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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Wizardman Operation Big Bear 15:08, 18 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Bulcsú László

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Bulcsú László (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)
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Croatian linguist who seems to fail all of the nine criteria listed at WP:ACADEMIC. Although he appears to have written a number articles published in what seem to be peer-reviewed linguistics publications and has taught various courses at several American universities, his impact on the field does not seem to be major. The same goes for his work in the fields of assyriology and machine translation. He has received no honours or awards, he does not seem to be a member of any prestigious and selective scholarly society (the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts would be the first place to look but he is neither a full or correspondent member there). He never held any of the highest level academic posts, he is virtually unknown outside the academia and I cannot find any evidence that he ever edited any well-established academic journals. His main claim to fame is the prolific coinage of purist Croatian neologisms in the mid-1990s, the large majority of which never became accepted in regular use.

Out of the seven references used in the article two are Croatian lexicons (e.g. tertiary sources) which describe his impact in his research fields in very vague terms (and only one of these lexicons is published by the Miroslav Krleža Lexicographical Institute, the premier lexicographical publisher in Croatia). The third reference is a book published by linguist Stjepan Babić who gives him a passing mention and says that the subject "influenced the Zagreb linguistic circle" which itself "influenced Croatian linguistics" but does not discuss it in more detail. Reference no. 5 is an overview of the history of the linguistics department at the Zagreb Faculty of Humanities which gives the subject passing mention as he taught there, reference no. 6 is a 1994 handbook of computer terminology which was only proofread by the subject and which was never accepted into mainstream use, and reference no. 7 is a broken link to a article in the Vijenac cultural magazine which describes his somewhat eccentric purist theories about the Croatian language. In fact the entire article boils down to assorted bits of biographical information plus a description of his theories and neologisms, without offering any proof of their acceptance by the wider research community or the public at large. In addition it is littered with sentences such as

  • "his contributions to the formation of Croatian standard language is not easily determinable";
  • "his contributions in the area of terminology used for computing and other modern disciplines is yet to be acknowledged"
  • "the acceptance of other valuable contributions by this philologist, chiefly at the field of orthography and language purism, are about to be seen in the future".

IMO this fails WP:ACADEMIC and is an example of WP:CRYSTALBALL. Timbouctou (talk) 22:56, 4 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Croatia-related deletion discussions. —Timbouctou (talk) 23:00, 4 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Google hits
Jutarnji list Slobodna Dalmacija Večernji list Vjesnik hrcak.srce.hr
Stjepan Babić 53 188 25 85 373
Ivo Pranjković 13 61 1 84 235
Dubravko Škiljan 14 2 2 2 66
Marija Znika 0 1 0 2 148
Bulcsú László 0 0 0 0 17
For those who know something about Croatian linguist(ic)s, this should be sufficient. Znika is actually rather obscure (even as a co-author of a major work), but she nevertheless gets at least some hits. GregorB (talk) 20:58, 5 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. I've added one more column with hrcak.srce.hr hits as a rough assessment of academic notability. Note that Škiljan did not live (and presumably did not publish) in Croatia, which is why his figure is comparably low. GregorB (talk) 07:36, 12 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 17:22, 6 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Ron Ritzman (talk) 00:01, 11 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Language-related deletion discussions. —GregorB (talk) 07:28, 12 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment First source on page is following: "Hrvatska enciklopedija", LZMK Zagreb, 2004, p. 444, vol 6, ISBN 953-6036-36-3 That would mean that current edition of best paper encyclopedia in Croatian language deem László as scholar worth including. Above is also written following: he have written a number articles published in peer-reviewed linguistics publications, (I left out non appropriate sarcasm like "appears to" etc), as that seem to me like most possible reason why he is included in premier encyclopedia on Croatian language. Further, although today lot of sources are available online, not all are, and googling is not reliable answer to all questions, it can be used in most