Talk:Drzewieccy

RFV discussion: May–December 2023
As a plural of the Polish surname in English. &mdash; S URJECTION / T / C / L / 06:36, 19 May 2023 (UTC)


 * This ECHR case clearly uses this plural in an English text:
 * The applicants, Maria and Zdzisław Drzewieccy, are Polish nationalsOn 16 May 1998 their son, Mr Piotr Drzewiecki, was involved in a road traffic accident.
 * Also this: However, in both cases, the referents are native Polish people (not, say, Polish Americans), so perhaps this is really a use of the Polish term, not the English one.
 * We need to clarify CFI as it concerns names, specifically, what it means for a name to belong to a language. We don't know what we are doing on this front. For now, I would be satisfied to delete the English entry even if a third "use" could be found. The Polish entry is more than sufficient. This, that and the other (talk) 10:39, 28 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I definitely agree we need to think through how to handle when names belong to which languages. OTOH ... I acknowledge we kind-of have been trying to sort out that question for years, and still haven't, because it gets complicated fast. In this case, someone looking up Drzewieccy could understand it from the #Polish entry even if there's not an #English entry, but what if English-language texts were using a similar -y plural of a Russian surname, like "M. and I. Putiny and their son A. Putin"? The Russian entry is at so Putiny is unintelligible without an entry. And we do include, say, Smiths as the plural of Smith. And/but in French it'd be different (Poutiny). If both were attested, would the act of transliteration make something like Putiny more keepable than something like Drzewieccy? What about if the name were spelled in Polish with diacritics but English dropped the diacritic but kept the -y? Mehhh. For given names we gesture at a not-well-defined distinction between ~"was born in an English-speaking country where their birth was recorded in English and in Latin letters" (which makes it an "English name from Russian" or whatever, like Sasha) vs "was born in countries where it would've been spelled in e.g. Cyrillic and then transliterated" (like Yaroslav), or both (Vladimir), which matches your "native Polish" vs "Polish Americans" distinction here, but (although not in this rare name's case, yet in other cases) names in fiction then complicate things again... if English authors populate non-Earth fantasy or sci-fi worlds with the occasional Yaroslav (or use a 'non-English' plural for their surnames), with no indication the characters are considered to all have birth certificates saying Яросла́в, is that still a "transliteration" or is it now a name? (Do we try and cleave off "names used in fiction" as a third thing distinct from real names and transliterations of names? But then, are we also splitting Harry into "A real given name" and "A fictional given name"? No, that's probably not wise.) Sorry, thinking aloud! - -sche (discuss) 14:18, 28 June 2023 (UTC)
 * I would point out that English never uses a plural X with "Mr. and Mrs. X", so I suspect an error. The quote seems to be an English summary of a case involving events entirely within Poland, so the person who wrote it may have copied the name of the parents from the case title, "DRZEWIECCY v. POLAND", without noticing that it was a plural. Chuck Entz (talk) 15:03, 28 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Failed. - -sche (discuss) 19:35, 22 December 2023 (UTC)