Обсуждение:Ньиредьхази, Эрвин

(What follows is something I wrote for the English-language version of the Nyiregyházi article in Wikipedia. I would appreciate your applying the information to this article as well.) Could you please correct the spelling of Ervin Nyiregyházi's surname in the Wikipedia article?--something that was raised years ago already and should have been fixed long ago. The name is properly spelled just as in my first sentence (not Nyíregyházi, a "correction" presumably made by some well-meaning Hungarophile). The first syllable was "Nyir" with a regular "i" and always was--every single surviving source, published and unpublished, and all official records, in Hungary and everywhere else, including every single instance of the name written or signed by the man himself, is spelled as I've indicated above. The ONLY source ever to introduce the spelling "Nyíregyházi" is actually ... Wikipedia, which, in its zeal to be hyper-correct, has actually introduced a unique error into the literature, which is now being lazily replicated all over the Internet because of the Wikipedia's "authority". I know that the name of the city from which the name derives is properly spelled "Nyíregyháza" and I know that "Nyíregyházi" and "nyíregyházi" are words used in Hungarian, but we're not talking about a word in Hungarian, we're talking a surname, and a surname is spelled however the family in question says it's spelled. (You wouldn't change a name from Taylor to Tailor in order to make it "correct English"; this is exactly analogous.) The Nyiregyházi family always used this spelling, and no one in Hungary ever thought there was anything wrong with it--ALL of the documents about his life published in Hungary used this spelling. And he himself used it literally every time he wrote or signed his name. I spent 10 years researching his life for my 2007 biography of him, "Lost Genius," and have seen, in addition to the published Hungarian literature, literally hundreds and hundreds of pages (compositions, letters, passport applications, tax records, etc.) in which he wrote or signed his name by hand. (I also had all sorts of help from Hungarians in writing the book, I assure you.) I swear by all that is holy that I actually know how the man's name should be spelled, and I can't see why someone contributing to what is supposed to be an "encyclopedia" would have arbitrarily changed it on the basis of no sound authority. Since you are someone who has contributed to editing this article, I decided to write to you in the hope that this silly and pretty basic error could finally be fixed before it becomes a "fact" by sheer force of repetition online. Many thanks. Kevin Bazzana kevinbazzana@shaw.ca