cases as guideline, but if we are to build quality encyclopedia, sometimes Internet is simply not as relevant as paper. But similarly as above Joy wrote, if users who are not linguists versed in Croatian language deem László not relevant based on quick Internet search, why should I (or anybody else) bother? I do not care enough. SpeedyGonsales (talk) 22:03, 12 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Although it is not written rule (nor it should be), usually all articles present in best paper encyclopedias have place in Wikipedia and we are usually keeping or deleting articles which are not present in best paper encyclopedias after check do they meet our criteria. Again, our criteria are good but if we want that also result to be good (Wikipedia to adhere to higher standards than paper encyclopedia(s)), we would need not only to have good criteria, but also well versed experts to enact that criteria. Otherwise we are behaving like robots who having lack of access to paper sources and insufficient real knowledge about subject are doing job with whimsical results, depending only on chance that Internet presence of some name/term is proportional to paper presence of that same name/term. If that assumption does not stand, we (and consequently Wikipedia) will in that case miserably fail. SpeedyGonsales (talk) 22:03, 12 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Can you name a specific field in which Laszlo had a major impact? Or do you think that just about any person who published any paper in any pee-reviewed journal merits an article here? We all know that googling is a less than perfect method of measuring someone's notability. However, it is reliable enough to be used for checking the 9 criteria set at WP:ACADEMIC. And Laszlo fails each and every one of them. There is virtualy no evidence that his purist theories were ever accepted by any other linguist and the neologisms he "prolifically coined" never came into widespread use. As evidenced by lack of hits in daily newspapers he is virtually unknown to he general public, he is not a member of any scholarly society that I know of and he did not receive any awards for academic achievements. Whatever the reasoning behind his inclusion into "Hrvatska enciklopedija" was, it is pretty obvious that it was not encyclopedic. Timbouctou (talk) 23:20, 12 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Paper sources are of course perfectly fine, but if editor(s) of this or any other article deem such sources as relevant, those sources should be by all means properly referenced, and nobody could reason against keeping the article. If on the other hand, the editor(s) vaguely point to 'works' and fail to reference them, the article is unreferenced and applicable notability criteria are not met. The papers need not be available online, magazine contents specifying author and title would probably do and those are generally available. The issue of major impact or otherwise is a further unreferenced point. Anyone publishing a scientific paper makes a contribution, but a major contribution should be verifiable through reliable sources.--Tomobe03 (talk) 23:35, 12 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Let me clarify the "Google test": it is most certainly not a proof of someone's lack of notability, but it is a strong indicator (and I believe BL's Google standing is a case in point). Inclusion in Hrvatska enciklopedija is, in turn, not a proof of someone's notability. Wikipedia has its own notability criteria, and these must be met regardless. So, while I'm pretty certain BL is not notable (he apparently does not even meet WP:GNG), it should be pretty easy and straightforward to prove me wrong: that's what WP:ACADEMIC is for. GregorB (talk) 10:20, 13 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
What are your reasons? Xxanthippe (talk) 23:37, 15 May 2011 (UTC).[reply]
  • Keep. This linguist got its place in major Croatian lexicographical project (in last 20-30 years), Hrvatski leksikon. Why should we search for more? Further, Google test is not always good and representative. Majority of today's Croatian newspapers do not have archives older than 2000. Some have reorganized their websites, so we are not able to see what was before the reorganization (for some sites it's possible). The situations is worse with the portals. The site Hrcak hasn't digitalized a lot of works from 1950-1998 [1] (Gluhak about Bulcsú László, Broj u jeziku, 157, Naše teme 1959:6, 128—176). Also, there was time before the age of Internet. Some important Croatian state and party functionaries are rarely mentioned now, contrary to 25 years before. Also, in recent 10 years there's a serious degradation of Croatian journalists. Majority are inadequate, illiterate and uneducated. Majority of texts look like the same group of re-chewed texts. So, if certain person isn't too much exposed, exponed, they don't know anything about that person. Sad but truth. Anyway, Bulcsu had an interview with Slobodna Dalmacija in 1994 and in those years also for magazine Globus also - I don't know for other newspapers and magazines.

