Recently, I created this Wikipedia page: [deleted] Some of you may remember that I asked for help for the American version of this page near the beginning of this year. A few days ago, a long established Wikipedia editor made a edit to that page and I had the temerity to ask for a citation. You can see the exchange at the bottom of [deleted]
Now I can’t prove there’s any connection, but just in the last couple days, someone proposed my article for deletion. [deleted] the page on that. I put up what I think is a strong argument that their complaints were specious, but from what I gather, that won’t be enough. I understand I need other voters to keep the page.
So anyone who has a Wiki account, if you think my page is worthwhile, please vote to keep it.
I’m not that familiar with the way Wikipedia works as far as discussions on proposed deletions. There’s a couple links on that page to other discussions and the two delete posts above mine are on those pages. Should I copy my post to those other discussions or is there some way it will be automatically copied? Or are those irrelevant to whether my page is removed?
Is the assertion that Vienna Austria is named after a city in Canada? That runs counter to how I would view the world. So either I learned something strange today or that article is weird.
I think the content of the page is useful and very interesting.
My quibble is that I think the presentation is backwards, as illustrated by sachertorte’s misunderstanding above. I, too, found the page confusing at first glance. One’s thought process would usually be “what is this city in Canada named after?”, not the other way around. So it would be more logical to list the Canadian cities first, followed by the places that they are named after. An etymology dictionary would always be arranged this way. (And clearer to document uncertainty on the matter, when there is more than one possible source name.)
The confusing presentation is exacerbated by the fact that the word “namesake” is often used more loosely to mean “having the same name as”, whereas here you are using the word in the stricter original sense of named after, i.e. you are documenting etymology.
ETA: I think the title of the page should be something like
Just a note; your earlier list of non-US cities with a US namesake is really incomplete, although it’s probably one of those lists that never will be complete. For example, there are 169 towns and cities in Connecticut, and almost all of them are named after English towns and cities. And that’s probably the case in the rest of New England.
I appreciate that very much. And thanks to Claverhouse too, who is also a member here, if I’m not mistaken.
No, it’s the other way around. All those Canadian places are named for cities in other countries. Strictly speaking, a namesake is someone or something that’s named for someone or something else. The person or thing that originally had the name is the eponym. At least that was the original meaning of those terms. All too often, the terms are used loosely and are applied to the opposite.
I originally had some text in the article saying this, but someone removed it shortly after I put it up. Perhaps I should put it back in.
The list has only one Canadian city for each foreign city. If I made this switch, people would expect all Canadian cities that are named for a those in another country. That’s actually not unreasonable to do for Canada. There’s some duplication between places in different provinces, but it’s not outrageous.
The reason it’s this way is that I did the US list first and just copied the format. For the US it would be pretty outrageous. By my estimate, I’d roughly quadruple the length of the list to include all those named for foreign cities. Maybe even more than quadruple.
This is all very true. I was limited by what references I could find online and for some reason there were very few for New England. Even so, there’s still a massive number of English places on the list that have Massachusetts namesakes. When I have time, I’ll see if I can get some references through ILL. There’s several other states I’d like to get references for, as well: Virginia, the Carolinas, Maryland, Florida, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Kansas.
Sorry, but I’ve got to close this…it comes a bit too close to asking people to further a cause, which we normally like to ask people to ask for permission to do first, so I have taken out the links and am closing this topic.