Talk:List of palindromic places

OR?

Is this list original research? I'm not referring to the entries on the list; I mean the list itself. I know that palindromes are well-studied, and place-names are well studied, but has anyone outside of Wikipedia ever studied the topic of palidromic placenames? And if not, should we really have an article on the topic? Xtifr _tälk 19:30, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

there are a few books that include them of which at least one was commercially published & is now named at bottom of articleEgull (talk) 20:49, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Eligibility

Does a single or two lettered name really count as a palindrome? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.131.171.61 (talk) 23:33, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

inclusion criteria

This list is full of red links, unsourced names, and items which do not fit the definition of "A palindromic place is a city or town ..." We have an elevator (Rotavele Elevator, California,California]]), an airport (Tropria Airport), streets (Euneva Avenue, Dao Road, Ena Lane), a tunnel,(Lennut Tunnel), companies or buildings (Lion Oil, Yreka Bakery, Yrella Gallery), a dam (Madoko Dam), lakes, and even Tesnus sunset..

1. Any red links without a source should be removed.
2. According to the current definition, anything which isn't a place where people live should be removed. No streets, no companies, no buildings, no tunnels, and no sunsets (or anything else we have to append to get a palindrome), etc. I suggest named geographic features that are palindromes should be added to the definition of palindromic places, in which case the lake entries would be acceptable if blue linked or sourced..
3. I leave it for discussion if we should accept such partial palindromes as Blake, DeKalb County
4. It also seems excessive that we go all the way to single letter names when we start off with "The longest known palindromic place names in the Latin alphabet are:"
5. I have no idea why user:Sgysd thinks the various Nan'an, China entries should be counted as having 10 more letters. We don't count the letters in the rest of the Wikipedia article title in determining how many letters there are in a palindromic name.

I'll leave this for discussion before I start trimming. Meters (talk) 01:22, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

@Meters: I strongly agree with item #1 because WP:V is policy. Item #2 also looks good, and I would support inclusion of lakes because in terms of the naming of places, they seem on par with geopolitical entities. For #3 I don't object to including multiword places or inclusion of "County" or similar designator makes the whole multiword term palindromatic. I weakly object to using including multiple levels (city+state) because it's getting WP:SYNTH to put them together. I do object to using partially overlapping but incomplete parts: either include "Dekalb County" or don't, but don't just use Dekalb. For item #4, I don't object to recasting the scope to be "palidromatic" rather than "longest palindromatic". For item #5, I agree as well; the "palindrome" is the topic and the length of that is the relevant detail. DMacks (talk) 14:04, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

Two months in, and no additional comments, so I'm starting the cleanup. Meters (talk) 05:36, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

First issue that cropped up... what about diacriticals? For example, are Salaš, Añana and Ellé palindromes? Meters (talk) 06:25, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

Places with diacriticals should not be listed as they are not palindromes, including Ičići (different letters). AndrejJ (talk) 07:11, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

I don't think we should arbitrarily consider diacritics as always making a different letter. Instead, we should treat them the same way the language in question does. In the Romance languages, diacritics on vowels, such as e-acute, are still considered the same letter. Ditto for a c-cedilla and anything with a diaeresis. (N-tilde, though, I'm not sure about. I think the Spanish language authorities have gone back and forth on how it should be treated and I don't know what they finally decided on.) In dictionaries, these letters are mixed in with the non-diacriticked letters. Now this isn't true of all such letters. The Scandinavian languages, for example, each have three additional vowels that look like they're diacriticked, but they treat them as distinct letters and alphabetize them after the Z. If you're unsure about how a language treats diacritics, you may have to check the Wiki page about the appropriate language's alphabet.

At any rate, a Spanish wordplay-ist would consider Neuquén to be a good palindrome and it should be reinstated on this page. Dtilque (talk) 01:43, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Good points. You are obviously knowledgeable about this. How do you suggests that we differentiate between place names where the diacritics may be ignored and those where they should be considered as different letters? The only approach I can come up with is to require a reliable source for each entry using unbalanced diacritics to show that is considered a palindrome. Meters (talk) 07:21, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

turns out there's a wikipedia for this: Diacritic#Other_languages You just have to figure out what the main language is for the country in question. Dtilque (talk) 04:44, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

Forgot to mention that ñ in Spanish is considered a separate letter. Dtilque (talk) 04:56, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

One issue that's related to diacritics is apostrophes. Or rather the ʻOkina. The ʻokina is a letter in Hawaiian and other polynesian languages that's often written as an apostrophe. It represents a glottal stop and is considered a distinct letter. An example of its use is ʻIliʻili, Samoa. In English wordplay, apostrophes are ignored, so this would look like a palindrome. It isn't one in Samoan. There's also a Hawaiian place with a similar name: ʻEleʻele. Its wikipage drops the ʻokinas and lists it as Eleele, although it gives the real Hawaiian form as an alternate spelling. I removed it from the list, but it should be reinstated. I just checked GNIS and it says the Board on Geographic Names made an official decision that it's spelled without the ʻokinas.

I'm not sure how apostrophes in Japanese and other languages should be handled. I'll have to research that. Dtilque (talk) 04:44, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

That's a good article, but we still have deal with the problem of differentiating which entries with diacritics are valid palindromes vs which are not. We can't expect drive-by editors to verify that their pet addition is a valid one when there are other entries with diacritics in the list, and most readers won't be able to tell either. How about a rule (and an article comment) that no entries with diacritics can be added unless they have first been discussed and approved on the talk page? Ignoring all diacritics is easy (but apparently not correct), and rejecting all unbalanced diacritics is easy (but again, apparently not correct). Both of these can be done by simple inspection of the name, but the correct approach of accepting names with unbalance diacritics as palindromes only in cases where the diacritics do not form new letters is going to require a source or a discussion for each case. Meters (talk) 09:35, 23 April 2020 (UTC

OK, I added not just one note, but three about different issues.

Other apostrophes: so far there are no Japanese names with them, I was thinking of Chinese names. It turns out that Chinese only uses them to indicate syllabification under certain circumstances. That won't make a difference to palindromicity, so they can be ignored like they are in English. Anyway, feel free to improve my notes; I know they aren't perfect. Dtilque (talk) 10:30, 24 April 2020 (UTC)