"The third reference is a book published by linguist Stjepan Babić who gives him a passing mention and says that the subject "influenced the Zagreb linguistic circle" which itself "influenced Croatian linguistics" but does not discuss it in more detail". Have you read that book at all? It's not one sentence, but several chapters: chapter: Hrvatski jezikoslovac Bulcsú László, chapter Lászlova jezikoslovna gozba, chapter Računalci nemaju više isprike.p. 258-260. This is not broken link [2]. Therefore, Bulcsu is not just some "another unimportant professor from some faculty". If the academist (Stjepan Babić) gives importance to that person, who are we to judge that? Therefore, I disagree with Timbouctou. I find his explanation as WP:OR. I don't understand, Timbouctou, GregorB, why do you have a pick on Bulcsu? Why do you ignore Hrvatski leksikon? Tomobe03, I don't understand you. You give importance to all those bridges and tunnels, but not to such a linguist? Francis Bond, prof. Bulcsu should be in your area of interest; he's one of the pioneers of machine translation (Mechanical Translation and Computational Linguistics, vol.9, no.2, June 1966 Syntax and Interpretation by B. Vauquois, G. Veillon, and J. Veyrunes, C.E.T.A., Grenoble, France,
Reference nr.1: Lamb, S. M., “Stratificational Linguistics as a Basis for Machine Translation,” in Bulcsú Laszló” (ed. ), Approaches to Language Data Processing. The Hague: Mouton, 1965</ref> and the initiator of the work on computer processing of Croatian literature (Ustroj tok pisina, mentor of work by Vjera Lopina:Strojna obrada imenične morfologije u pisanome hrvatskom jeziku, 1999 (Machine processing of noun morphology in the written Croatian language [3]). Ako čovjek nije samoreklamer koji pati od toga da ga se vidi u medijima, to nije razlog da ga ignoriramo. Ljudi, niste mi jasni. Zašto se niste više informirali? Pa nije mjerilo važnosti neke osobe ako je eksponiran u medijima kao neki opskurni likovi iz nekog talent showa ili polusvijet iz Big Brothera. Njima se imena spominju u tisućama Googleovih rezultata. Je li to mjerilo? Man, if a person isn't present in media like some strange persons from talent shows or Big Brother, that is not the reason to exclude him. I think that we forgot the mention the importance of Bulcsu as accentologist [4]. Here's also a reference of important linguist name Radoslav Katičić about Bulcsu [5] (László je uvijek znao svoje, Suvremena lingvistika, 18/2 (34), 1992, 5-9, On Bulcsú László). Or do you find the opinion of Mate Kapović as valid [6] [7] (I would like to thank Bulcsú László for many useful examples and ideas concerning the subject) [8]? Here's something about Bulcsu's methodology [9]? Besides his linguist side, Bulcsu is interesting as a sportsman. AFAIK, he held Croatian record in butterfly style, national team representative and a candidate for the Olympics (1948). Sorry, everyone, for being this long. Kubura (talk) 02:56, 16 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

  • The issue here is not that Laszlo is media-shy but that he fails all the nine (9) criteria set at WP:ACADEMIC. And the random collection of links you posted serve very little to contradict this. So far all the criticism I've seen here from Speedy and Kubura boil down to how ignorant we Wiki editors are and ignores the fact that there is not a single shred of evidence that an allegedly important scholar was ever honored as such by the academic community. Have you ever read WP:ACADEMIC Kubura at all - or do you think that Stjepan Babić is the final word on academic notability? Laszlo is verifiably a linguist with eccentrically purist views which themselves always represented a tiny minority in academic circles and that is the only reason why his theories are ever mentioned by anyone, just like a geologist claiming that the world is flat is likely to get some airplay in geology magazines simply by virtue of being bizarre. In this vain he coined a whole lot of words, but these words are not used by anyone. And his day job for the past 40 years consisted of translating Assyrian texts, writing papers on Old Slavic accents, dabbling in machine translation and teaching courses in Basque and Sanskrit languages to students of linguistics. His impact (defined as the "acceptance of his research and/or original ideas") on any of these fields is minimal at best.
