Talk:Berenice (port)

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[edit] Troglodytica into Trogodytica

According to Stanley M. Burstein's notes to his translation of the fragments of Agatharchides, the manuscripts of Photius, Strabo & the majority of Diodorus read "Troglodytai" as the name of the aboriginal people who lived along the Red Sea coast in modern-day Sudan & Ethiopia; however, the Ptolemaic inscriptions of the time all have the form "Trogodytai" -- with no L. Pliny the Elder also cites an earlier writer, Juba, as using the form without an L also.

What we appear to have is an example of the rule from textual criticism that uncommon words should be favored over uncommon words or forms: it is far easier to explain how the odd Trogodyte became the familiar Troglodyte ("cave dweller") than the second came to be corrupted into the first. G.W.B. Huntingsford speculates that

stripped of the Greek termination dūtes it yields a root TRG suggestive of the name Targi, plural Tuareg, the veiled people of the Sahara, though its etymology is unknown. It has been suggested that this word is akin to the Arabic tawāriq, sing. tāriqa, "tribe".

(Huntingsford (trans. & ed.), Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (London, 1980), p.146.

Hence my removal of an L in this article. And some notes towards a future article. -- llywrch 05:46, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I understand your removal of the L in Troglodytica and appreciate the discussion you give above to make your choice clear. Good work! Still, I have some remarks. I have done the unfamous Google test and noticed that Berenice Trogodytica yields no result whereas Berenice Trogodytica yields seven. Moreover, the only useful website on Berenice [1] uses Troglodytica without discussion. Then I did a stone age Google test on the bibliography of a recent article on Berenice (S. Sidebotham and W. Wendrich, "Berenike, Roms Tor am Roten Meer nach Arabien und Indien", AW 2001 32 (3) p. 251-263) and got a similar result: one article refered in its title to "Berenice Troglodytica" whereas non at all refered to "Berenice Trogodytica". Therefore it seems present-day scholarly spelling is Berenice Troglodytica, although Berenice Trogodytica might be more correct from a linguistic point of view. Therefore, as this is an encyclopedia and not a state of the art scientific paper I would like to suggest we revert to Troglodytica in the main text, but either in a footnote or between brackets put a scentence like "Although Troglodytica is commonly used in scholarly circles, the correct name might be Trogodytica etc...," with reference to Huntingford's discussion of the term (not Huntingsford as far as I know... unless a similar discussion on the spelling of his name is possible ;-) ).

Before I change the article, I would like to have your opinion on this matter. --Hippalus 07:15, Jan 27, 2005 (UTC)

First, I'm assuming that in your statement above one of those searches was for "Berenice TrogLodytica". ;-) Yes, I have problems with cut-n-paste, too (as you pointed out with Huntingford).

Yes ;-). The 7 results where for "Berenike TrogLodytica", of course...

Second, after a few test searches, I noticed that if someone typed in either spelling, this page would not come up. And at first I thought no article linked here, but Periplus of the Erythraean Sea actually does; this must be a cache problem. (I did look to see what linked to "Troglodyte", & it appears that only one article refers to the African people, compared to the word's other uses.) My efforts along these lines were because if "Berenice Trogodytica" & "Berenice Troglodytica " are subjects people will plausibly search for, then we need to create redirects to help them.

Yep, must be a cache problem, I got the same strange result yesterday (and today), whereas I know for sure that at least ten pages link to this page (I disambiguated them myself).

Third, you have a point: we want to help people find information here, & we need to try to direct searches that are reasonably correct to the material the user is looking for. Whether the spelling should be "TrogLodytica" or "Trogodytica" is a POV, so both should be mentioned. From my reading, I assumed that the consensus was that this was an error & few experts have seriously argued against the reading that I corrected it to. -- llywrch 18:10, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I integrated the view on the etymology of the word Troglodytica in the text - I think the text is quite NPOV now. A redirect from Berenice Troglodytica and a link from Berenice (and indirectly from Berenike) already exist. I guess it would be a bit redundant to create redirects from Trogodytai or Berenice Trogoditica. What do you say? --Hippalus 11:02, Jan 28, 2005 (UTC)

I think that we need to eventually add an article about the aboriginal people of the Red Sea coast, which means it would be called [[Trogodytai]], [[Trogodytes]] or [[Troglodytes (Africa)]], so that part of the namespace ought ot be left open. However, the idea of a redirect at Berenice Trogoditica makes sense -- to help pendants like me who might be looking for this port under that name. ;-)

You win. I created the redirect: Berenice Trogodytica ("Berenice Trogoditica" was a typo of mine you copied...). BTW, how much is known about those people?

BTW, I tweaked the article a little. Hope my edits meet your approval. -- llywrch 18:46, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Don't worry they sure do. I wasn't 100% happy about the result of my edits. It wasn't "brilliant prose" as I couldn't find a way of getting all the important information to fit in a logical sequence of sentences. You did just that. Thanks! Cheers to our collaboration! --Hippalus 19:29, Jan 28, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Indifferent harbour?

"The harbour is indifferent, but was improved by art." I don't understand what the writer was trying to say with this one. Was it a boring-looking harbour that artists made look nicer? Was it a poor harbour that was made deeper or wider or something by moving dirt around? Recury 13:49, 15 September 2006 (UTC)