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

[Ray Saintonge]

Tony Sidaway wrote:

>On 11/14/05, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>I have no doubt that a sizable proportion of people on
>>both sides of those disputes knew for a fact that they were right
>>about their preferred usage being vastly more common, and quoted
>>specific searches to prove it.
>>    
>>
>Yep.  The world will not be a worse place, nor Wikipedia a worse
>encyclopedia, if it happens to have the article on Zurich at Zürich
>and the article on Ivory Coast at Cote d'Ivoire.  While such choices
>seem utterly bizarre they are certainly not matters of great moment.
>
>I do sometimes wonder where the process of abandonment of English
>proper names of places will lead us, but no doubt in time we would all
>become accustomed to referring to Cymru, Alba, Euskal Herria,
>Deutschland, España, Confoederatio Helvetica, Österreich, and all the
>rest--and some of us may even understand which country we're talking
>about.
>
I don't hear much complaining about the change away from the established 
English names of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras.  When the news of last 
year's tsunami broke I had to pause to determine what this major 
affected city of Chennai was.

Ec