Talk:Ho Chi Minh

Work in progress

There is a lot of material here, although I also have a good deal still on interlibrary loan order. This may be fairly long, but it's in the category of a well-developing draft.Howard C. Berkowitz 18:55, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

Names, notations and conventions

There are some issues involving personal and organizational names, many of which are -0p mcommon in Asia and some more specific to Vietnam, or to revolutionary movement.

Simplest are organizational names. I generally use the best-known name as an article or subhead title. That name is often a contraction of the actual Vietnamese name. When the full name comes up, I put the Vietnamese name in italics and the English translation in regular text; if there's a question, I put the better-known name first, which is sometimes but not always English. There are times when give in and call something the "North Vietnamese party", which is unambiguous if not always precise. Hey, one name changed three times, within a year, among Indochinese Communist Party, Vietnamese Communist Party, and Indochinese Communist Party, to say nothing of the time that three different groups called themselves Communist in Vietnam.

The subject of this article was not born Ho Chi Minh; he actually took that name in 1942. Nevertheless, it is best known. I do have a subpage of a number of names; shall I make them subheads so I can link to them from the article?

In like manner, I think I need to have a glossary of organizations. Again, lots of redirects and no really good convention, as organizations often changed names, merged, etc. There's a delicate line between what's appropriate in a glossary and when a subarticle is needed.

With the exception "Ho", which is actually used in other than by common Vietnamese practice, I often repeat full names, because source indexing isn't consistent, and also that some names aren't "family". Truong Chinh, for example, means "Long March" and was adopted as an alias.

I do break down and refer frequently to "Ho", which should be unambiguous in context, although the man might actually have called himself "Ba" or "Nguyen Ai Quoc" at the time. In fact, he was probably called NAQ for more years than by any other name.

In some respects, this is New Draft of the Week stuff, but I'm not comfortable having it there until I get a better convention on naming. Howard C. Berkowitz 16:39, 28 January 2009 (UTC)