Category talk:en:Names

RFM discussion: June 2014–March 2017
And likewise for other languages. There is nothing particularly topical about names as such. Of course the entities that they refer to have a topical element, but that is distinct from the name used to refer to them. That is, "Canada" is both a country (as a concept; topical), and the English name for that country (as a word; lexical). So I propose that a stricter split is made between these two things. I think that since we already have another category tree for names of people, we might as well extend that category tree for names of other things as well. 17:43, 24 June 2014 (UTC)

After thinking about this some more, I'm not sure about this proposal. I was mainly led by the name of the top-level categories, "Names" and "Place names". These are clearly about the nature of the word rather than what it refers to. A place name is a word for a place, not a place itself. For personal names it's more practical to treat names as types of words, because there are many individuals named "Alice" or "Bob" and putting them in some category like "People" is hardly going to be useful. But at the same time, it's not so clear for things like "countries", or "cities" because by and large these terms are unique in what they refer to. is clearly the name of one unique place, not a name for many places to be assigned as one sees fit. This means that categories for "countries" would not really contain anything different from categories for "names of countries". Sure, the focus is different (topical versus lexical) but the end result would be the same. So I'm wondering what the best approach would be here. 12:53, 25 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Information_desk/Archive_2013/July-December is semi-relevant. Most (but not all!) people seem to agree that there's a distinction between "en:Names" (and "en:Surnames", etc) and "English names" ("English surnames", etc), but not everyone agrees on what that distinction is. - -sche (discuss) 02:10, 4 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Earlier today, I stumbled on a good example for discussion: Yazdegerd, which seems to be strictly used to refer to Persian emperors who died before the English language even existed. It seems odd to lump this in with names of clearly English origin and usage such as Smith. Yes, it occurs in the English language- but I somehow doubt that the average speaker of English would ever describe it as an English name. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:28, 4 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Most people here agree that place names are topics and personal names are parts of speech. So it doesn't matter which one you use for the top category, the topic/POS division never made sense with names anyway. Names of foreigners used in another language, like Yazdegerd, have always been a problem. I would place it in a "Category:en:Middle Persian male given names" (cf. Category:en:Persian male given names), but Anatoli always uses the from= parameter and now Vahagn has taken it up too. It might help if Template:given name and Template:surname had a parameter for transliterations. But you'd still have to decide the category name and the definition ("A Middle Persian male given name? A(n English) rendering of a Middle Persian male given name?") CodeCat, please don't make any major change before bringing it up in Beer parlour, otherwise you'll just add to the chaos. Very few people read this page. And be prepared that the discussion will go astray and there will be no consensus, as in the link given by -sche. People who never edit names often believe that there's a miraculous simple rule that will solve everything. --Makaokalani (talk) 13:53, 8 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Not merged. - -sche (discuss) 22:31, 18 March 2017 (UTC)