certainly better definitions, words, and labels might help this?

Naming things with respect to future search functionality and capabilities can be useful.

name for typewriter collectors via LogInternational2253

As long as you know and understand what you're writing, use as many languages as you or your zettelkasten wants or needs.

I'm often working with ideas from other languages and cultures which have no direct translations into English, so I use those native words interspersed with English. Sometimes I don't have words in any language and make up a shorthand phrase in English until I can come up with a better word. Often I'll collect examples of the same "foreign" words in multiple contexts to tease out their contextual meanings as was comprehensively done with large group zettelkasten like the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae and the Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache. I also frequently use mathematical symbols, equations, and other scientific notations, graphs, drawings, color, etc. to make my meanings clear.

I've also worked with historical figures who have had names in multiple languages over the centuries and cross index them in a variety of different languages based on context. As an example, I've got at least 11 different variations of names for Ramon Llull in almost as many languages and variations of transliterations. I try to keep each one in its original context, but link them in my index.

There are certainly zettelkasten out there written in four and more languages as suited the needs of their users. S.D. Goitein certainly used Hebrew, English, German, Arabic, Aramaic in his and may have likely had other languages (Yiddish, Coptic, Egyptian?) interspersed to lesser extents. Adolph Erman certainly used Egyptian hieroglyphs along with German in his. It can easily be argued that their zettelkasten and work required multiple languages.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180627163317im_/https://aaew.bbaw.de/wbhome/Broschuere/abb08.jpg A example zettelkasten slip showing a passage of text from the victory stele of Sesostris III at the Nubian fortress of Semna. The handwriting is that of Adolf Erman, who had "already struggled with the text as a high school student".

At the end of the day, they're your notes, so write them as you like.

reply to dandennison84 at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/17921/#Comment_17921

I've written a bit before on The Two Definitions of Zettelkasten, the latter of which has been emerging since roughly 2013 in English language contexts. Some of it is similar to or extends @dandennison84's framing along with some additional history.

Because of the richness of prior annotation and note taking traditions, for those who might mean what we're jokingly calling ZK®, I typically refer to that practice specifically as a "Luhmann-esque zettelkasten", though it might be far more appropriate to name them a (Melvil) "Dewey Zettelkasten" because the underlying idea which makes Luhmann's specific zettelkasten unique is that he was numbering his ideas and filing them next to similar ideas. Luhmann was treating ideas on cards the way Dewey had treated and classified books about 76 years earlier. Luhmann fortunately didn't need to have a standardized set of numbers the way the Mundaneum had with the Universal Decimal Classification system, because his was personal/private and not shared.

To be clear, I'm presently unaware that Dewey had or kept any specific sort of note taking system, card-based or otherwise. I would suspect, given his context, that if we were to dig into that history, we would find something closer to a Locke-inspired indexed commonplace book, though he may have switched later in life as his Library Bureau came to greater prominence and dominance.

Some of the value of the Dewey-Luhmann note taking system stems from the same sorts of serendipity one discovers while flipping through ideas that one finds in searching for books on library shelves. You may find the specific book you were looking for, but you're also liable to find some interesting things to read on the shelves around that book or even on a shelf you pass on the way to find your book.

Perhaps naming it and referring to it as the Dewey-Luhmann note taking system or the Dewey-Luhmann Zettelkasten may help to better ground and/or demystify the specific practices? Co-crediting them for the root idea and an early actual practice, respectively, provides a better framing and understanding, especially for native English speakers who don't have the linguistic context for understanding Zettelkästen on its own. Such a moniker would help to better delineate the expected practices and shape of a note taking practice which could be differentiated from other very similar ones which provide somewhat different affordances.

Of course, as the history of naming scientific principles and mathematical theorems after people shows us, as soon as such a surname label might catch on, we'll assuredly discover someone earlier in the timeline who had mastered these principles long before (eg: the "Gessner Zettelkasten" anyone?) Caveat emptor.

Example of someone ("davecan") with a specific reason for using unique identifiers in the titles for their digital note taking.

Generative ambiguity is the process of giving names, potentially tentative, to a nebulous collection of nascent and unclear ideas in an effort to help make sense of them both to themselves as well as others.

It's tough to do your own marketing and naming is hard. If you have an obscure short title, be sure to have a sharply defined subtitle, both for definition but to hit the keywords you'll want for discovery and search (SEO) purposes. Though be careful with keyword stuffing, if for no other reason than that Luhmann had a particularly sparse index.

Zettelkasten doesn't have much value for for native search (yet). Who besides a student that doesn't really want to buy it searches for a book on note taking?! Creativity, Productivity, and Writing are probably most of your potential market, so look at books in those areas for words to borrow (aka steal flagrantly). Other less common keywords to consider or throw into your description of the book, though not the title: research, research methods, literature review, thesis writing, Ph.D., etc.

Perhaps you've limited the question Scott. Instead ask everyone: What title would you want to see on such a book that would make you want to buy and read it? Everyone should brainstorm for 3 minutes and write down a few potential titles.

I'll start:

Antinet Method: Thought Development for Creativity and Productive Writing

Antinet Zettelkasten: A Modern Approach to Thought Development

Antinet: The Technique of Unreasonably Productive Intellectual Work (and Fun) [h/t F. Kuntze]

Mix and match away...

Sadly, I've already forgotten his self-defined version of IP and I can only think of intellectual property. Is footnote mention linking it to intellectual property certainly didn't help things.

This is part of why using popular acronyms that aren't descriptive or clever is a bad naming practice.

from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

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