Talk:Nevsky Prospect

Anon's comment moved from User_talk:Ghirlandajo

Those of you who have visited St Petersburg will know the official translation of the street name from Russian is Prospekt. This as almost all of the buildings have the street sign with the number and street name in English. Prospekt means avenue and should not be confused with the German word 'prospekt' meaning prospectus (an official document), or prospect which means outlook. Generally the only accepted spelling of 'prospect' is when referring to the English translation of the story by Gogol.

Another comment moved from User_talk:Ghirlandajo

Hi Ghirlandajo! Thanks for the reply. As for the spelling, it should definitely be "Prospekt", not "Prospekt", as this is a transliteration of the Russian street name, not a translation. If you were to translate "Невский проспект", it should end up as "Neva Avenue", as that's what it means. The English word "prospect" has nothing to do with it. The Cyrillic to English/Latin transliteration systems may disagree regarding the transliteration of "Невский", because of different views regarding the letter combination "ий", but they all agree that "проспект" should be "prospekt", as they all equal the Cyrillic letter "к" with "k". The Cyrillic equivalent to the Latin "c" is "ц" in the Cyrillic-Latin transliteration tables (GOST 16876-71, ISO 9 and the United Nations), while the recognised Cyrillic-English transliteration tables (ALA-CL and BGN/PCGN) have no Cyrillic letter transliterated to "c" (the closest you get to a "c" is that they transliterate "ч" to "ch"). The only possible exception to this would be the English name of Gogol's short story takning place in the street, in his rather obscure collection of short stories that is called "Arabesques", if that indeed has been written "Nevsky Prospect" in all the editions and thus must be regarded as an established convention. However, I'm not so sure of that, as I immediately came across the "Prospekt" variant in The Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol when I googled Gogol "Nevsky Prospekt".

The recognised transliteration systems can be found in Wikipedia under Romanization of Russian, and in addition the Wikipedia naming conventions policy has an agreed transliteration table of its own (a variant of BGN/PCGN), which can be found under Wikipedia:Transliteration of Russian into English. Best regards Thomas Blomberg 11:54, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

There's certainly a number of different translations for the title of Gogol's story, but when googling "Arabesques Gogol Nevsky", Prospect appeared more common than Prospekt. And it's not just the word prospect; a final -ect is common in English words, and a final -ekt is only found a variant spelling of a word listed as obsolete, and provincial in the Dict.org dictionaries. An optimal, but extremely complex transliteration scheme would use the c instead of the k where correct for English spelling. A person transliterating would use the -ect spelling naturally.--Prosfilaes 18:32, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

I would kindly suggest that you review the currently used transliteration system before you call for anything even more complicated :)—Ëzhiki (ërinacëus amurënsis) 18:40, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Comments copied from User talk:Ezhiki

Hi, Ezhiki. Your comments are most welcome. --Ghirla | talk 12:02, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Hi, Ghirlandajo! May I ask you about your reasoning for choosing the "c"-version in the first place? Is the name of the Gogol's story the only reason, or is there more to it than that? While I myself think that the name should be either transliterated (with a "k") or translated, I'd like to hear from you first in case I'm missing something big picture-wise.—Ëzhiki (ërinacëus amurënsis) 15:13, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

I don't understand much about transliteration, but rendering Russian "к" as Latin "k" rather than "c" just because they look similar is somewhat puerile imho. The spelling "prospect" should be familiar to English eyes, no need to introduce new outlandish spellings. But that's just me. --Ghirla | talk 15:16, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Well, just like Thomas noted, the problem is that there is no single transliteration system that would use letter "c" to transliterate Russian "к", but what's more important is that while the English word "prospect" has many meanings, "avenue" is not one of them, which makes the title quite misleading. I'd say if you don't like how "prospekt" looks, then use either "Neva Avenue" or "Nevsky Avenue". I will double-check, but I don't think we have a policy/guidelines regarding street names, so you have some flexibility there.—Ëzhiki (ërinacëus amurënsis) 15:26, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm with Ezhiki on this. —Nightstallion (?) 15:30, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

I'd say if you don't like how "prospekt" looks, then use either "Neva Avenue" or "Nevsky Avenue".

So I do. Move the article to "prospekt" if you feel that "prospect" may be misleading.--Ghirla | talk 15:33, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

In this case, Nevsky Prospekt is established English usage, probably to avoid Prospect. Less well-known streets are a different problem, however...Septentrionalis 03:37, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Comment on above, not moved from anywhere

All the talk of transliteration systems is irrelevent- the article title should be the most common name of the street in English. That name is "Nevsky Prospekt", as Google confirms ("Prospect" is a close second, "Avenue" is nowhere). Mark¹ 19:02, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Neva Avenue??

