Talk:Jógvan Heinason

What orthography is appropriate in such cases?

This article, and lots of the other articles about historical Faroese people, suffer from an anachronistic way of treating the name forms.

The text tells us that the name of this "law speaker" was Jógvan Heinason, without any alternative forms. Now, Jógvan is the modern way to write the Faroese vaiant of a classical Christian name, which was rendered differently in different languages. (The corresponding English form is John; and the modern Danish form most closely related to Jógvan should be Joen.) The Faroese written form was invented in the 19'th century, when V. U. Hammershaimb created the modern Faroese orthography. It is important to remember, that Hammershaimb did not codify some existing "writing praxis" from his days; except perhaps in adopting some Icelandic conventions.

In other words: The person named Jógvan never wrote his first name like that, until the 19'th century never had it written like that, never would have recognised his name, if he had seen it spelled thus, and never was named thus in any texts appearing before the second half of the 19'th century. Whether or not he pronounced it thus is not quite clear; but having a Faroese mother, it is quite possible that the first form in which he learned to recognise his name was something fairly similar to the modern Faroese pronounciation of Jógvan. On the other hand, he probably later also learnt "a proper form", without the "dialectal" -gv- (as it was considered then), something closer to Joen, and quite probably also "the true" form, more corresponding to the way he wrote his name.

Now, I do not know how he and others at the time spelled his name. My guess would be Johannes, since that was the way the biblical name most often was rendered in full among "the learned classes" in Scandinavia. In Sweden at that time, that is the form that would have entered into the church book, the official registery. At that time, it was thought natural to translate proper names from one language to another; whence any contemporary dockument in English mentioning him probably would have named him John, in a more or less normalised orthography. The learned language at that time and place was Latin, and the locally recognised language Danish; until late in the 19'th century, Denmark officially considered what we now call Faroese as nothing but some Danish dialects. Therefore, he may have used two name forms in writing, e. g., Johannes and Joen; or he may have used only one.

What we can be absolutely sure of, is that his name never was written like anything similar to Jógvan, except possibly if he incidently nas named in any text in Icelandic. (Denmark did recognise Icelandic as a separate language. However, a more probable "Icelanidicised" form might be Jón.)

Conclusion: This is a biographic article in an encyclopaedia. The title should render the name form "most commonly recognied" to-day, and that may very well be the modern Faroese form. However, the name form used in Danish documents also should be given, and if there are contemporary documentation about "the official way" his name was spelled then, this sould also be given. Moreover, the reader should be informed that the spelling Jógvan Heinason is "in normalised modern Faroese form". If incidently someone finds that he also does appear in older English texts, then the name form used there also should be mentioned. There should also be redirs or dab items from all the alternative name forms to the article.

As I mentioned, this is just one of a group of articles about "historical Faroese people". Most of what holds here, should also be done for all the other articles.

Quite a separate matter is that he wasn't exactly a "first minister". A "lagmand" at that time had mainly juridical functions; see law speaker; and even if law and administration then was not as separated as now, there was absolutely nothing similar to "a Faroese government", with or without Heinason as its chief. However, the problems arising from comparing an ancient løgmaður with a modern one is a different matter, and has no real bearing on the problems about his proper names.) JoergenB (talk) 15:10, 22 May 2013 (UTC)