Portuguese place name categories

Question

The Portugal Project are looking to standardise Portuguese place name categories and have proposed the following:

Portugal

   --- Province

      --- Municipality

         --- Parish, Province

Portugal

   --- Madeira

      --- Parish, Madeira

Portugal

   --- Azores

      --- Parishes, Azores

This would run from the 13th Century to the late 20th Century so would include the bulk of the profiles we will be working on. Any before that would be categorised differently.

We'll leave this up for a week for comment and feedback, after which we'll begin to put the categories into place.

Thanks all,

Susie and Mindy

Comments

Could you give a couple of examples of the text/code that would go on profiles? I am referring to the [[Category:Place Name]] text.

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Hi Lindy,

The first example is the mainland. For example the parish of Alcains would be nestled this way: Alcains, Castelo Branco, Beira, Portugal.

Category: Alcains, Beira

The second is the island of Madeira. An example would be Madalena do Mar, Madeira, Portugal (I would list this on a profile as Madalena do Mar, Ponta do Sol, Funchal, Madeira, Portugal  which adds the diocese and the county - or Madalena do Mar, Ponta do Sol, Madeira, Portugal  which includes the county)

Category: Madalena do Mar, Madeira

The third is the Azores: An example would be Feteiras, Azores, Portugal (I would list this on a profile as Feteiras, Ponta Delgada, São Miguel, Açores, Portugal   which also uses the county and the island)

Category: Feteiras, Azores

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Hi:

I'm sorry but it's not like that. We must refer if ther's Reino de Portugal or República Portuguesa (in the end, of course).

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Thank you for the information António. These were the English categories for Madeira and the Açores.

Reino de Portugal (Kingdom of Portugal) was 1139 to 1910 while the República Portuguesa (Portuguese Republic) was 1910 to 1926 ... correct? I think it would be great to add those to the profiles but I think for the category structure it was decided to keep it all within 'Portugal' for now for ease of grouping profiles and for finding categories.

We still need to create the categories (and their structure of course) in Portuguese.

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Hello,

I'm willing to help.

There is a page with links to most Portuguese parish books, which I'm sure you've come across

     https://tombo.pt/en

Books are organised by Districts/Municipalities/Civil Parishes.

Maybe this is a good way to start.

Answer 1

Will this be in a Portuguese language hierarchy or English?  How will you handle place names that may be different in the two languages?  Typically small towns go only by one name, but capitals often have a different English version, i.e. Lisboa and Lisbon.

The WikiTree policy of "using the language those being profiled would have used" does not automatically apply to categories, which are in single-language hiearchies.  Categories, however, must be consistently in one language or another, so this is a decision that should be made at the outset.  

France is currently creating all current location categories in the French language hierarchy, and you may find that a useful model.

Comments

Good question Jack. At the moment the profiles have the Portuguese version in the Birth and Death Place fields. If the biography is written in English you can put the English version there. As an alternative, you can put in the Research Notes that the town is said Lisboa in Portugal, but is said Lisbon in English. In one of the examples I used for Lindy: Feteiras, Ponta Delgada, São Miguel, Açores, Portugal (this would go in the Birth and Death Fields). In the biography, if written in English, you would say the island of Saint Michael in the Azores.

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Hi, Mindy -- the data field, the biography, and the categories follow different rules.

1.  The data field of the profile -- names and places --should be as the person himself or herself would have used. So a Portuguese person born in Lisbon would have Lisboa in the place of birth field.  You're on target with what you're doing there!

2.  The biographical narrative can be in any language;  it can be in English or, if a Portuguese speaker is on tap, it can be in Portuguese;  it works well to have a bilingual biography in both Portuguese and English when that is possible.  When you have all or part of the biography in Portuguese, I would encourage you to make the biographical heading ==Biografia== rather than using the English word.  If an English translation follows, it can begin with ==Biography==  WikiTree is inevitably anglo-centric at this point, but i think anything we can do to make it truly global advances our purpose.

3.  The location categories need to be in single-language streams.  This was the focus of my original question.  If the intent is to have the primary category stream be in English, then you would categorize this profile in [[Category:  Lisbon]] or [[Category: Lisbon, (English name for the Province).]]  If the intent is to have the primary category stream in Portuguese, then you would categorize this profile in [[Category:  Lisboa]] or [[Category:  Lisboa, (Portuguese name for the Province)]].  And you can categorize it in both streams, but this is less user friendly and that's a disadvantage;  people might do just one or the other and then you have half your profiles in Lisbon and the other half in Lisboa.

My observation is that the tendency in WikiTree is to develop location categories in the local language stream.  France is doing its locations in French, and Scandanavian countries are doing theirs in the local language also.  

Any category can be duplicated in any other language.  If you look at the top level category --[[Category: Categories]] you'll see that it exists in a couple dozen different languages now.

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1. Thank you 

2. I agree (see Manoel de Aguiar), though I don't always have time to do both.

3.  You're right in saying that I was answering regarding the fields, not the category. I would personally prefer to see them in Portuguese, but was waiting to see how others weighed in on the matter. I certainly love the brainstorming and collaboration here! I've seen the excellent work of the French Roots Project - I refer people there when I greet.

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And yes I've noticed that I put the dual language bio's 'backwards' from your suggestion. I'm a native English speaker so all biographies are in English. When I have the time, I add the Portuguese version. I wish I could do that on all of them! (If you can figure out how to fit more than 24 hours in a day, I'd love to know lol, so much to do...)

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lol!  Most of us discovered a long time ago that genealogy has an infinite capacity to absorb time!

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We have to have them in English as this is an American site, but if we want to also have them in Portuguese we can. This was discussed in the Categorisation Project Jack (and when we discussed Spain). I am using other bi-lingual projects on WikiTree as examples of how to do this so there is significant precedence for it.

Susie