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"Lydda" is currently a disambig page to Lod (described as "Lod, formerly Lydda, but renamed after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War") or Exodus from Lydda (described as "Exodus from Lydda, the Palestinian expulsion from the hcity in July 1948").
I wish to claim this is an error. First, since Lod and Lydda are no more seperate than Bratislava and Pressburg or Lviv and Lemberg - It's 2 names for one place. In this case Lod is the biblical veriant, partly retained in the arabic Lud, so writing "formerly Lydda, but renamed after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War" is a factual error.
Second, a disambig is meant to help someone likely to look for one of two options. The Exodus is one event in at least 4000 years of history, and virtually nobody searching for "Lydda" will look for and event, they will look for a place. Therefore, a disambig will cause "noise" rather than help. DGtal (talk) 19:37, 22 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I take your point. I just wonder whether it's true that anyone searching for "Lydda" nowadays will be looking for the place. I suspect they may be looking for what happened there in 1948, which is why I created the dab page.
People can find the word Lydda in anything from old textbooks to the Israel Ministry of Tourism website. The variant is far from extinct, so I honestly doubt anyone will look for the Exodus as this term (and frankly, 90% of the people who heard of Lod haven't heard of the Exodus). DGtal (talk) 20:37, 22 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The disambiguation page is a good thing.
Lydda is not the former name of Lod. In 1948, an event (that could be equivalent to an earthquake) destroyed the city and its name was changed.
It is true that the event was not physical (earthquake) but ethno-sociological (the expulsion of the population that was replaced by another one) but that is the same stuff.
I disagree. Lydda is not a former name, it is a parrallel name, if anything, al-Ludd is the main variant, as not too many Greco-Latin speakers are around nowadays.
On the other point: Ethnic transfer (especially when it is only partial) does not "replace" a city, it "only" opens a new chapter in it's history. That doesn't make one event even close to an equal to a centuries old name of the city. DGtal (talk) 20:57, 22 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
DGtal, what we do on WP is simply publish what reliable sources say. In this case, historians say that the city's named was changed from Lydda to Lod in 1948, so that's what we say too. Example: "Yacobi, Haim. The Jewish-Arab City, Taylor & Francis, 2009, p. 29: "The occupation of Lydda by Israel in the 1948 war did not allow the realization of Pocheck's garden city vision. Different geopolitics and ideologies began to shape Lydda's urban landscape ... [and] its name was changed from Lydda to Lod, which was the region's biblical name."
The problem is that Yacobi is semi-incorrect. In jewish sources (i.e. Hebrew language) the city has always been Lod (לוד); in Arabic sources and day to day talk, I assume, the name is Lud (P.S. many Israeli jews say "Lud", not "Lod") . The only "alleged" change is in Latin-derived alphabets: Until 1948 the main use was Lydda, like the traditional naming (and note: Lod-Lud-Lydda are basically the same), after 1948 the naming changed to Lod, a transliteration of the hebrew לוד. Factually, Lydda is still common, including in Official Israeli websites (as shown above), so with all due respect to Yacobi, he's mistaken. A few redone road signs is not a naming revolution. DGtal (talk) 06:40, 24 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
He's just a source I added as an example. Most of the historians writing about this describe the change from Lydda to Lod, and we're discussing Latin-derived alphabets because this encyclopedia is written in one. So from that perspective, there has been a name change. I take your point, though. As for your argument that population transfer doesn't replace a city, it's an interesting question. If you took all the French out of Paris, and changed which state it belonged to, would it still be Paris? Yes and no. SlimVirgintalk|contribs15:48, 24 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
