot. There was a statement above to the effect that the moves have been reversed, but it doesn't seem like this is the case for most on that list. And why have we lost redirects at Talk:Sami music and Talk:Norwegian Sami Association? Recreating those. Dekimasuよ! 21:06, 29 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose and Revert This type of mass change is "inappropriate" per the ArbCom in 2005, 2006, and 2009. Remember, MOS:CONSISTENCY is only a goal, not a rule. A review of the above comments clearly suggests that all three are acceptable. So existing articles that are titled using one of them should keep doing so, unless a consensus is built to change that particular article. There should, however, be redirects for the alternate spellings, i.e. Saami in Alaska and Sámi in Alaska to Sami in Alaska; Sami Council and Sámi Council to Saami Council; and Sami drum and Saami drum to Sámi drum. Informata ob Iniquitatum (talk) 00:38, 30 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Support, as long as it is used by the institution/etc. itself. As I am one of the people who starts these articles, I always use the form that the community/institution/etc. itself uses in English. Most of these pages were originally with the á, but someone took it upon themselves once upon a time to move them to the a version instead without any discussion of the matter. In addition to not discussing this before doing so, they have also changed the titles of published books this way, which means that these are all wrong now. To me this is akin to blasting through articles written in British English and changing everything over to American English or vice versa since all three forms are used, even in English-language sources. Saami, which has been in heavily used before, is imo falling out of favor, while Sámi seems to be gaining. Sami is used when trying to cater to people without diacritics (and is by the way a very common first name in Finland, etc., which may be skewing the results). -Yupik (talk) 12:02, 30 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  For example, the Swedish Sami Parliament does not use the á, but the Finnish Sámi Parliament does. The Norwegian Sámi/Sami Parliament uses both rather randomly as does the UN. Just to make life more interesting, the Norwegian Sámi Parliament also uses Saami sometimes. -Yupik (talk) 12:16, 30 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  So much for the "auto-revert as undiscussed moves" idea then; if most of these articles were themselves moved from Sámi to Sami without discussion, those are the moves that should be reverted.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:35, 30 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• My guess is that the request will sit for a long time since no one has done the work to list out which articles should be reverted under each scenario. If this is closed as "consensus not to move," then it would reaffirm the current article titles for these cases, however. This looks like an extraordinary amount of work to close even though it's pretty clear that the proposed moves do not enjoy consensus. Dekimasuよ! 19:27, 1 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. Sami is an English word. It is well-naturalized so that it is listed in all main English dictionaries without the acute. The only alternative form given is Saami, but we can safely disregard it as it is always listed secondary. (I believe this form with aa might come from Finnish.) The form with diacritic is skewed toward one particular variety/orthography and makes a wrong impression that this is unanimously accepted form among all the varieties of the language. It also gives somewhat a wrong impression that the acute is used regularly to show the length of the vowels and hence obligatory (like it would be, for example, in Irish or Czech/Slovak). However, to my knowledge, Sami may have a full set of long vowels, but only the long a has been given the acute. In other instances it is not shown, or with the macron. Though this is rather a deficiency of the orthography as a whole than of this particular word. I doubt that Google ghits are a sufficient ground for the preference of one form. Amusingly enough but Google tells me that "Ngrams not found: Sámi language". Note, that all I'm saying is about the people, language, culture, etc. If there are some proper names with the acute, it may be reasonable to keep it. I do not see why we need consistency here for all the instances of the word Sami, what is wrong with inconsistency. I'd rather prefer an individual approach to each case than a mechanistic one.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 15:44, 30 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I have to admit the use of Sami / Sámi is in inconsistent use. It's a mess, and therefore only have one simple solution! Please keep 'Sami' at least for the Sami parliament and us Forest Sami, the double 'a' spelling is an attempt to set us apart from persons who happen to have it as the first name on the Internet same for the use of 'Sámi'. While it have no place whatsoever in orthography and pronunciation. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.208.94.161 (talk) 23:05, 1 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.