Talk:594913 ꞌAylóꞌchaxnim

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Renaming article

Kwamikagami (talk · contribs) could you please cite any WP policies/guidelines as to why you have modified the asteroid's official designation? That would be helpful. Thx, --Rfassbind – talk 17:00, 10 November 2021 (UTC)

The precedent of other astronomy articles. E.g. We spell the moon Hiʻiaka with the letter ʻokina, though the MPC substitutes an ASCII apostrophe. Even when they do attempt to spell a non-ASCII name correctly, as with Gǃkúnǁʼhòmdímà, they tend to get it wrong and the MPC, JPL/NASA and USGS may disagree with each other. For instance, one will use ⟨ǃ⟩ while another uses ⟨!⟩; more obviously, one may use diacritics and another not. The MPC even keeps parallel ASCII and Unicode renderings of the names (or tries to), indicating that there is no one correct format. Currently, JPL lists a moon as ⟨(229762) G!kun||'homdima I Gǃòʼé ǃHú⟩ – that is, the primary is ASCII-ified, but the secondary is Unicodified. This isn't an official or intentional distinction. And in this case it would be impossible for us to use the JPL rendering, because some of the ASCII substitutions are illegal in WP article names.

I've actually written to the MPC about mis-rendered names, and they've tried correcting them, but there are limits to what they are able to accomplish. That is, it's not a matter of the exact Unicode characters being official, but of the technical constraints of their software or website as they attempt a visual match.

In the case of ʼAylóʼchaxnim, in proper orthography the second glottal stop wouldn't be there. But that was the choice of the proposer and the MPC, and as with several other misspelled names, that is the official spelling. We've never attempted to "correct" misspellings (and some of them are doozies), and I haven't here. But we've always used the proper Unicode characters for names rather than ASCII-ifying them. — kwami (talk) 18:41, 10 November 2021 (UTC)

The official minor-planet designation uses a straight apostrophe (IAU), not a curly one in its name. This move did not conform with our naming conventions for minor planets. For as long as the International Astronomical Union does not issue a correction of the published name, and/or we do not expand our naming conventions on Wikipedia, the article's title should agree with the official publication. Pls note that I will gladly help you draft a new version of our mentioned policies (to include a change to a modifier letter apostrophe from a straight apostrophe for a set of defined names). But this first needs an extensive revision, not just claims and rather convoluted reasoning as given above (however, I'm prepared to go through every single point of your argument if you wish to). -- Rfassbind – talk 17:03, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

I rather agree with kwami on this, and support the move to 594913 ʼAylóʼchaxnim with the curly apostrophes. It is quite clear that not all the MPC / WSGBN publications bother to use non-ASCII characters, e.g. G!kun||'homdima. In the MPC databases the click letters are ASCII-fied, so it is in the naming citation as well. But the discoverers, who presumably knew what they were naming it after, did not do so in their publications, but used the proper characters. That makes me suspect that the MPC online archives often ASCII-fy things, not because the ASCII names are "correct", but simply because of technical restrictions. In which case I don't see grounds for following the ASCII-fications rather than the presumed originals. The naming citation for 594913 refers to the Luiseño language, and the curly apostrophe is apparently the correct orthography for that language; so this seems like it would be a similar case.

I agree with Rfassbind's suggestion to add a list of names where the MPC online archives omit some non-ASCII characters to the naming policies. Double sharp (talk) 20:55, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

I didn't rename the article. It's the same name. I moved it to proper characters.

Whether we have curly or straight glottal stops is an independent matter. I'm fine with straight. However, letters should be letters, not punctuation marks. We could have curly combining apostrophes or straight saltillos, but not curly quotation marks or straight ASCII apostrophes. We'd never use a quotation mark for an ʻokina, for example. You can tell when the character is punctuation rather than a letter because when you dbl click on the name, you don't get the whole thing. This is no different than changing the ASCII hyphen in the date of a BCE comet to a minus sign for a negative date. If the MCU uses an ASCII hyphen, it's still really a minus. In fact, I was thanked the other day by one of our astronomer-editors for making just that correction at Caesar's Comet, though in that case it didn't affect the title. Still, if it were in the title, it would be ⟨C/−43 K1⟩ with a proper minus sign.

