Talk:Pour le Merite/Definition

Name

Why does a German decoration have a French name? Sandy Harris 07:22, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

For historic reasons. There was a time when most conversations amongst the nobles in Europe were held in French (even in Germany or Russia), and my guess would be that this is a remnant from that period. The correct title, in both German and French, is "Pour le Mérite", with the accented e. --Daniel Mietchen 09:42, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, Daniel. I have always wondered this myself, but never made the connection to the use of French as the primary court language. It certainly seems a plausible alternative. Some other decorations of the time are usually rendered in English, such as the Order of Maria Theresa, given to commanders who won battles by disobeying orders, but it would be interesting to see if a French name was used -- I believe it originated under the Hapsburgs.

Apropos of correct naming, at least in primary article names rather than redirects or the lede, I use an operational decision that actually has support in a number of technical groups that deal with internationalization: limiting it to the ISO/IEC 646 character set, which is really the only core capability of Roman-alphabet capabilities. There are 8-bit extension (ISO 8859 from memory), but those produce some messy results because there are four major European variants, and 8-bit rather than Unicode forces the reuse of some encodings. A northern European diacritic may display a completely different character on a Southern European display. In other words, I'm not being chauvinistic but modeling my position on international standards. When I worked at the Library of Congress, I worked on the 177-character American Library Association character set, which, while generally avoiding character redefinition, was not adopted by ISO, perhaps because it needs a double-shift keyboard. Howard C. Berkowitz 12:21, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

MediaWiki understands Unicode, so I do not think your argument holds here. --Daniel Mietchen 03:34, 29 December 2010 (UTC)