[WikiEN-l] Tower of Babel - Voting to ignore MoS, NCs for language reasons.

[Andrew Gray]

On 13/11/05, charles matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Tony Sidaway wrote
>
> > Consensus cannot be gauged only by voting; the
> external sources comprehensively refute the votes for the French name.
>
> That's simplistic here.  I wouldn't be surprised to hear 'Ivory Coast' on
> BBC radio, because it is much easier to grok.  But I don't imagine the BBC
> thinks that's the real name of the country.  Diplomats are supposed to be
> able to hack French pronunciation.  Let's face it, most anglophones can't.
> However WP is a written medium.

My dissertation went for Côte d'Ivoire, and I do hope it counts as an
English-language source...

We also have [[São Tomé and Príncipe]], not "Sao Tome and Principe",
though that is by far the most common form of the name in English
(and, interestingly, MS Word's spellchecker doesn't know about the
version with accents!) - or [[Myanmar]] with Burma a redirect.

This latter one seems to be the most comparable situation; the
government requested a change to a less familiar version, and "Burma"
is still in very common use. (1600 "Burma" stories on Google News,
2100 "Myanmar")

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk