I know Louise sets a precedent for this (although we don't have a louise alias) but this breaks the no-first-name-aliases rule. A shortcut like /kir is acceptable.
Or we can not bother with this at all.
Posted under General
This is why I was iffy on the Louise thing, because of precedent... It's much tougher when a character is known by a single name for so long, than if it's one full name aliased to a different spelling or something.
Rename and disambig sounds like the best option for both Kirche and Tiffania.
I'm not touching the Sylpheed mess.
Also vote on just mass editing and disambiguating.
As for the dragon-chick's mess, Sylphid is the most common reading of that name in english, though maybe a bit too common (It's a common name for air-related creatures). The double "ee" version oddly seems to be mostly related to stuff in japanese (The software in particular). Iru-whatchamacallit is used so incredibly little in both novels and anime that I'm not sure it's even worth keeping.
There are (IIRC) three pics with the Iru-thing, though only two show up upon clicking the tag. "Sylpheed" makes me think of the Square Enix game. I'm kinda outta the loop on the Zero stuff, but I saw a translation on-site that had the Kirche's name all-out, so I dipped into Wikipedia a bit.
ANN says Irukuku, and so does post #283474.
Fencedude said: Her name is "Sylpheed", "Irukuku" is a fake name she took on because she was trying to hide her true identity.
That's what I'd remembered. Leaving it sylpheed is probably best.
About the only benefit of a separate irukuku tag would be to diambig between dragon and human forms, but I really don't see the point - how often was she tagged in dragon form? Ever? The only other potential benefit is that someone watching seasons 1 and 2 won't be spoiled (like I was) if they see Irukuku as opposed to a human Sylpheed. But... even then I'm not sure that's reason enough.
So just leave it Sylpheed. And I see Kirche and Tiffania were already done, so I think this thread is fully dealt with.
Not to be a bother, but as I said before, "sylpheed" is just a random guess on シルフィード made by... someone. I dunno, I blame careless fansubbing. She's not named as such anywhere officially that I know of, and the propper romanization for her name is "Sylphid". Her name was never romanized in the original Japanese.
Technically yes, but this isn't a made-up name, it's a real word. A Sylph or a Sylphid is a wind spirit, which is what her name means (The Iru-whatchamacallit is also supposed to mean that, though I don't know if it's from an actual language). "Sylpheed" is what happens when people transform the already semi-bastardized Japanese (Which came from the west, which in turn came from China) spelling back into roman characters (Like the e-mail client), which is why the majority of translators including the ones who did the official release for ZnT use "Sylphid".
And the english "i" is perfectly capable of being a long vowel in words borrowed from other languages (see: machine), which is precisely the case here.
The point is: It's a very valid spelling for the name. I'd suggest at least an alias if the tag isn't renamed, but "Sylphid" by itself is extremely common in other media, so it'd have to be something like sylphid_(znt/zero_no_tsukaima).
Updated
It'd probably be better to stick the qualifier on the mave-chan character, since there's only two images.
I don't know about an alias though. If we did one, it would have to be sylpheed -> sylphid, since the latter is likely to come up again (heck, already has) and we wouldn't want to alias all sylphid characters to sylpheed. I'd probably also want to make sylphid ambiguous.
I did a quick google for "zero no tsukaima sylpheed" and "zero no tsukaima sylphid" and the number of results was pretty much the same. Which was unexpected, since I've never really seen anyone call the ZnT character Sylphid. Might be more common than I thought.
Guess I'm leaning toward changing it now.
Well, the etymology bit didn't factor into my comments either way.
Honestly I'm fine keeping it Sylpheed too and said as much, but that was based on 1) my thought that thats what all ZnT fans used already, and 2) that Sylpheed was a common spelling used in many other contexts besides ZnT.
But it seems like ZnT fandom doesn't overwhelmingly support one or the other (although this specific thread IS heavily in favor of Sylpheed), and Sylpheed is not, actually, used in any other context I can find besides some computer program.
Also, ANN doesn't use either name so we can't go by that, while Wikipedia uses Sylphid. All the Japanese websites just use イルククゥ/Irukuku.
I think this thread is becoming a good example of "if it isn't broke, don't fix it" so maybe I'm inclined to switch back to just leaving it and closing the matter. I really don't know if it's worth all this hassle... blargh.
Been trying to look around a bit, but there doesn't seem to be an official English site, and I don't know the channels by which to get scans of the North American release's print materials. If anyone does have the box set, would you mind dropping us some scans (by link, o'course)?
I'd also support not entirely closing the matter, but more putting it on hold until _something_ conclusive pops up aside from accepted nomenclature.