Talk:Nasreddin

Page Title

I'm moving the page to Nasrudin. The article body uses that name, and there doesn't seem to be any justification for using the Nasreddin variant since the claim from 2004 about Nasreddin being "more popular in Google" is now demonstrably untrue. --Dante Alighieri | Talk 17:33, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

I'm surprised no one reverted this earlier. I've undone this change, albeit a little late. It was done with no discussion, unless the discussion was deleted. I checked google again and Nesreddin had about 200 000 more results. Finally, none of the names listed on the page had Nesrudin listedwith Nasreddin and Nasrettin being the most common. Only Bosnia was listed as using the vowel u, although I didn't look at the Cyrlic scrips. Additionally most other wikipedia language articles had a form of Nasreddin, so consistency here would be preferable. Grant bud (talk) 01:42, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Examples Section

Is it me, or does the whole thing seem to be a largely unreferenced and unencyclopedic amalgamation of snippets? I thought I'd check first but if there's no objections I'm thinking of just removing that whole section. Peter Deer (talk) 11:05, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Factual accuracy

This article makes the ridiculous attempt to establish some kind of "real life" for a totally legendary person. Any claim to his alleged birthplace is just POV, as are any references to his alleged ethnic background, country of birth, etc. Just check the sources given in those paragraphs: they are totally unreliable, not a single scholastic work. Therefore, I have tagged the article. Please do not remove the tags without supporting these claims with REAL scholarly sources and not unreliable websites. Tajik (talk) 20:59, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Nasruddin does indeed belong to the realm of legend. EVERYTHING about him is POV; indeed, Nasruddin stories are nothing but games of POV hide & seek. What is important is that the stories circulate and exert cultural power over millions.

The same can be said for Jesus Christ, for that matter, for there are indeed those who dispute his actual existence.

The only solution is to give equal weight to all POVs and stop the handwringing over trying to find any Supreme Truth version.

He must be rolling over laughing in his grave over this thingie about "The Neutrality of This Article is Disputed."

Save the neutrality and objectivity for articles on bookkeeping and triethanolamine.

--Arthur Borges (talk) 07:35, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

There is no clear line between truth and legend. For example, the best known story about George Washington is that he chopped down a cherry tree, a story which has been told about several men, but that does not mean George Washington never existed.

It is unlikely that any single man did all the things attibuted to Nasrudin, but that does not prove that he didn't exist. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.62.242.53 (talk) 23:27, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

Four remarks

1. Nasrettin Hoca is not a legendary person. His tomb is in Akşehir and I have been there. It is true that there are other cities in Turkey which also put claim to own him. That's no surprise. He is an important element of Turkish culture and the cities try to be proud of his existence. (I think that is true with other historical popular people also.)
2. Nasrettin Hoca lived in Turkey. He had never been to Khorasan. And by the way, it was impossible then. Mongols annexed Khwarezmid and Khorasan in 1220s while Nasrettin was still a teen boy. While everybody was fleeing to Turkey, why would he visit Khorosan ?
3. Then, why is he so popular and owned by other people ? This is called cultural exchange. (It is a healty attitude; stories instead of war !)
4. And one remark more. The name of an article about a Turk should be in Turkish. Please note that Nasrettin Hoca is a proper name and proper names should not be translated. If Nasrettin Hoca have already been included in the culture of English speaking countries, then I would not object an English name of Nasrettin in Englih Wikipedia . But he is not. In that case the name should be in Turkish. Nedim Ardoğa (talk) 18:39, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

I don't agree that the name should by default be in Turkish because he's a Turk. Additionally the arabic script, which lacks short vowels, was used at the time so this makes transliteration difficult. Besides, wasn't Turkey Persia at the time of Nasrettin Hoca? Since I thought the mongols are what made the Turks Turks? Anyway I changed it to Nasreddin for the reasons stated above. Not that I don't prefer Nasrettin myself, easier to pronounce, but it seems to be the most common one. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Grant bud (talk • contribs) 01:55, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Grand bud explains that he has changed the name because of above reasons. Which reasons ? I haven't seen one. Yes Arabic lacks some vowels, so what ? In Turkish prononciation words can't end by d . If words borrowed from another language end in -d, it is automatically changed into -t. eg., Ahmad → Ahmet (There are other changes like b → p for instance, but that's another story.) Naturally, a Turkish name should be written accordingly. And one serious question about claims. What does Turkey Persia mean ? and why did Mongols make Turks ? If Mongols had the power of converting national identities wouldn't they convert the people of Turkey to themselves instead of Turks ? Please try to be reasonable. Nedim Ardoğa (talk) 21:26, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

Nedim Ardoğa, you seem (reasonably) to be confused by some casually idiomatic US English, and while it is a bit tangential, you deserve clarification:

1. "wasn't Turkey Persia" would be more formally correct as: "wasn't the area now referred to as 'Turkey' populated by people who spoke Persian and would have identified themselves as Persians, and wasn't it under the control of a political entity centered in Persia". I believe that the answer to that is "no". The areas cited in the article seem to have been under either Byzantine or 'Sultanate of Rum' rule during the 1200's.
2. "I thought the mongols are what made the Turks Turks?" seems to me to be an oversimplified (and probably misunderstood) statement of the orthodox (at least in the US) historical interpretation that the existence of a unitary Turkish ethnic and cultural identity centered in Anatolia is a 2nd-order consequence of the Mongol incursions in the historically Turkic areas of Central Asia (as you refer to in your original remarks.) One might analogously say that the Goths made the English English (by driving groups of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes to find a new homeland that was not chronically attacked by Goths)

As for how to spell the title of the article, I don't believe there is an obvious answer. This is the English language Wikipedia and the transliterations (NOT translation) of the name for English speakers have varied greatly. One could make a case for Nasruddin or Nassr Eddin based on prior references in English, but I'm not sure that the choice of title transliteration really matters as long as the Wikipedia plumbing gets people here for all of the variants used widely in English. On the other hand, the overall article is such a mess stylistically that it seems to argue for a split into two articles: one titled "Nasrettin Hoca" with content limited to credibly referenced historical facts about the man in a strictly factual style, and another one titled "Nasreddin" about the legendary/literary character. WKCole (talk) 22:35, 16 September 2010 (UTC)