  • Now let's go through the random set of links Kubura came up with:
  • [10] is a bizarre 2001 article published in the Vijenac cultural magazine written in archaic Croatian in which Laslo argues for a "back-to-the-roots" ortography of he language. Its impact is certainly "difficult to determine" as no other linguist bothered to comment on it.
  • [11] is a 1966 paper by three French linguists about syntactical analysis which lists 15 references, one of which is a paper by a certain linguist named Lamb which had allegedly been included in a collection of papers edited by Laszlo. This collection, in turn, does not seem to have actually been published anywhere (the 1966 paper which references it says it is "in press" and my library searches do not come up with anything);
  • [12] is an entry from the archive of courses taught at FFZG which says that he at some point taught a seminar about Tok Pisin (I have no idea why you thoguht this would be relevant but there you go);
  • [13] is a link to an an entry in the Croatian scholarly papers database which mentions a 133-page master thesis written by Vjera Lopina titled "Machine processing of noun morphology in the written Croatian language" which was mentored by Laszlo - which does not seem that remarkable to me considering the fact that Lopina and Laszlo worked at the same department of the same faculty at the time. Again, how mentoring a thesis is relevant here is a mystery to me. An average university professor in Croatia mentors dozens of such works throughout their career and every single thesis written by students has to have a mentor.
  • [14] is a link to a personal page (unacceptable for Wikipeda but let's pretend it is not for the sake of the argument) which says that Laszlo held a lecture on the "Lithuanian nominal accentual space" in March 2011 at a linguistic conference in Zagreb. That's nice but how does that contribute to his notability?
  • Kapović's papers (and Mate Kapović is a young linguist who btw also comes from the same department of the same faculty) [15] and [16] say that he (Kapović) thanks Laszlo for "useful examples" (whatever that meant) but hey - he also thanks Kristina Marenić for "reading the text carefully". Is Kristina notable as well? This hardly indicated notability does it.
  • Kapović's third paper listed here ([17]) mentions two articles published by Laszlo in its list of references: one is a 1996 article about differences in Serbian and Crotian ortography published in 1996 in a collection of articles issued by a Croatian (possibly peer-reviewed) linguistics magazine; the other is an article by Laszlo about pretty much the same topic in relation to 19th-century Hungarian politics published in a collection of articles commemorating "900 years of historical relations between Croatia and Hungary" published by - you guessed it - the hungarology department of the very same faculty that Laszlo, Kapović, Lopina and others work at.
  • This paper written by Bojan Marotti is a real gem - it concerns the issue of philosophical terminology and whether certain expressions used by Croatian philosophers when discussing philosophy should be translated or not. So on page 35 Marotti gives a passing mention of Laszlo's ideas (presented at one of his public lectures) about how words should be accepted for inclusion in dictionaries: Laszlo apparently proposed some ludicrous points system which would take into account vague criteria such as "how ancient the word is", "readability", "completeness", "harmonious sounding" and 15 others. Of course, anyone who knows anything about lexicography or semantics is probably laughing his head off after reading these lines, and let me just add that Laszlo has never compiled any lexicographical work himself so his expertise on the issue is pretty much non-existent. This is just an extension of the age-old debate of prescriptive vs. descriptive approaches to languages - and this is a fine example how Laszlo represents an extreme end of the former stream of thought.
