Talk:Võrtsjärv

Estonia High‑importance

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Lakes Mid‑importance

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Restored German name

Greetings,

I have restored the German name in the article, which was removed by IP 109.184.81.40 accompanied by a rather emotional edit summary. I realize me reverting this edit might be bold, so I'm creating this talk page section to give the IP and others a place for discussion.

Now, I realize this is can be a very emotional topic for many people. However, Wikipedia is not about pushing any agenda, it's simply a place to accumulate information in encyclopedic form. The reason that German names are given for several localities in the Baltics is because historically – long, long ago – a German minority lived in the area and coined separate names for them. These are obviously not in frequent use anymore, but are exonyms certainly used in historical literature.

The reason given by IP in the edit summary was: Estonia is not a German colony, Germans don't live in Estonia anymore, and German translation doesn't neet to be there any more than Swedish or Danish translation

I agree with the first point fully, with the second statement only partly (Estonia is in the EU and German citizens are allowed to be there, and a few are living in Estonia, but ofc there is no large minority living there anymore), and with the last one not at all. Ironically, if you check the Danish article or the Spanish one, you can see that they don't feature a Danish or a Spanish name given, but instead the German one. I believe that the reason is that there simply is no Danish or Spanish exonym, since they never had much historical connection to the area. Now, the Swedish article actually gives an alternate name as "Virtsjärv", which might be the Swedish exonym – but it also gives the German exonym.

I realize that this is not the best argument since this is all just in Wikipedia. But my point is: If you want to see it removed, you will need to give some better reason than a contempt for German colonialism. This is not about cultural superiority or our modern world, I think that should be very clear. The exonym is only retained for historical purposes, and I actually feel it could be better marked as that. --LordPeterII (talk) 13:21, 23 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]