User:Rupert Clayton/Artuqid naming

Names for Artuqid rulers

I'd like to get editors' views on how we can adopt some consistent naming for the main Artuqid rulers. I'm raising the topic here on the Artuqids page, but I'll try to link to this discussion from the individual pages for specific rulers.

What are the issues?

Deciding how to name Artuqid rulers is quite complicated:

• They ruled a fairly remote region of south-east Anatolia and the Jazira between the 11th and 14th centuries, so records are pretty limited.
• They lived in a predominantly Arabic-speaking culture, with a medieval Arabic–Islamic naming convention and their lives were mostly chronicled in Arabic manuscript histories, which causes all the "usual" problems we have in applying consistent style to Arabic names. (See MOS:ISLAM for the core guidelines and WP:MOS-AR for additional informal guidance.)
• They were Oghuz Turkmen from the Döger clan, and undoubtedly spoke Turkish as their mother tongue, as well as Arabic.
• Many had Turkish personal names that remain popular (or have been revived) among Turkish-speakers today.
• Some scholarship on the dynasty has been written by Turkish academics. A common Turkish convention is to use phonetic spellings for all names and terms. In most Turkish scholarship, the rulers are referred to by the modern versions of their names using the post-1928 Turkish alphabet. The same spellings are typically used by Turkish academics publishing in English.
• Non-Turkish academics have typically followed one or other transliteration scheme to render the Arabic version of each ruler's name into English, often using a strict transliteration approach that uses diacritics to exactly map Arabic letters to a Latin alphabet.
• We actually want to use different versions of the name in different places such as in the article lead, as a common name in article text, in the article title. (More on this below.)

What principles am I proposing?

I believe that we should generally refer to these Artuqid rulers by a simple transliteration of the Arabic version of their common name (following the WP:MOS-AR guidelines), and not by the Turkish version of that same name. I absolutely recognize that these people were ethnically Turkmen, but they operated in a culture where the written language was Arabic, and all references to them before the emergence of modern Turkey were either in Arabic or transliterations from Arabic. Choosing to use a Turkish version of a name (Sökmen vs. Sukman) has the result of disconnecting Wikipedia from the majority of scholarship and the historical record.

We can and should recognize alternative name versions, and should make clear that these were Turkmen rulers and not Arabs.

In more detail my suggestions are as follows:

1. In the lead paragraph of the article we give (a) the full Arabic name in strict transliteration, (b) the Arabic common name in simple transliteration, (c) any other name variants used very commonly in English, (d) parenthetically, the name in the main languages relevant to the person's life and culture (e.g. untransliterated Arabic, Turkish, Syriac).
2. Elsewhere in the article, we refer to the person by the simple transliteration of their Arabic common name, unless there's a need to distinguish them from another person of the same name.
3. We provide a footnote that explains why we're using the Arabic common name for this non-Arab person (to minimize confusion and pointless edit wars). Here we can also list all the common name versions that may be encountered in the literature, to help clarify that these are all the same person. In some cases, name variants may be best addressed in a section within the body of the article.
4. We choose an article title following the WP:TITLES guidance to select a "commonly recognizable name". This may be the same as the simple transliteration of the Arabic common name used above, but it may be that there is a need to distinguish an Artuqid (such as Sukman from various other similarly named people (see Sökmen). In this case, we should prefer a more complete version of the ruler's name, (e.g. Sukman ibn Artuq, or Muʿin ad-Din Soqman) to an artificial distinguisher, such as Sukman (Artuqid).
5. We set up redirects for all commonly used versions of the person's name (and any previous page titles).
6. We create disambiguation pages to distinguish these Artuqids from similarly named people.

What forms are used in WP now / used by major sources / proposed for WP

The tables below show first the forms used for the name of some of the early major Artuqid figures currently in Wikipedia and second the forms used by several major writers on Artuqid history. Bold text is used to indicate the common name used for this person on later reference. The third section proposes forms for these names following the principles above.

Current WP	Article title	Artuk Bey	Sökmen (Artuqid)	Ilghazi
	Full name	Zaheer-ul-Daulah Artuk Beg
Sources	Cahen 1935	Urtuk	Sukmān	Ilġāzi	Šams ad-Daula Sulaymān
	Hillenbrand 1981	Artuq	Sukmān	Najm al-Dīn Il-Ghāzī	Shams al-Daula Sulaimān
	Meinecke 1996	Artuq	Muʿīn ad-Dīn Sukmān bin Artuq
Proposed for WP	Strict name	Artuq ibn Aksab
	Common name	Artuq
	Article title

Current WP	Article title
	Full name
Sources	Cahen 1935	Husam ad-din Timurtāš	Rukn ad-Daula Dāūd	Najm ad-din Alpi
	Hillenbrand 1981	Temür-Tash bin Il-Ghāzī	Rukn al-Daula Dāʾūd	Najm al-Dīn Alpï
	Meinecke 1996	Temür Tāsh		Najm ad-Dīn Alpī	Fakhr ad-Dīn Qarā Arslān
Proposed for WP	Strict name	Husām ad-Dīn Temür-Tash bin Il-Ghāzī
	Common name
	Article title