  • Now let me add a link of my own - here's a short article published in September 2004 in the satirical weekly Feral Tribune which openly made fun of Laszlo and his neologisms, referencing the limited fame he achieved for his statement published in the Globus weekly in October 1993 when he, seriously speaking, stated that "Croatian language and its ortography are the most perfect in the world. Our language is so perfect that nobody can learn it, including ourselves."[18]. Spoken like a true linguist. The statement was later ridiculed in Feral's contest for the "most stupid" quote of the year in 1993. In addition, in 2007 Denis Kuljiš, a columnist writing for Globus, published a column in which he also made fun of Laszlo's and other linguists' neologisms. Kuljiš also added that "[because of this habit of inventing unnecessary words] linguists stir incredibly negative emotions among the Croatian public" and that "no academic field has ever enjoyed a lower reputation [in Croatia]".
  • So in conclusion, as evidenced above by GregorB, Laszlo fails WP:GNG. In addition, he fails WP:ACADEMIC. The academic community itself (you know, the knowledgeable group of people who do not rely on Google hits) never gave him any awards and never invited him to become a member of any scholarly society (the Croatian Language Technologies Society where Laszlo is an "honorary president" is more of an interest group and according to their website they have a grand total of 9 members, 7 of whom just happen to come from the same department of the same faculty at the same university as Laslo, including Vjera Lopina). He never published any book as far as I know (feel free to prove me otherwise), very few of his neologisms (if any) found its way to dictionaries of the Croatian language. He was never part of the mainstream linguistic thought in Croatia and he never contributed to any prescriptive publication such as the official orthography of the Croatian language. He never actually taught a course which dealt with Croatian (yes, he taught introductory courses about Tok Pisin, Lithuanian, Sanskrit, Basque, Old Slavic and Assyrian at the department of linguistics - but so do great many other professors in that kind of departments), there is absolutely no proof that whatever he did had any major impact on any academic field whatsoever, and the handful of his papers which did get published were published by journals of questionable academic rigor which were all sponsored by the very same departments at the same faculty he spent a few decades lecturing at. As to the single tertiary source which Kubura keeps bringing up (the Croatian lexicon) - I have no clue what their criteria for inclusion was, but I strongly suspect it was because linguistics purism was inextricably connected to right-wing politics of the day - the Croatian Lexicon was published in 1996, at the height of the authoritarian rule of Franjo Tuđman (coincidentally, Franjo's son Miroslav Tuđman worked at the same department as Laszlo at the time), the lexicon was edited by a somewhat shady publisher named Ante Žužul, published by the otherwise unknown "Leksikon Naklada" publishing house "in cooperation with the Miroslav Krleža Lexicographical Institute (LZMK)" and the book is not even listed in the list of lexicons available for purchase on LZMK's website. Even if one was to disregard all this, see WP:TERTIARY for guidelines on its relevance.
  • P.S. @Kubura: Spare me the Croatian-language rants. Unlike you I've attended some of Laszlo's lectures and I am familiar with Katičić's and Babić's work as well as Lopina and Kapović. Kapović (a linguist in his own right, definitely more notable than Laszlo) published a book recently titled "Čiji je jezik?" ("Whose language is this?") in which he adamantly opposes the purism espoused by Laszlo and his less eccentric colleagues. And unlike Laszlo I did receive some training in semantics and sociolinguistics except I was taught by actual linguists (such as Milena Žic-Fuchs to name one) whose contributions to the field can be evidenced by published books, citations in international academic journals, membership in scholarly societies and so forth - as opposed to Laszlo whose contributions to the field consist of musings on what he thinks is "pure" Croatian. So please refrain from personalising the issue with "you are all ignorant" remarks, in English or Croatian. Timbouctou (talk) 07:21, 16 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. I created the original article and I support its deletion. László is really a minor figure, unworthy of encyclopedic coverage. He didn't publish any important works, and most of his "papers" are written in some imaginary purist language that nobody has a clue what it means, but which gives a boner to the Croatian right-wingers who of course readily publish them in their irrelevant little journals. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 13:23, 17 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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