Talk:Eilat

Excuse me, but why the silly accent on the E in "Eilat"?

Hebrew does not use latin characters, so this accent does not come "from the original Hebrew". So the title of the article should the name of the city in English or as would be typically written by English speakers. And that is "Eilat", without any foreign-looking accent mark. Compare Tel-Aviv (not Tel-'abib or who knows what), Haifa (not Khefa, Cheifa, or whatever).

I believe this article should be renamed Eilat, unaccented.

Nyh 14:45, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)

It is simply a more accurate Latin script transliteration convention for Hebrew. You see, in Hebrew it is regular for the accent to be on the last syllable. But then this is not the case, an acute mark can be placed over the accented syllable to show that it — rather than the last syllable — is accented. It is not "exotic", it is linguistic. - Gilgamesh 22:18, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I beg you pardon?! Maybe in a subset of the supposed set of Hebrew languages Eilat is pronounced with the first syllable accented, but Hebrew is not a member of that subset. --i@k5 22:26, Sep 20, 2004 (UTC)

I recall that it is on the first syllable in Biblical Hebrew. But if it's not the case in Israeli Hebrew, then by all means move the article back. But don't change the Tiberian vocalized transliteration. Maybe someone could leave a note about the differences in stress for the name between the forms of Hebrew. - Gilgamesh 22:50, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I'm more studied in Tiberian Hebrew, to be truthful. Tiberian Hebrew and Standard Hebrew do have a lot of subtle irregular mutual differences that creep up on me all the time, so a confusion like this is an easy mistake to make. For the most prominent example I've seen of the differences, see the names for the vowels in niqqud, and how different they are between the vocalizations. (Why in the world did Standard Hebrew do this so much?) - Gilgamesh 22:56, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Um, it's most certainly on the last syllable in Israeli Hebrew, I'm not quite sure about Tiberian (is it relevant in a discussion of modern Israeli realitiy anyway?) I removed the accent in Eilat, but not in Negev. In the latter case the stress is marked correctly; the big question is whether we should mark it at all in normal English text flow.

If we do it for names from other languages in article texts (Arabic, French, Hawaiian, Japanese), why not here? :) It's always nice to have a bit more detail. When in doubt, I always add linguistic detail. - Gilgamesh 23:45, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)