I started a thread at WP:NCASTRO. — kwami (talk) 03:21, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

I'm happy with using actual letters (instead of apostrophes) to denote the glottal here. But it should be the modifier letter apostrophe ʼ, rather than the saltillo ꞌ – as pointed out above, Luiseño orthography uses the former. That the character appears straight in the WGSBN citation seems to be merely the result of ASCII-fication, and doesn't mean that we have to use a similar character while ignoring the proper orthography underlying it. — RAVENPVFF · talk · 16:34, 27 November 2021 (UTC)

Agreed. — kwami (talk) 20:29, 27 November 2021 (UTC)

+1 Double sharp (talk) 23:00, 27 November 2021 (UTC)

@Ravenpuff: The Luiseño reader published by the Pechanga tribal govt uses a straight glottal stop: see here. My contact in the Pechanga govt (cultural curator) directed me to the reader when I asked about this. Curly ones have previously been used in publication, but there are several diffs in orthography for the current revitalization efforts, such as ⟨s̸⟩ for former ⟨z⟩. (You can see one of those on the cover.) The name ꞌAylóꞌchaxnim, with the redundant 2nd glottal stop, shows this is current orthography: previous orthographies would've omitted it as predictable, but now all glottal stops and stress are written out explicitly, presumably because students are no longer native speakers. (E.g. the teacher in the vid keeps apologizing for not pronouncing things right.) Should we move this article back to saltillos? — kwami (talk) 02:12, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

I agree. Double sharp (talk) 07:27, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

Part of me wonders whether that character featured in the book is just a simple ASCII apostrophe (') – it looks like an apostrophe when used with that font, at least. This might just be a case of substituting a easier-to-type character in place of a more specialized one (whichever that is); I note that the website of the tribal government also uses an apostrophe, e.g. here. If there's a source saying that Luiseño orthography should formally use the saltillo character where possible (you might be able to find one via your contact, perhaps), I'd be happy to move the article to the former name. Otherwise I think the preponderance of academic sources currently point us towards the modifier letter apostrophe. — RAVENPVFF · talk · 17:00, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

(Another potential complication: there are in fact two Unicode saltillo characters, uppercase Ꞌ and lowercase ꞌ. If we were to use saltillos here, would the first one be the uppercase character, and if so would the letter A still need to be capitalized as well?) — RAVENPVFF · talk · 17:03, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Of course on websites ppl tend to use ASCII, and an ASCII apostrophe isn't a proper letter. But the question is what ppl would expect to see in print, and the reader could easily have had curly apostrophes. After all, it includes the non-Unicode letter s-slash. More likely is that it's a child's learning form, like the one-story 'a' and 'g'.

Old orthographies are not evidence for what the current orthography is.

As for a capital, the vowel after the saltillo is capitalized. You see that in orthographies that don't capitalize the saltillo. — kwami (talk) 20:20, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Incidentally, I have stumbled upon this Luiseño "How-to-Get-to-College Poster" (background information here). This uses Unicode (lowercase) saltillos throughout, but doesn't capitalize any letters immediately following it – this can be seen most clearly on pages 3 and 5, where the bulleted points are meant to be in sentence case with initial capitals, but letters following sentence-initial saltillos aren't capitalized. As regards Aylochaxnim, though, I would keep the capital A in any case since that's what the IAU approved. Do you have a source detailing the current Luiseño orthography? — RAVENPVFF · talk · 00:38, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Good find!

My only recent sources are the video and an emailed list of letters available on the Luiseno keyboard, though that provides some that are no longer used (e.g. ŋ for current ng). But the poster you found clinches it: they went to the effort of using Unicode saltillos. They even made a typo with a saltillo for an apostrophe in English in "CSUꞌs". Maybe because that's the default for the keyboard?

Re. caps, presumably that's why ꞌa, ꞌe &c are presented as single letters in the reader, so that kids know how to capitalize them? The reader is explicit that ꞌA ~ ꞌa are a casing pair.

In "piláꞌchilanga" on p 1, you see the redundant glottal stop after the stressed vowel, just as in ꞌAylóꞌchaxnim (which you don't see in older dictionaries), and also the <ş>, which is on the Luiseno keyboard for the non-Unicode s-slash in the reader. Geminate glottal stops too. — kwami (talk) 07:25, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Trying to contact Eric Elliott, at CSUSB. He's the linguist who worked with the community to develop that poster. — kwami (talk) 22:31, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

@Ravenpuff: Haven't heard back from Elliot. But the Curator of Pechanga Cultural Resources wrote back, "We have to use what’s available at times with the print of our language so that is where the discrepancy will appear." We have a recent RS that the glottal stop should be straight (the primer published by Pechanga), and a recent example use of the Unicode saltillo as the character for that letter (the CSU poster), which was created with the input of the one linguist working on the language. In other words, we have good evidence that glottal stop should be the saltillo, and no recent sources that it should be the combining apostrophe. — kwami (talk) 20:54, 28 January 2022 (UTC)