Tuesday, 22 November 2005
Stakhanov, Wikipedia and stranger languages
« Upgrade of blojsom and PostMailerPlugin | Main | Apache XML-RPC over HTTPS »I've just falsified the history of Superfluo :-P .
My local machine was erroneously called stakanov while the correct spelling has an h between k and a, so I've renamed the machine and substituted stakanov with stakhanov everywhere in the blog.
The funny thing is that I knew that stakanov was wrong but thought that the right form was stachanov! Since I disliked this last one and found it unusual (!), I had been using stakanov until, some days ago, Pippo pointed me out how the things were really (thank you!).
In Italian there is the noun stachanovista that is derived from Stakhanov and indicates a person that shows excessive fervor in doing his own work. This word misled me at first, then I found an article on Nederlands Wikipedia about Stachanov that gave me an additional (but wrong?) confirmation.
How is it possible that a proper noun is written differently in different languages? Note that for Stakhanov there is also a third version, the Polsky one. Isn't Wikipedia trustworthy on this subject? (I don't think so)
Comments on this entry:
It happens when the original word is written using a different alphabet. Translitteration to another alphabet is not a clear-cut issue in this case.
By the way, the only correct spelling is Стаханов (now we'll see how well blojsom supports non-latin charsets ;).
Looks like it supports it quite well.
thanks for the explanation.
I'm not surprised that blojsom supports it quite well :-) : David Czarnecki (its author) seems to have a lot of attention for internationalization.