Talk:Kuphar

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Requested move 15 June 2018

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: no consensus to move the page at this time, per the discussion below. Dekimasuよ! 20:25, 23 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Kuphar → Quffa – To better reflect common English usage and the native Arabic name. Search results: A case-insensitive Google ngram from 1900 through 2008 shows usage of quffa being larger than that of kuphar in written English.

Google books: 4,160 - Quffa 2,860 - Kuphar

Interestingly none of the Google books results for kuphar on the first page are about the boat, while several of the results on the first page for quffa are.

Google scholar: 338 - Quffa 144 - Kuphar

Also, "kuphar" is a homophone of a highly derogatory Arabic word (كفار kuffār, meaning "infidels"). This point is rather minor, although I worry that someone will go to the Arab world and start talking about "kuphar" and run into trouble. Chumash11 (talk) 14:50, 15 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose When I started this article, I explicitly chose this spelling because it is that used by the Oxford English Dictionary – the most reputable dictionary of English. Americans might prefer Webster but that has it as gufa, which is yet another option. The trouble is that there are numerous options for this, including kufa, kuffah, guffa, koofah, &c. The proposal here is to move to an Arabic form but that's not appropriate for the English language Wikipedia. Best to stick to the original, as used by Tennyson. As for homophones, a more significant one is Kufa. That dominates the Google ngram when compared with the other possibilities, but as we have multiple meanings and spellings, that's not a reliable metric. Overall, the word doesn't see much action and so claims that one form is common are fanciful. Per WP:TITLECHANGES, "If an article title has been stable for a long time, and there is no good reason to change it, it should not be changed." Andrew D. (talk) 18:17, 15 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.