While Nevsky Avenue is acceptable as a translation of Невский проспект instead of a transliteration, I don't think "Neva Avenue" is. As far as I understand it, the street is named after Alexander Nevsky, not the river Neva, although I've seen a few websites claim that. Does anyone know for sure if it's Nevsky or Neva it has been named after? "Neva Avenue" gets 129 hits with Google, and several those come from this article (all those sites running copies of Wikipedia). "Nevsky Avenue" gets 915, and "Nevsky Prospekt" a whopping 71,000. Thomas Blomberg 23:52, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Alexander Nevsky gets his name from his battle on the river Neva, so it all boils down to the fact that the prospect it is named after the river, however I believe that we should keep the name "Nevsky Prospekt", and keep subsequent translations in taht same format.

Buggie111 (talk) 01:32, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

WikiProject class rating

This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as stub, and the rating on other projects was brought up to Stub class. BetacommandBot 05:56, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

"Brought up to stub class." LOL. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Buggie111 (talk • contribs) 13:16, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Bombings of the Nevsky prospekt.

I think something should be added to the article about the Bombings of the Nevsky prospekt, where Nazi bombings killed thousands of civilians in Leningrad. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Monkeynator03 (talk • contribs) 20:52, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Requested move

Nevsky Avenue → Nevsky Prospect –

WP:COMMONNAME clearly applies. Nevsky Prospect is simply much, much more widely attested in English than Nevsky Avenue. So is the variant Nevsky Prospekt. You can confirm this with any configuration of a google search you like. For example, Google books, limited to university publishers:

• "Nevsky Avenue" inpublisher:university produces 236 results
• "Nevsky Prospekt" inpublisher:university produces 857 results.
• "Nevsky Prospect" inpublisher:university produces 1800 results.

If you take out "Gogol" to avoid the book title, the difference becomes stronger. Past discussions above suggest that people are not happy with "Nevsky Avenue". (To my ears, it sounds quite affected).VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 05:56, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

• Oppose. Article titles are supposed to be in English. "Prospekt" is not a word in English, and "prospect" does not mean "avenue" (or any other kind of street, for that matter). The only thing the ghits above indicate is that the entity in question is sometimes referred to by its transliterated name—something only done in Wikipedia when there is neither a common English name nor an appropriate translation. In this case, however, a perfectly good translation is available, so that's what's being used.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); November 4, 2011; 12:13 (UTC)
  • Comment What is English is what is used in English. It is not sometimes referred to as Nevsky Prospect or Prospekt, it is overwhelmingly referred to by these names in English texts. More examples:

Google news archives, probably the best easy guide to more contemporary usage: Nevsky Prospect gets 1480 hits, Nevsky Prospekt gets 1490 results, while Nevsky Avenue gets just 33.

Google Scholar: Nevsky Prospect gets 1110 hits, "Nevsky Prospekt" gets 844 hits, but "Nevsky Avenue" 135.

Google Scholar, roughly controlling for Gogol's book: "Nevsky Prospect" -Gogol gets 707 hits, "Nevsky Prospekt" -gogol gets 637 hits while "Nevsky Avenue" -gogol gets 59 hits

Google books without refining the search: Nevsky Prospect 45,200, Nevsky Prospekt: 42,400, Nevsky Avenue: 3570.

Something is hardly a common name if it represents (as it appears to) 5% or less of occurrences in both overseen English texts and published texts in general. The same could not be said of Red Square, or the Winter Palace, or the Hermitage which are clearly the common English names for those places. We are totally misleading readers if we give them the impression that this street is most commonly called "Nevsky Avenue" in English. Plainly, that's not true.

It's also not true that we always use an attested "English name" (read: literal translation) for places. Alexanderplatz is preferred to the attested (but uncommon) "Alexander Square". Karl-Marx-Allee is preferred to the rare, but attested "Karl Marx Boulevard". We have (finding a castle at random) Château de Coucy rather than the attested "Castle Coucy". I know this is an WP:otherstuffexists argument, but I think the "English name" argument should apply to what English texts mostly use, rather than the availability of seldom used literal translations. To do otherwise is to invent a convention in the teeth of common usage.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 13:20, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

• Support per VsevolodKrolikov. Colchicum (talk) 13:25, 4 November 2011 (UTC)